Of Course

There is a moment in "Of Course," somewhere in its glitching, jazz-inflected groove, where a deep and genuine laugh surfaces in the background of the recording. Not a theatrical aside or a stylistic flourish, but something that sounds involuntary: the kind of laughter that escapes when a person realizes they are articulating the most obvious truth about themselves. That laugh is the key to everything.

The song is, by most critical accounts, the funniest thing Yebba has committed to record and possibly the meanest^[1]. That combination, funny and mean, is not the emotional register most listeners expect from an artist who came to prominence carrying grief like a physical weight. It is also the most honest thing she could have done.

The Album as Context

Yebba, born Abigail Elizabeth Smith on January 16, 1995, in West Memphis, Arkansas, grew up singing in her father's church, where she absorbed the gospel tradition that still shapes every note she places^[2]. Her debut album, Dawn (2021), named for her mother who died by suicide in 2016, was a record built from catastrophic loss. It announced an artist whose emotional depth was matched only by the instrument she used to express it.^[2]

Her second album, Jean, released March 6, 2026, takes its name from her late grandmother, a woman who helped raise her and represented something different from loss: lineage, stability, permission to be fully oneself. The album was built over five years with producer John Rooney and composer James Francies, recorded across sessions in Arkansas, Dallas, and New York's Electric Lady Studios^[3]. Its sound is more muted and rustic than its predecessor, prioritizing space and emotional nuance over vocal spectacle.

Critics praised Jean for mapping what Yebba has described as her "adulting years," the stretch of life after catastrophic loss when grief has not ended but has begun to coexist with ordinary ambition, creative uncertainty, and the strange lightness of feeling less desperate^[3]. Rolling Stone noted the album's achievement in balancing devastation and liberation, while NPR placed it within modern R&B's broader "confessional streak," a tradition of artists who use the genre to process the most private and consequential experiences of their lives^[4].

"Of Course" arrives near the album's mid-point, surrounded by songs of considerable emotional weight. Its presence there is not accidental.

A Sound That Announces Itself

The production of "Of Course" signals its intentions before a single word lands. Where much of Jean breathes quietly and leans acoustic, this track arrives with a jazz-inflected drum and bass rhythm underneath glitching, hyper-pop production that distorts Yebba's vocals into something slightly fractured and playful^[1]. The contrast is stark and deliberate.

For an artist who built her reputation on the purity and depth of her voice, submitting that voice to digital distortion is not a compromise. It is a performance of self-assurance. The control is still present; you can hear it in the precision of her phrasing even through the effect. She is not disappearing into the production. She is playing with it, the way someone who is completely secure in their own identity can try on a disguise and remain entirely themselves.

This sonic approach also marks a creative risk. Yebba has spoken about wanting to experience singing differently with Jean, and "Of Course" is the record's most audacious demonstration of that impulse^[5]. The song essentially dares the listener to find it strange before winning them over.

Self-Worth as Baseline Condition

The narrator of "Of Course" is not in the middle of a confidence crisis. The song opens with declarations of physical and personal worth that would feel boastful in other contexts but here land as simple fact-stating, a woman reciting the obvious about herself the way someone might recite the weather. The title phrase, repeated throughout, operates as an ironic acknowledgment of inevitability. Of course she is all of this. Was there ever any question?

This is not the wounded confidence of someone reasserting herself after being diminished. It is something more settled. The narrator speaks from a position that no longer needs to argue or justify itself. The self-regard here does not arrive as a response to attack; it is simply the ambient condition of the song, the air it breathes.

What gives this particular quality of confidence its weight is the journey behind it. Yebba is an artist who has spent years in the public eye processing enormous grief. The settled self-assurance of "Of Course" does not emerge from someone who has never been tested. It is the kind of confidence that grief sometimes leaves behind when it finally loosens its grip: not the bravado of someone who has never doubted, but the clarity of someone who has doubted everything and arrived somewhere firm.

Men as Running Jokes

Where the narrator's relationship to herself is one of settled certainty, her relationship to male attention is one of amused contempt. The song presents a series of encounters with men who do not measure up, and the narrator's response to each is dismissive to the point of comedy. A man who slides into her messages gets treated with the same regard one gives to unwanted solicitation: reported, blocked, deleted. The catalog of men in general gets filed under a single sweeping category of collective inadequacy^[1].

The mean humor is specific and intentional. It is not cruelty for its own sake but a clear-eyed refusal to take male pursuit seriously on its own terms. The men in the song have no interiority; they are types, running jokes, problems that resolve themselves when ignored. This is, in its way, a form of power: to reduce what might have once unsettled you to something you can laugh about.

There is also something specifically contemporary about the song's imagery. The scenario of the unwanted message and the act of reporting a persistent admirer as spam is a detail that could only exist now, drawn from the specific exhaustion that women living their lives partly in digital public spaces navigate constantly. Yebba takes this mundane frustration and elevates it into comedy, which is perhaps the most effective available response.

That Laugh

The bellowing laugh embedded in one of the song's verses deserves its own consideration. It functions as both a production element and a statement of intent. It tells us that the person singing this song is genuinely having fun with it, that the attitude is not a performance but a condition^[1]. It provides a kind of permission to the listener: you are allowed to find this funny.

In the context of an album about grief and healing, that laugh lands with particular force. Yebba has spent years, publicly and privately, navigating loss. To find something genuinely, helplessly funny is not a minor achievement. It represents a kind of arrival: not at a destination where pain has ended, but at a place wide enough to contain both grief and comedy without one canceling the other.

This is the emotional logic of the song's placement within the album. It is not a distraction from the heavier material but a demonstration that healing is not linear. It looks like tears, sometimes. And sometimes it looks exactly like this.

In the Soul and R&B Tradition

Women in soul and R&B have always claimed the right to their own self-regard. The tradition runs from Aretha Franklin's demand for basic respect to contemporary artists who have built entire careers on anthems of self-worth. What "Of Course" does differently is marry that tradition to a specifically deflating comedy about romantic pursuit rather than the intensity that typically accompanies declarations of worth^[6]. The song is not reaching for empowerment with a capital E. It is too busy laughing.

The glitch-pop production also connects the song to a younger mode of R&B that borrows freely from electronic, alternative, and experimental textures. Yebba is a gospel-trained singer who released her breakthrough in part through a viral YouTube cover, won a Grammy for a feature on a traditional R&B song, and is now distorting her voice over a hyper-pop beat to talk about blocking men online^[2]. The range is the point.

NPR's review of Jean placed it within modern R&B's "confessional streak," and "Of Course" represents a particular variant of that tradition: the confession that you are doing fine, actually, and that the men in question are not the problem you once imagined them to be^[4].

Another Reading

One reading of "Of Course" treats it as pure emotional catharsis: a song designed to let Yebba and her audience experience the relief of not being serious for a few minutes. On this reading, it is rest disguised as music, a palate cleanser between heavier courses.

Another reading places it in conversation with the album's broader themes of forgiveness and surrender. If the harder songs on Jean require Yebba to turn toward pain and hold it with grace, "Of Course" enacts a different kind of release: the release of caring what unworthy people think. The contempt for these men is also a form of self-protection, a boundary expressed through comedy rather than confrontation^[7].

A third reading attends to the song's structural placement within the album. It does not arrive at the beginning, as an opening declaration, or at the end, as a triumphant conclusion. It arrives in the middle, as a breath between harder things. That placement suggests confidence is not a permanent state Yebba has achieved and now inhabits, but something more like a room she can visit: inhabit for a while, then return to the larger work of being human.

"Of Course" is the kind of song that looks simple on the surface and rewards attention. Its production is more complex than its playful affect suggests. Its thematic content is more considered than its mean humor initially implies.

Yebba has always had one of the most immediately recognizable voices in contemporary music. The unexpected gift of "Of Course" is what she does with that voice when the assignment is not to move you to tears but to make you laugh. The laugh embedded in that verse is contagious because it is real. And the fact that it is real, that this artist who has carried so much has found something to cackle about, is perhaps the most hopeful moment on an album full of them.