Premiere: Rashmeet Kaur Turns to Afrobeats on ‘Cherie Coco’

While she was in Cape Town for a couple of months shooting for reality show Fear Factor: Khatron Ke Khiladi 13, singer-composer Rashmeet Kaur made the most of her time in South Africa and began working on an Afrobeats-inspired song called “Cherie Coco” with Nigerian singer-songwriter C-Mart aka Chukwuma Martin Okoye, Congo artist Gaz Mawete and Germany-based producer Konstantin Reinfeld.

The buoyant tune that has hints of a tropical sound with plenty of love language and fantasies in the mix was a result of Kaur’s collaboration with C-Mart, Mawete and Reinfeld. Although it’s a collaboration that crosses Germany, India, Nigeria and Congo, the multilingual song starts off with a Spanish hook, gets into Kaur’s Hindi verses and a short feature verse from Mawete in a mix of Bantu languages, French and a sprinkle of English. “Cherie Coco,” according to the artists, translates to “my angel” in French and celebrates love, unity and diversity.

In an earlier interview with Rolling Stone India, Kaur spoke about her trip to South Africa and finding musicians in her time outside of shooting for Khatron Ke Khiladi. “I was there for two months and it was a very hectic and packed schedule, but I got a chance to connect with a few people and we made a tune. Now it’s a track that we have and I’m so happy. I put Hindi in Afro music and there’s a Congolese artist who’s written a verse on it. So now I feel it becomes more than India – the sound becomes global. My target is to become global, rather than just focusing on one country or one region, or just one category of people,” she said.

In terms of collaboration, Kaur is no stranger to being a genre-hopping artist, working with everyone from rappers like Ikka and KR$NA to producers like Gurbax, Su Real and Nucleya, and more recently, with Donn Bhat on Coke Studio Bharat. “I should feel from inside that, ‘Oh, yeah, I can give something, I can add to it.’ So that’s when I think I can take this project. I don’t go by the name, or by the views, or by the history, your past, I should just like the song. And if I liked the song that I will start building on it. That’s how sort of my mind works,” Kaur says.

Watch the lyric video for “Cherie Coco” below. Stream the song here.