Watching Jazmine Sullivan get excited with her own ability is like watching Spider-Man happily return from heaven to heaven, not an enemy in sight. Watch Sullivan shimmy at a recent NPR Music Tiny Desk (Home) concert as she sings, “I hope these tits can get me out of town,” her voice tickling her lower depths. Her eyes widen with disguised confusion when she finds the words, “I don’t know where I woke up.” When the belt, “Don’t have too much fun without me,” from Heaux Tales’ a remarkable single “Lost One”, throws his head, arms and palms back, as if offering something bigger.
Heaux’s story in itself it also points to something greater, beyond Sullivan as a subject or star. Her fourth album is expansive and comprehensive, embodying as many women’s perspectives on love and sex as possible (readHeaux“Like” ho “) as 32 minutes could reasonably allow. Over eight songs connected by interludes spoken from different women, Heaux’s story unfolds a package of origins, results, strong sensations and disasters of coital indulgence in her most cohesive work to date. Sullivan strategically activates his royal voice with sharp, intimate and captivating stories.
One of Sullivan’s breaks in popular R&B was with the 2008 revenge tango “Bust Your Windows”. The boy despised in song is one of the many characters that Sullivan would play during three albums that pulsated with drama and camp. Her music jumped from reggae to disco to boom-bap to fanfare and more as she explored the lives of women and men in crime, passion and addiction. Heaux Tales, instead, they engage in simpler and more timeless soundscapes, such as “Bodies” snapshots and synthesizers or the remarkable guitars from “Lost One” and “Girl Like Me.” Over minimalist production and instrumentation, the album’s agency narratives become central.
There is a direct line between the archetypal portraits that Sullivan painted in the past and the more dynamic stories here. On “Mascara”, from her 2015 album Reality show, Sullivan personified a proud gold digger with an attitude of equality. “We all want to be that confident person,” Sullivan said of the song at the time. “It simply came to our notice then. Because you always feel like someone is judging you. “It simply came to our notice then Heaux’s storyhowever, the motivations and motives of women who do or want to earn material things through love and sex are considered with more kindness and clarity. In one of the speeches, a woman named Precious Daughtry says that she deprives a child of deprivation from men without money. Her words are followed by Sullivan’s scary performance, “The Other Side,” a dream come true of moving to Atlanta to be with a rapper who can secure her. “I just want to be taken care of / Because I’ve worked hard enough,” she says.
The album’s perspectives sometimes contradict each other. On songs like “The Other Side” and “Pricetags” assisted by Anderson. Paak, sex is a bold means of empowerment, financial or otherwise. Then, in a single interlude, Sullivan’s 20-year-old girlfriend, Amanda Henderson, bluntly admits that looking for sex for power leaves her feeling insecure. “Amanda’s Story” is followed by “Girl Like Me,” in which Sullivan and HER sing about the clothes in Fashion Nova dresses that steal their love interests. Ho-ing goes from a source of pride and abundance to one of shame. Sullivan’s composition is agile: these conflicting judgments and desires live in women – and both can live in one woman at a time.
Everywhere Heaux’s story, Sullivan struggles with what can be lost and gained through sex, from a self-confident feeling (“Take her together, bitch”, she tells herself on “Bodies”. “You become careless”) to crazy pleasure (” I spend my last case on the D-bomb “, she proudly admits to” Put it down “). The colloquial explosions of specificity in these eggplants are a feat of composition, and the restraint that a power vocalist like Sullivan presents in her delivery is just as important. Sometimes her voice is restless and conversational, sometimes it sounds like a rap and it is almost always a delight to sing together. On this album, she is both Deena Jones and Effie White; it can be easily listened to or consumed. Since the painful opening of the movie “Put It Down”, his most powerful song is mixed in the background, to make it a little more superhuman.
R&B has long given women space to express their sexual appetites, from the foundational blues melodic melodies, such as “Shave ‘Em Dry,” by Lucille Bogan, in 1935. the night before, honey / And I feel exactly like I want to shoot something else ”) to Adina Howard’s 1995 hit” Freak Like Me “. After six years between projects, Sullivan joins the ranks of today’s adjacent R&B and R&B stars, such as Summer Walker and SZA, who have updated the genre with music that complicates desire with disordered reality. Old archetypes like The Gold Digger and new ones like Instagram Baddie are starting to collapse, leaving fuller women behind. Amanda Henderson, Sullivan’s girlfriend, told Philadelphia Inquirer that she was nervous to include her revelation Heaux’s story, but has since found relief in the number of fans who have connected to it. Even the way Sullivan’s Tiny Desk has been laid out – with lush instrumental breaks, opportunities for her backing singers to get the spotlight and an appearance of HER guests – is clear Heaux’s story it is communal.
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