Seeing Jazmine Sullivan thrill with her own ability is like watching Spider-Man happily swing from sky to sky, not an enemy in sight. Just look at Sullivan shimmy at a recent NPR Music Tiny Desk (Home) concert as he sings, “I’m hoping these tities can get me out of town,” his voice tickling him at shallower depths. His eyes widen with feigned confusion as he chooses the words, “I don’t know where I woke up.” When he tapes, “Don’t have too much fun without me,” by Heaux Tales’ exceptional single “Lost One,” throws his head, arms, and palms back, as if offered to something larger.
Contes Heaux by itself it sees something greater, beyond Sullivan as a subject or star. Her fourth album is expansive and inclusive, incorporating so many women’s ideas about love and sex (read “Heaux“Like” it “), as they could reasonably allow 32 minutes. In eight songs related to interludes by several women, Contes Heaux deploys a mosaic of origins, outcomes, emotions, and disasters of coital indulgence in his most cohesive work to date. Sullivan strategically activates his gift voice with crisp, intimate, and addictive stories.
One of Sullivan’s breaks in popular R&B was with the 2008 revenge tango “Bust Your Windows”. The despised lover of the song is one of many characters that Sullivan would play throughout three albums with drama and camp. Her music has gone from reggae to disco, from boom-bap to music band and more as she explores the lives of women and men in the midst of crime, passion and addiction. Heaux Tales, on the contrary, it opts for simpler and more timeless soundscapes, such as the snapshots and synthesizers of “Bodies” or the most prominent guitars of “Lost One” and “Girl Like Me”. Throughout comparatively minimalist production and instrumentation, the album’s agency narratives become central.
There is a direct line between the archetypal portraits Sullivan has painted in the past and the more dynamic stories here. In “Mascara”, from his 2015 album Reality Show, Sullivan personified a proud gold digger with an attitude of matching. “We all want to be that safe person,” Sullivan said of the song at the time. “It simply came to our notice then. Because you always have the feeling that someone is judging you. ” Contes Heaux, however, the motivations and decisions of women who win or wish to win material things through love and sex are considered more kindly and clearly. In one of the spoken interventions, a woman named Precious Daughtry says that a childhood of deprivation repels her from men without money. Her words are followed by Sullivan’s burgeoning rendition of “The Other Side,” a waking dream alive about moving to Atlanta to be with a rapper who can help her. “I just want to be taken care of / because I’ve worked hard enough,” he reasons.
Sometimes the prospects of the record contradict each other. In songs like “The Other Side” and “Pricetags,” assisted by Anderson. Paak, sex is a bold means of empowerment, financial or not. Then, in an interlude, Sullivan’s 20-year-old friend, Amanda Henderson, bluntly admits that looking at sex to be able to make her feel insecure. “Amanda’s Tale” is followed by “Girl Like Me,” in which Sullivan and HER sing the fashionable Nova dresses that rob them of their love interests. Ho-ing goes from a source of pride and abundance to one of shame. Sullivan’s songs are agile: these contradictory judgments and desires live in women, and both can live in one woman at a time.
Everywhere Contes Heaux, Sullivan struggles with what can be lost and gained through sex, from a confident sense of self (“Gather up, bitch,” she calls herself in “Bodies.” “You’re being careless.”) to the mad pleasure (“I pass my last because it causes the D-bomb,” he proudly admits to “Put It On.” The colloquial bursts of specificity of these vignettes are a feat of songwriting, and the restraint that a power vocalist like Sullivan shows in her delivery is so important.Sometimes her voice is restless and conversational, sometimes it sounds like rap, and it’s almost always a delight to sing.On this album, they are Deena Jones and Effie White, it can be easy to listen to or it consumes everything.From the cruel opening of “Put It Down,” her most powerful singing mixes with the background, as if to make it a little less superhuman.
R&B has long offered women space to express their sexual desires, from dirty raw blues songs like Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ‘Em Dry” in 1935 (“Say I fucked all night and all night before , baby / And I feel just like I want to fuck a little more ”) to Adina Howard’s 1995 hit,“ Freak Like Me. ”After six years between projects, Sullivan joins the current ranks of stars adjacent to R&B and R&B like 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 The Instagram Baddie begin to crumble, leaving women more Sullivan’s friend Amanda Henderson told Al Philadelphia Inquirer who was nervous to include his revelation Contes Heaux, but has since found relief in the number of fans who have connected. Even in the way Sullivan’s Tiny Desk was organized — with lush instrumental pauses, opportunities for his background singers to take the spotlight, and a HER appearance — of course Tales Heaux it is communal.
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