Mr.Arroz
Staff member
he/him/his
In the days leading up to the holidays and the end of the voting extension period, I'll be posting more videos/music/articles focusing on the women assembled here, as well as other Black women in music that I rate pretty highly too. I think it's perfect to not only listen to the albums, but investigate a little further the specific context that each one carries.
And oh yeah. Y'all please keep using the poll posted above. I'm getting such a kii watching the results...
Here we go!
K E L E L A
“Just getting the courage it takes to straddle multiple approaches on the album, and declare that they’re all ‘black’ because I did it, it takes a lot of experience to get there,” she says. “The amount of listening I’ve done, the music I’ve been exposed to, what I’ve taken in, and the hours of singing, application, writing, trying to be better, the courage it takes to just say that’s how you want it. ‘Take Me Apart’ doesn’t feel cohesive in a singular way, but in a varied way. You can fixate on individual songs, and there are references from all over the place, Anita Baker to Bjork. I wanted to show all the facets of myself.”
The album’s individuality was part of a wider mission for the singer.
“I want to empower,” she says. “It’s so (awful) out there, you can never have enough music that empowers black women. You can never have enough reinforcements, resources for black women to thrive in the world. The topic has been addressed a million times before, but it will never end because what we’re up against keeps morphing and we have to figure out how to beat it. I do this because it’s how I can change the world. The act of me just being robust in the world is so radical — it’s so radical for a black woman to think she’s going to be a star, because it takes so much to get there. It’s still a battle every day, but I feel happy because I feel like I cracked the code and figured out how to work through it. Now I want to give the map to other women.”
http://www.telegram.com/entertainmentlife/20171112/kelela-you-can-never-have-enough-music-that-empowers-black-women
S Z A
RCA Chairman Peter Edge echoed Henderson’s sentiment. ”(Rowe) made a coherent statement,” he said. “She is a woman of color who has a viewpoint that is not being heard everywhere, and therefore, what she’s saying really stands out in today’s musical landscape.”
She sings of self-esteem, toxic relationships, twentysomething angst and sexual freedom over dreamy productions that weave R&B, hip-hop, electronic and indie rock textures.
“People grapple with labeling me as hip-hop, R&B or pop, and it’s interesting to me. I’m just making music,” she said. “I listen to Stevie Nicks. I love classical jazz. I love folk. I love rap. I love Modest Mouse. I’m making an album with Tame Impala and Mark Ronson. When you try to label it, you remove the option for it to be limitless. It diminishes the music.”
Rowe is still in disbelief over the attention her music has received this year. Miguel and Khalid went viral with covers of her songs, her headlining tour sold out in minutes and she’s joining Bryson Tiller on a European tour, Solange is set to direct her next video and a deluxe edition of “Ctrl” is in the works.
“I wasn’t expecting people were going to show a ... lot of attention,” she said. “Every moment, I’m shocked. It’s taught me a lesson on energy and expectation. The biggest songs on the album — ‘Love Galore,’ ‘The Weekend,’ ‘Supermodel,’ ‘Broken Clocks’ — are the easiest songs I’ve ever made. Just free-flowing energy and not me resisting.”
http://www.fosters.com/news/20171023/sza-is-having-killer-year-with-ctrl
A Z E A L I A
Musically and thematically, however, Broke With Expensive Taste serves as a perfect companion album to Beyoncé. As lyrically provocative, sexually brash, and stylistically eclectic as its more pop-oriented forbear, Broke is decidedly non-commercial, reveling in sonic detours and dizzying vocal delivery that were evidently too much for the executives at Interscope. Banks’ first full-length pulls off an impressive trick — a confrontational anti-pop record that also manages to be one of the year’s most accessible and melodically pleasing LPs.
The album’s sonic schizophrenia complements Banks’ lyrics perfectly. Banks explores and deconstructs two classic tropes of hip-hop and R&B femininity – the street-tough gangster and the glamorous diva — two sides of the same coin immortalized in the album’s title itself. Rather than adopt either identity, Banks presents a multi-dimensional persona who “moves sexy in Dior” on “JFK” but threatens to rip challengers’ heads off and “send [them] to Jehovah” on “Yung Rapunxel.” “I be in the mirror looking luxe and plush” from “Desperado” presents the stark antithesis to the way she looks “heavy metal and reflective” on the aggressive track named as such. The very moniker of “Yung Rapunxel” epitomizes this dichotomy — Banks posits herself as a fairy tale princess in a six-story walkup with a phonetic perversion that belies the rapper’s penchant for eschewing and transcending stereotypes. Banks is content to contradict herself; she contains multitudes.
https://prettymuchamazing.com/reviews/azealia-banks-broke-with-expensive-taste
T I N A S H E
Listening to Aquarius, you can get a brief feeling that the system works, that this thrown-together mob of executives and professionals and outsiders have all gotten together to help a young woman realize her vision. History has proven the opposite time and again, but Aquarius makes the entire music business sound like an enterprise dedicated to helping people become great.
Rappers show up sometimes, and even though they’re guys I like — Future, A$AP Rocky, Schoolboy Q — their verses are always the weakest parts of their songs, since they can’t help but pierce through the atmosphere that Tinashe has so lovingly conjured. These songs are slow-burners, songs that reveal themselves slowly, over multiple listens. “Pretend,” the album’s second single, came out weeks ago, and I feel like I’m only starting to understand what a perfectly written pop song it is. There’s feeling on “Pretend” — the wish for a passion that’s just not there, the hope that you can make things better just by acting like it’s better — but Tinashe and producer Detail don’t blast you over the head with it. They handle it delicately, gracefully. And while Tinashe keeps her delivery as flat and assured as ever, she lets a ghost of regret creep into her voice, subtly revealing itself in a tiny creak here or an ad-libbed ooh there. The other songs work the same way, taking their time in revealing themselves. “Wildfire” just laid me out the last time I heard it, even though I’d been living with it for a couple of weeks and it hadn’t had that effect on me before. Other songs will probably work the same way. Aquarius is a slow mist of an album, an unhurried pleasure. When was the last time you could say that about a major-label pop album?
https://www.stereogum.com/1710329/album-of-the-week-tinashe-aquarius/franchises/album-of-the-week/
D ∆ W N
The album, supposedly the first in a trilogy of records due this year, is a larger-than-life fairy tale recasting of modern rhythm and blues. In Richard’s hands, she is the primary songwriter along with co-producer Andrew “Druski” Scott. The woes and highs of love are given a medieval makeover, the album’s scope brings to mind Donna Summer’s rewrite of Cinderella on her Once Upon a Time (1977) LP. Richard’s vocal persona shows she’s studied at the altar of Brandy Norwood, her voice multi-harmonied and nebulous on “Intro (In the Hearts Tonight)” and “[300].”
Richard’s ability to make the mundane extraordinary is uncanny, as heard on the sublime and stark title cut. The piano keys and Richard are all that adorn the track; the piano’s pristine presence recalls the crisp heights of George Gershwin’s jazz opus “Rhapsody in Blue.” In truth, the sample is pulled from Claude Debussy’s “Clair de lune.”
For lazy listeners, Goldenheart may seem a trifle boring in the sense that the atmosphere is valued above immediate gratification. Further, there is a distance kept between Richard and the listener when it comes to her delivery at times; it’s like the story songs are being revisited versus lived.
Such a Sade-esque disconnect vocally, barring the titular track and several other nuggets (“Goliath”), may also give some the cold shoulder. Standard R&B formula is not necessarily the mission here, but patience (and an open-mind) will reward as Goldenheart grows addictive with each return.
https://theqhblend.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/dawn-richard-her-goldenheart-legend/
S A N T I G O L D
As a former major-label A&R scout, the background talent behind alt-soul singer Res, and frontwoman for Philly pop punks Stiffed, Santi White — now reborn as Brooklyn’s Santogold — comes on like the experienced “newcomer” that she is. “I want to get up out of my skin,” she declares on opener “L.E.S. Artistes” over clicking Cars guitars, and admits, “I pay for what’s called eccentricity and my will to evolve” over the ghostly post-punk dub of “Shove It.” You’d have to go back to Grace Jones in the early ’80s to find an African-American woman who comes on this strong with avant-garde club funk and weird rock shit.
Like Jones, White bypasses R&B’s body-centric testimonies of emotion. Instead, she sings from the head, as if summoning up an interior alternative to an outside world that marginalizes, fetishizes, and otherwise criminalizes its native aliens. Appeasing her inner freak while summoning the hooks to go pop, this well-connected genre-bender transmits the results in multiple soundclash mutations produced by such of-the-moment beatmakers as M.I.A.’s Switch and Diplo. Combining new wave, ska, dub, grime, Baltimore club, and hip-hop in an ear-warping wash of 21st-century psychedelia, Santogold takes listeners on a trip to a hidden black America, where White acts as tour guide through the alleyways of her mind and undoubtedly excellent iPod.
https://www.spin.com/2008/05/santogold-santogold-downtownlizard-king/
Happy listening errbody. Thanks so much for the votes that I've received and the votes to come. Be back with more content shortly!
And oh yeah. Y'all please keep using the poll posted above. I'm getting such a kii watching the results...
Here we go!
K E L E L A
“Just getting the courage it takes to straddle multiple approaches on the album, and declare that they’re all ‘black’ because I did it, it takes a lot of experience to get there,” she says. “The amount of listening I’ve done, the music I’ve been exposed to, what I’ve taken in, and the hours of singing, application, writing, trying to be better, the courage it takes to just say that’s how you want it. ‘Take Me Apart’ doesn’t feel cohesive in a singular way, but in a varied way. You can fixate on individual songs, and there are references from all over the place, Anita Baker to Bjork. I wanted to show all the facets of myself.”
The album’s individuality was part of a wider mission for the singer.
“I want to empower,” she says. “It’s so (awful) out there, you can never have enough music that empowers black women. You can never have enough reinforcements, resources for black women to thrive in the world. The topic has been addressed a million times before, but it will never end because what we’re up against keeps morphing and we have to figure out how to beat it. I do this because it’s how I can change the world. The act of me just being robust in the world is so radical — it’s so radical for a black woman to think she’s going to be a star, because it takes so much to get there. It’s still a battle every day, but I feel happy because I feel like I cracked the code and figured out how to work through it. Now I want to give the map to other women.”
http://www.telegram.com/entertainmentlife/20171112/kelela-you-can-never-have-enough-music-that-empowers-black-women
S Z A
RCA Chairman Peter Edge echoed Henderson’s sentiment. ”(Rowe) made a coherent statement,” he said. “She is a woman of color who has a viewpoint that is not being heard everywhere, and therefore, what she’s saying really stands out in today’s musical landscape.”
She sings of self-esteem, toxic relationships, twentysomething angst and sexual freedom over dreamy productions that weave R&B, hip-hop, electronic and indie rock textures.
“People grapple with labeling me as hip-hop, R&B or pop, and it’s interesting to me. I’m just making music,” she said. “I listen to Stevie Nicks. I love classical jazz. I love folk. I love rap. I love Modest Mouse. I’m making an album with Tame Impala and Mark Ronson. When you try to label it, you remove the option for it to be limitless. It diminishes the music.”
Rowe is still in disbelief over the attention her music has received this year. Miguel and Khalid went viral with covers of her songs, her headlining tour sold out in minutes and she’s joining Bryson Tiller on a European tour, Solange is set to direct her next video and a deluxe edition of “Ctrl” is in the works.
“I wasn’t expecting people were going to show a ... lot of attention,” she said. “Every moment, I’m shocked. It’s taught me a lesson on energy and expectation. The biggest songs on the album — ‘Love Galore,’ ‘The Weekend,’ ‘Supermodel,’ ‘Broken Clocks’ — are the easiest songs I’ve ever made. Just free-flowing energy and not me resisting.”
http://www.fosters.com/news/20171023/sza-is-having-killer-year-with-ctrl
A Z E A L I A
Musically and thematically, however, Broke With Expensive Taste serves as a perfect companion album to Beyoncé. As lyrically provocative, sexually brash, and stylistically eclectic as its more pop-oriented forbear, Broke is decidedly non-commercial, reveling in sonic detours and dizzying vocal delivery that were evidently too much for the executives at Interscope. Banks’ first full-length pulls off an impressive trick — a confrontational anti-pop record that also manages to be one of the year’s most accessible and melodically pleasing LPs.
The album’s sonic schizophrenia complements Banks’ lyrics perfectly. Banks explores and deconstructs two classic tropes of hip-hop and R&B femininity – the street-tough gangster and the glamorous diva — two sides of the same coin immortalized in the album’s title itself. Rather than adopt either identity, Banks presents a multi-dimensional persona who “moves sexy in Dior” on “JFK” but threatens to rip challengers’ heads off and “send [them] to Jehovah” on “Yung Rapunxel.” “I be in the mirror looking luxe and plush” from “Desperado” presents the stark antithesis to the way she looks “heavy metal and reflective” on the aggressive track named as such. The very moniker of “Yung Rapunxel” epitomizes this dichotomy — Banks posits herself as a fairy tale princess in a six-story walkup with a phonetic perversion that belies the rapper’s penchant for eschewing and transcending stereotypes. Banks is content to contradict herself; she contains multitudes.
https://prettymuchamazing.com/reviews/azealia-banks-broke-with-expensive-taste
T I N A S H E
Listening to Aquarius, you can get a brief feeling that the system works, that this thrown-together mob of executives and professionals and outsiders have all gotten together to help a young woman realize her vision. History has proven the opposite time and again, but Aquarius makes the entire music business sound like an enterprise dedicated to helping people become great.
Rappers show up sometimes, and even though they’re guys I like — Future, A$AP Rocky, Schoolboy Q — their verses are always the weakest parts of their songs, since they can’t help but pierce through the atmosphere that Tinashe has so lovingly conjured. These songs are slow-burners, songs that reveal themselves slowly, over multiple listens. “Pretend,” the album’s second single, came out weeks ago, and I feel like I’m only starting to understand what a perfectly written pop song it is. There’s feeling on “Pretend” — the wish for a passion that’s just not there, the hope that you can make things better just by acting like it’s better — but Tinashe and producer Detail don’t blast you over the head with it. They handle it delicately, gracefully. And while Tinashe keeps her delivery as flat and assured as ever, she lets a ghost of regret creep into her voice, subtly revealing itself in a tiny creak here or an ad-libbed ooh there. The other songs work the same way, taking their time in revealing themselves. “Wildfire” just laid me out the last time I heard it, even though I’d been living with it for a couple of weeks and it hadn’t had that effect on me before. Other songs will probably work the same way. Aquarius is a slow mist of an album, an unhurried pleasure. When was the last time you could say that about a major-label pop album?
https://www.stereogum.com/1710329/album-of-the-week-tinashe-aquarius/franchises/album-of-the-week/
D ∆ W N
The album, supposedly the first in a trilogy of records due this year, is a larger-than-life fairy tale recasting of modern rhythm and blues. In Richard’s hands, she is the primary songwriter along with co-producer Andrew “Druski” Scott. The woes and highs of love are given a medieval makeover, the album’s scope brings to mind Donna Summer’s rewrite of Cinderella on her Once Upon a Time (1977) LP. Richard’s vocal persona shows she’s studied at the altar of Brandy Norwood, her voice multi-harmonied and nebulous on “Intro (In the Hearts Tonight)” and “[300].”
Richard’s ability to make the mundane extraordinary is uncanny, as heard on the sublime and stark title cut. The piano keys and Richard are all that adorn the track; the piano’s pristine presence recalls the crisp heights of George Gershwin’s jazz opus “Rhapsody in Blue.” In truth, the sample is pulled from Claude Debussy’s “Clair de lune.”
For lazy listeners, Goldenheart may seem a trifle boring in the sense that the atmosphere is valued above immediate gratification. Further, there is a distance kept between Richard and the listener when it comes to her delivery at times; it’s like the story songs are being revisited versus lived.
Such a Sade-esque disconnect vocally, barring the titular track and several other nuggets (“Goliath”), may also give some the cold shoulder. Standard R&B formula is not necessarily the mission here, but patience (and an open-mind) will reward as Goldenheart grows addictive with each return.
https://theqhblend.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/dawn-richard-her-goldenheart-legend/
S A N T I G O L D
As a former major-label A&R scout, the background talent behind alt-soul singer Res, and frontwoman for Philly pop punks Stiffed, Santi White — now reborn as Brooklyn’s Santogold — comes on like the experienced “newcomer” that she is. “I want to get up out of my skin,” she declares on opener “L.E.S. Artistes” over clicking Cars guitars, and admits, “I pay for what’s called eccentricity and my will to evolve” over the ghostly post-punk dub of “Shove It.” You’d have to go back to Grace Jones in the early ’80s to find an African-American woman who comes on this strong with avant-garde club funk and weird rock shit.
Like Jones, White bypasses R&B’s body-centric testimonies of emotion. Instead, she sings from the head, as if summoning up an interior alternative to an outside world that marginalizes, fetishizes, and otherwise criminalizes its native aliens. Appeasing her inner freak while summoning the hooks to go pop, this well-connected genre-bender transmits the results in multiple soundclash mutations produced by such of-the-moment beatmakers as M.I.A.’s Switch and Diplo. Combining new wave, ska, dub, grime, Baltimore club, and hip-hop in an ear-warping wash of 21st-century psychedelia, Santogold takes listeners on a trip to a hidden black America, where White acts as tour guide through the alleyways of her mind and undoubtedly excellent iPod.
https://www.spin.com/2008/05/santogold-santogold-downtownlizard-king/
Happy listening errbody. Thanks so much for the votes that I've received and the votes to come. Be back with more content shortly!
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