Seeing Jazmine Sullivan thrill with her own ability is like watching Spider-Man swing merrily from skyrise to skyrise, not an enemy in sight. Just 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 tickled to the bottom. Her eyes widened with deceptive confusion as she pondered the words, “I do not know where I woke up.” When she belts: “Do not have too much fun without me”, from Heaux Tales’ outstanding single “Lost One”, she throws back her head, arms and palms, as if offering herself something bigger.
Heaux Tales himself also looks at something greater, beyond Sullivan as subject or star. Her fourth album is extensive and inclusive and contains so many women’s insights into love and sex (read “Heaux”As“ ho ”) as 32 minutes could reasonably allow. About eight songs linked to speeches by different women, Heaux Tales unfolds a patchwork of origins, outcomes, excitement and disasters of indulgence in her most cohesive work to date. Sullivan activates her royal voice strategically with stories that are sharp, intimate and addictive.
One of Sullivan’s breaks in the popular R&B was with the 2008 revenge tango “Bust Your Windows.” The disdainful lover in the song is one of the many people who have performed Sullivan over the course of three albums who have dabbled in drama and camp. Her music jumped from reggae to disco to boom-bap to marching band and more as she explored the lives of women and men amidst crime, passion and addiction. Heaux Tales, instead, it connects to simpler, timeless soundscapes, like the snaps and synths of “Bodies” or the striking guitars of “Lost One” and “Girl Like Me.” The narratives of the album are central to the comparative minimalist production and instrumentation.
There is a direct line between the archetypal portraits that Sullivan painted in the past and the more dynamic versions here. On “Mascara”, from her album 2015 Reality show, Personalize Sullivan a proud gold digger with an attitude to fit. “We all want to be that confident person,” Sullivan said of the song at the time. “And it’s hard to be like that. Because you always feel that someone is judging you. ” Through Heaux Taleshowever, the motivations and intentions of women who do or want to earn material things through love and sex are viewed with more kindness and clarity. In one of the spoken intervals, a woman named Precious Daughtry says that a childhood of deprivation repels her from men without money. Her words are followed by Sullivan’s scathing rendition of ‘The Other Side’, a vivid daydream about moving to Atlanta to be with a rapper who can take care of her. “I just want to be taken care of because I’ve worked hard enough,” she reasoned.
The perspectives of the album sometimes contradict themselves. On songs like ‘The Other Side’ and the Anderson. ‘Pricetags’ supported by Paak, sex is a daring way of empowerment, financially or otherwise. At one point, Sullivan’s girlfriend of 20 years, Amanda Henderson, desperately admits that she wants to look at insecurity when she’s looking for sex. ‘Amanda’s Languages’ is followed by ‘Girl Like Me’, in which Sullivan and HER sing the singers in Fashion Nova dresses who steal their love interests. Ho-ing goes from a source of pride and abundance to one of shame. Sullivan’s songwriting is agile: these conflicting judgments and desires live in women – and both can live in one woman at the same time.
Everywhere Heaux TalesSullivan struggles with what can be lost and gained through sex, from a secure sense of self (“Get it together, bitch,” she says to herself on ‘Bodies’. ‘You get sloppy.’) To crazy pleasure ( “I spend my last, because the D-bomb,” she proudly admits to “Put it down”). The collective outbursts of specificity in these vignettes are an achievement of songwriting, and the self-control that a power vocalist like Sullivan shows in her delivery is just as important. Sometimes her voice is ominous and sometimes it sounds like a beat, and it’s almost always a pleasure to sing along. On this album, she is both Deena Jones and Effie White; it can be easy to listen or consume everything. From the winding opening track on “Put It Down”, her most powerful song is mixed in the background, as if she wants to make her a little less superhuman.
R&B has long offered women space to address their sexual appetites, from the fundamentally dirty blues songs like Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ‘Em Dry” in 1935 (“Say I Fucked All Night and All Night Before, Baby / And I just feel like I want to fuck a little more “) with Adina Howard’s hit” Freak Like Me “from 1995. After six years between projects, Sullivan joins the ranks of today’s R & B and R & B -adjacent stars such as Summer Walker and SZA, who have updated the genre with music that complicates the desire with the messy reality. Old archetypes like The Gold Digger and new ones like The Instagram Baddie start to crumble, leaving fuller women behind. Sullivan’s friend Amanda Henderson told the Philadelphia investigator that she was nervous about recording her revelation Heaux Tales, but has since found relief in the number of fans linked to it. Even in the way Sullivan’s Tiny Desk is set up – with lush instrumental pauses, opportunities for her background singers to take the spotlight and a guest appearance from HER – it’s clear Heaux Tales is common.
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