I've been poking around the online archives of Bomb Magazine (28 years of artists interviewing each other = Mountain of Crack) when I came across a conversation between Me'shell Ndegeocello and singer/songwriter Marc Anthony Thompson. Mr Thompson and I haven't had the pleasure. Ms. Meshell I know and love all two well.
I'm been talking some crazy jibberish for at least ten years about what a genius MN is, what a gift she is to contemporary music and its fans about how your ears, mind and heart are missing out if you aren't familiar. But after printing out this interview (haven't read it yet), I asked myself why. Why'd I pick this one out of the hundreds in Bomb's archives.
Which lead straight to a list of 8 reasons why I love Me'shell NDegeocello.
- She's widely credited with launching the Neo Soul movement with her first two albums Plantation Lullabies (1993) and Peace Beyond Passion (1996). Her breakthrough third album Bitter (1999) came right when the movement was in full flower and is, to my mind one of its crowning acheivements. Right next to D'Angelo's Voodoo and Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of…
- Bitter
is an album written in the wake of a horrible breakup, mostly about
heartache, pain and regret. At the same time, it manages to be
quiveringly erotic and sexy, a get-down album if there ever was one. To
be hot and melancholy at the same time is a feat rarely heard.
- Ms. Ndegeocello was the first woman ever featured on the cover of Bass Player magazine. Which probably says more about that publication than her but still…
- Her given name is Michelle Lynn Johnson. She choose Me'shell Ndegeocello as a teenager and kept her unpronounceable moniker even after signing a record deal. More than likely, dozens of managers, agents, executives, guys in suits advised her to change it back. She hasn't and more than likely won't.
- I heard an interview with her on KPFA a few years ago where she asked an innocent question "Why can't Outkast do a blues record?" She was arguing that blackness (or any race for that matter) should not confine a musician to a specific genre and that Jimi Hendrix, Living Color, Ben Harper and TV on the Radio may have a lot of white fans but that doesn't remove who they are from the music they make. It's an argument we need way more of in discussions of contemporary music and culture which often is about very much about race but insists to the death that it isn't. If it is not, I ask you, how many of the artists in your music collection are of a different race than you?
- In the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown, Ms. Ndegeocello held Eddie Willis, a white studio musician old enough to be her father whom she barely knew, in her arms as he wept over the demise of Detroit after the city's 1967 riots.
- Even though they had broken up, Meshell and her former partner Rebecca Walker raised a son together who undoubtedly grew into an incredible human being like his mothers.
Where to start:
Get thee a copy of Bitter and listen to it, start to finish, preferably on headphones with the lights turned off. Then have a lot of wild sex or wild sexy thoughts.
To say in the slow, sensual groove, jump over to Comfort Woman (2003) or the jazz-based Dance of the Infidel. To shake your butt heavy bass-style, begin at Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape (2002).
