On El Alimento, Cimafunk does not present Afro-Cuban music and US funk as strangers waiting to meet at a famous guest’s microphone. Asked about their connection in a Recording Academy interview, he places both within Black musical history across the Americas. That account offers a better way to approach the Cuban artist’s 2021 record than a list of collaborators. It makes exchange an existing relationship to work within, while leaving room for specific people to make new choices inside it.
The first announced single, “Funk Aspirin,” pairs Cimafunk with George Clinton. The artist’s release note explicitly describes the meeting as Clinton’s funk joining Cimafunk’s Afro-Cuban approach. The title borrows the language of medicine; its artistic use matters because Cimafunk once studied medicine before choosing music. In his own account, live performance in Havana taught him to respond to musicians and crowds in real time. A song billed as a remedy is thus connected to a practice of exchange, not simply to the prestige of a guest name. The medical image sits beside his earlier path through medical school and his stated belief that music helped him find a way forward.
“Rómpelo,” a single with Lupe Fiasco, sets a different task. Cimafunk’s announcement describes his Afro-Cuban voice and approach in relation to hip-hop. Clinton’s appearance and Fiasco’s do not certify the same tradition, and treating both as generic international features would miss the album’s organizing problem. One song draws a direct line to a funk elder; another puts a Cuban bandleader beside a US rapper. The album asks how a musician can make those crossings legible as his own work without pretending the histories on either side are identical.
Jack Splash produced the 13-track album with Cimafunk. In the later interview, Cimafunk credits their team for a change in the record’s quality, while resisting a single genre label for its contents. He talks about mixing sound and groove and describes his Havana training as an education in improvisation. Those statements locate artistic agency in selecting and shaping relationships, not in absorbing named influences whole. Producer, band and guests enter a project led by an artist whose own account of the connection begins before this release.
The album arrived on October 8, 2021. Its title, El Alimento, may invite the question of what music nourishes, but the answer cannot be supplied by a menu of genres. Here the more consequential fact is that Cimafunk names a shared Black musical inheritance while building distinct songs with Clinton and Fiasco. The two singles hold different encounters within the same project. Cimafunk’s later words explain why that movement across traditions matters to him: the album offers particular relationships rather than an abstract promise that genres have no borders.