The Teenage Girl Leading Jamaica’s New Reggae Scene

—Toward the end of August 2017, a 17-year-old Jamaican musician named Mikayla Simpson uploaded a video of herself singing to her Instagram account. In the short clip, she strummed her acoustic guitar and performed “,” a record she’d written as a tribute to the country’s famed track star Usain Bolt. “Yuh nuh need no medal with a heart of gold, yuh stay humble inna yuh glory,” she sang about the Olympic champion. “If the times get slower and yuh start get old, mi still remember yuh story.” Soon after, Bolt saw the video and , where it has since been viewed nearly 300,000 times by his several million followers. In the year and a half since recording that first video, Simpson, who sings under the stage name Koffee (sometimes Original Koffee), has been wholeheartedly embraced by some of Jamaica’s Koffee to a massive audience one month before her 18th birthday. Now 19, the DJ and singer-songwriter—or “singjay,” in island parlance—has already performed alongside contemporary icons such as and .