Somewhere past the first minute of this live recording from the Center for the Arts, a single phrase, "Bidi lang lang," rolls back and forth between the singer and the room until it stops sounding like nonsense and starts sounding like a pulse. Then a voice opens a question into the space: "Do you know ancient pharaohs?" The answer comes not as a lecture but as a chant, a list of names sung over and over until the names themselves become the melody. "Come From," the song Simrit performed with dub creative, is a short piece with a large idea at its center: that everyone who is alive came through a woman, and that the first teacher any of us had was a woman too. It is built from the simplest tools a chant has, a repeated phrase, a refrain, and a call answered by a crowd, and it ends up doing something most songs about ancestry never attempt. It sings a history.
Simrit introduces the piece before it begins, and the introduction is the closest thing to a program note. "This next song is a song called Come From," the performer says, "and we love the male, we love the female. And this is about where we all come from." That last sentence is the whole premise, and it is worth taking literally. The song is not a manifesto against men or a generic celebration of motherhood. It starts from origin, and it insists that origin is feminine, which is an old idea given a fresh, physical sound.
The refrain makes the point before any history arrives. "Remember where we come from," the voices sing, and then, as a corrective to the abstraction, "We come from our woman." The phrase is plain on purpose. In the live recording, the lyric moves from the general, "where we come from," to the particular, "our woman," and then to a claim about education: "First teacher is our woman." A few lines later the song adds, "Respect our woman." Taken together, these lines describe a sequence of origin, teaching and respect, and they do it in the language of a family rather than a textbook.
This is where "Come From" earns its place as more than a slogan. Around the middle of the recording, the song pivots to a question and a roster. "Do you know ancient pharaohs?" the lead asks, and then supplies the answer the song has been circling: "Our woman they came before. They laid the foundation." From there the piece sings a sequence of names. Sobekneferu. Queen Ahhotep II. Nefertari. Hatshepsut. Nefertiti. The names are drawn from Egyptian history, and the song is careful to hand them to the listener as a set of rulers who came before, not as a footnote.
What turns the roster into music is repetition. The names are not recited once and dropped. They are sung, then sung again, then looped, with "the third" attached to several of them, until the phrase "Sobekneferu the third" settles into a groove that the band and the crowd can hold. This is the same logic that makes a call-and-response chant work in any tradition: a short unit is repeated until the body learns it, and the repetition itself carries the meaning. The listener does not walk away with a timeline of Egyptian dynasties. The listener walks away with the names in their mouth.
"We come from our woman. First teacher is our woman. Respect our woman."
The structure matters for the same reason. The song moves in loops: the refrain "Remember where we come from," then the chant of nonsense syllables that work as breath and bridge, then the list, then back to the refrain. Each return to "Remember" is a reset. The chant lets the audience re-enter the idea every time it comes around, so the claim that women came before and laid the foundation is not heard once. It is returned to.
One of the quieter moves in the recording comes near the end of the chant section, when the refrain shifts its noun. "Remember where we come from," the voices sing, and then the answer changes: "We come from mama." The shift from "woman" to "mama" is small on paper and large in the room. It takes the abstract claim about origin and makes it familiar, the kind of sentence a child says to a parent. The song holds two registers at once, the civilizational one (the pharaohs who laid the foundation) and the domestic one (the mother who taught you first). It does not choose between them, and that is part of its strength.
After the list, the piece returns to its percussive syllables, "Bong bong" and "Bong de de bong," which function less as words than as a pulse to hold the room together while the singers catch their breath. This is a kind of structural honesty. A song that is about remembering needs a pause in which to remember, and the nonsense syllables give the audience that space without asking them to parse anything.
The spoken coda at the end of the recording gives the performance its context. "Thank you so much family," Simrit says. "Feels so good to be here in the hometown. We just came off the road. We were traveling into in the Pacific Northwest and it feels so wonderful to be home with y'all." The remark is ordinary, the sort of thing a touring musician says at a hometown show, but it reframes the song. A piece about where we come from, performed by someone who has just returned from the road, is a piece about return. The song is sung to a room that is, in a literal sense, where the singer comes from.
It is worth being plain about what this recording is and is not. It is a single live take, posted to YouTube with a description that points listeners to the album "become" and to streaming links for the artist. The lyrics here were transcribed from auto-generated captions, which render some of the chant syllables imperfectly, so the spellings "Bidi," "Biddy," and "Bong de de bong" should be read as approximations of what the crowd sang rather than an official lyric sheet. The view count at the time of writing is modest, 554, which means this is a document of a single night rather than a widely circulated hit. That is not a flaw. A chant is supposed to be sung by a room, and a room is always particular.
If the song has stayed with you, the most useful next step is to listen to the full album, "become," which contains "Come From" in its recorded form, and to notice how the studio arrangement differs from the live chant. Then try the simplest version of the practice at home: pick a short refrain about where you come from, sing it as a call, answer it yourself, and let it repeat until the words feel like a pulse. The song's lesson is not really about pharaohs. It is about the discipline of remembering, and a refrain you sing often enough is one of the few ways to keep a memory in the body rather than on a shelf.
For a deeper read, look up the Egyptian rulers the song names, starting with Hatshepsut and Nefertiti, and see how the chant's list compares to the historical record. Then return to the refrain. "Remember where we come from." Simple enough to sing, and harder to forget.
