Marcy Chin Unfiltered: Talks New Music, Broke Men, Safe Sex And Financial Literacy
If spontaneously spending US$2,000 on a woman is going to set you back by a few weeks, you don’t qualify to date Marcy Chin.
The unvarnished entertainer has struck a nerve with the struggling-adjacent man on her latest single When Mi Ah, which encourages women to exercise discernment with their sexual partners. Her rationale?
Cause bruk man salt
Full a problem and wh-re like dawg
Nuh like condom, dem love f**k raw
Mi nuh waan dat inna my vagina
The shot is stirring conversations online, reminiscent of her declaration of threesomes as a rich man’s sport on the infectious Gimmie More. Her unapologetic disdain for dating the “trying” youth is shaped by the horror stories of women being wronged by a man they helped climb the socio-economic ladder.
“When you are done getting your money up, you can talk to me, you qualify – then I’ll add to that,” Chin told DancehallMag. “But me and you nah guh go through the struggle together.”
It’s a topic often raised in today’s dating climate, with the cons of snagging a rich man not as discussed. For the Downsound Records signee, it’s a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils.
“Every man a crosses, right through… Man a nuh prize – period. When we couple up with people, it’s about forward movement, elevating. You want to get with a guy who has enough experience knowing how to be with women, enough experience with money. When you deal with a man and you wanna do something simple, cost a couple US$1,000, when him spend that, him nuh supposed to bat an eye…
“I’m not saying that when you get to a certain level that you won’t run into issues. I’m saying it will be more worth it when you’re both okay… It’s better to struggle and cry with money than to not have money.”
In other words, your intimate relationships “haffi mek sense”, as Chin reiterates throughout When Mi Ah.
Nestled on the Scuba Dive riddim, the track oozes Scoobay nostalgia thanks to her longtime collaborator Kunley Da Kulprit. True to their Timbaland-Missy Elliott dynamic, Kunley cooked up a pulsating beat (for Billionaire Bootcamp Records), watermarked with playful “na-na-na” vocals, a triple entendre for lady parts, rejecting access and child-like taunting. Then comes the ‘Chin City’ president in all her cool, rap-flow glory, delighting ears with melodically and lyrically versatile bars.
The track’s origin traces back to Christmas Day in 2023 when she teased it on socials after getting the instrumental and recording it that day. Like many things Marcy Chin, people ate it up.
“I knew I wanted to start this year really strong. To have it be from a no-brainer song – I didn’t have to think too hard about it – it’s just the best thing in the world right now and I feel so happy.”
Shade to the indigent aside, the song could double as a theme for a safe sex campaign. Chin said this messaging was deliberate, considering the physical and spiritual ties that come with sex, and its accompanying impact on one’s health.
The icing on the cake is the clean, reworked version of the song, which toasts to Chin’s creative genius. Ditching the typical approach of editing explicit music by swapping out some words, she opted for an entirely new track that promotes financial literacy.
“I never actually thought about it, I just wrote a whole new thing,” she said. “I definitely intentionally wanted to avoid cutting words out cause I personally hate a clean version. I don’t like to be censored, at all, so I’d rather talk about something else. This raw version is what it is; I’m not fixing that. Let’s talk about money because at the end of the day, we all need to have money…
“A lot of us don’t know anything about money management or are financially illiterate, especially in the dancehall community. A lot of us make nuff money, we nuh come from money, so as we mek the money, it gone and we gone right back to zero. This is something to remind them about making it make sense.”
The reworked version also suits her younger fanbase, though she isn’t stifling her art to be anyone’s role model.
“My personal philosophy about creating art is that you have to do it for you first,” she said. “When you lose that, then you lose the whole essence of everything. You lose yourself and now it becomes about everybody else, and when it becomes about everybody else, you get stuck… I have to stay true to that. Let me work out the logistics later because the kids will grow up anyway.”
Nonetheless, both versions have attracted viral dance challenges by choreographers like Nico Ovadose and Jazz Highflames.
Though When Mi Ah is now her second most recently streamed track on Spotify with 29,000-plus listens (behind the 2013 international Mek It Bunx Up hit with DeeWunn clocking 57 million streams), Chin is already in the future, creating the next wave.
“I’d like to see it get more viral but I can’t afford to sit and think about this song when I have other things to do, so what I try to do is make sure there’s nothing in its way for it to go further.”