Charmaine released “Double Dutch” as track four of her debut EP Hood Avant Garde on April 2, 2021 through Warner Music Canada, then brought the song back as a single in June 2021 with an official video. This is a catalogue song, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the record still matters because its second life, as the visual centrepiece of her deluxe edition summer, is where her whole Renaissance woman idea became visible.
The official video, embedded below, is the song performed as a period piece: Charmaine in a Bridgerton style gown and crown, seated like royalty, rapping a playground titled club record. That contrast, couture against lawless energy, is the entire Charmaine proposition in one frame.
Join The iimiTV Letter
Enter your email and we will send you a confirmation link. Click it and your first edition lands on Friday.
A Song That Came Back As A Single
Wonderland premiered the video on June 1, 2021, noting the single sat at number four on the EP and hearing a rapper who “boldly asserts herself and her squad as leaders in their own fierce lane,” over intricate raps and an empowering, head thumping beat. The sequence is the house detail worth keeping: “Double Dutch” was not a pre-release teaser for Hood Avant Garde, revisited in our return to the EP. It was an album cut, in sequence terms, that earned a single’s rollout two months after the project landed, because it was the song the deluxe chapter could be built around.
Clash, covering the video on June 7, 2021, placed it exactly there: a single taken from the deluxe edition of her debut EP, with Charmaine freshly signed to Warner Music and “laying down preparations for the deluxe edition,” the song itself “an all-out rap mover, a club smash that comes with a side order of lawless creativity.” A five track EP does not usually get a deluxe era at all. That hers did, and that this song fronted it, tells you how much weight the record was carrying by that summer.
Channelling Missy, Dressed For Another Century
Both outlets landed on the same visual reading. Clash heard the visuals finding Charmaine “channelling her inner Missy Elliott, while playfully toying with her idea of the modern-day Renaissance woman,” and Wonderland described culture and couture on full display, “lacing it with icy Saweetie-approved nails and Bridgerton-style dresses.” The Missy comparison is not casual in her catalogue: Missy Elliott is one of the inspirations Charmaine named from her earliest interviews, alongside Lil Kim and Nicki Minaj, and “Double Dutch” is where she stopped citing that lineage and started staging it, the playful, costume forward, entirely unbothered visual language translated into a Toronto key.
The video was directed by Spencer Edwards, and Charmaine’s own summary of the shoot, given to Wonderland at the premiere, doubles as the song’s ethic: “I want them to understand that the only competition they have in life is themselves and you should always do your best to outdo yourself.” She added that the set itself was a blast, “but that’s normal for us, it’s always a vibe on set.” Read against the lyric’s squad leading confidence, the quote is the softer half of the same message that “BOLD,” broken down in our reading of her debut single, had stated as a definition the year before.
The Deluxe Door It Opened
The deluxe edition the single was preparing arrived that summer, expanding the five song original with “We Don’t Care” featuring Haviah Mighty, “A Mi Manera” featuring Valentino and “Sizzle” featuring Kali. That guest list is the other half of the “Double Dutch” story: the song’s Renaissance framing was not decoration, it was a mission statement the deluxe then acted on, one record each for Toronto’s Polaris winning MC, a Warner Music Latin singer and an Atlanta rapper, three rooms the original EP had only promised she could enter.
By the time the deluxe run closed, Charmaine had been named one of Complex Canada’s 25 artists to watch in 2021, selected as Spotify Canada’s April RADAR artist and Amazon Music Canada’s Breakthrough artist, and “BOLD” was on its way to the 2022 Juno Award for Rap Single of the Year. “Double Dutch” sits in the middle of that arc, not the biggest single and never pretending to be, but the moment the debut EP stopped being an introduction and became a world with costumes, rules and a court of its own.
Released on the EP on April 2, 2021 and singled out that June, “Double Dutch” remains the most visual record of Charmaine’s first era: a playground name, a club mover’s engine, a Missy Elliott homage staged in period dress, and the front door of a deluxe summer that took a twelve minute debut around the world.
