If you don’t know Wyn Starks yet, you’re behind. The singer’s rise has been fast, apearing on America’s Got Talent and steadily climbing streaming count that now sits north of 89 million. His latest single, ‘Coco’, continues that momentum, a warm, afro-fusion anthem about holding onto your sense of self when the world gives you every reason to doubt it.
That inheritance is the whole point of the song. ‘Coco’ speaks directly to a “coco girl” and a “coco boy,” the way an elder might, reminding them they weren’t born into an easy world, but they were cut from something finer than the world had any right to expect. There are storms in this song, and rain, and hard ground. There’s a lyric about Mother Africa singing on the wind, a lineage reaching back further than any one struggle, further than any one lifetime. It’s a song that understands Black identity not as something to explain or defend, but as something already whole, already worth celebrating, long before anyone else agrees.
The song doesn’t announce its ache. It just lets you feel it arrive. A verse about tears becoming soil. A chorus that keeps insisting, almost like it’s trying to convince itself: you feel it in your bones, way down in your soul. By the time the hook rolls back around, it’s stopped sounding like a lyric and started sounding like something closer to a hand steadying you.
The video doesn’t try to compete with that, it just follows it. Starks opens still and shadowed, blue light pooling around him while flashes flicker behind him with no real rhythm, like distant lightning that hasn’t decided to come closer. Then the chorus hits, and he’s gon, replaced by a silhouette made entirely of drifting cloud, a body dissolved into something bigger than itself. What follows is pure release: hot pink flooding the frame, streaks of blue and gold cutting through it, Starks finally letting his body move the way the song has clearly wanted to the whole time.
It’s a small visual idea, but a devastatingly simple one, stillness, dissolution, then joy. Three feelings, no dialogue needed. And underneath it all is the thing ‘Coco’ was built to say in the first place: that survival isn’t the end of the story. It’s just the soil. What grows out of it is the celebration.
