Watching Jazmine Sullivan get emotional with his own skill is like watching Spider-Man swing happily from sky to sky, without an enemy in sight. Just look at Sullivan dancing at a recent NPR Music Tiny Desk (Home) concert as she sings, “I hope those boobs can get me out of town,” her voice tickling the lowest depths. Her eyes widen with feigned confusion when she murmurs the words, “I don’t know where I woke up.” When she says, “Don’t have too much fun without me,” Heaux Tales’ excellent single “Lost One”, she throws her head, arms and palms back, as if offering herself something bigger.
Heaux Tales she looks at something bigger, too, besides Sullivan as her subject or star. Her fourth album is expansive and inclusive, incorporating so many feminine perceptions of love and sex (read “Heaux”As“ ho ”) as 32 minutes could reasonably allow. In eight songs connected by spoken interludes by different women, Heaux Tales unfolds a patchwork of origins, results, emotions and disasters of coital indulgence in his most cohesive work to date. Sullivan strategically activates his real voice with stories that are sharp, intimate and addictive.
One of Sullivan’s breakthroughs in popular R&B was with the 2008 revenge tango “Bust Your Windows”. The despised lover in music is one of the many personas that Sullivan would represent over three albums that pulsed with drama and camp. Her music jumped from reggae to disco, boom-bap, martial band and more as she explored the lives of women and men amid crime, passion and addiction. Heaux Tales, on the other hand, it is committed to simpler and timeless soundscapes, such as the “Bodies” sockets and synthesizers or the “Lost One” and “Girl Like Me” guitars. Throughout the comparatively minimalist production and instrumentation, the album’s agency narratives become central.
There is a direct cross line between the archetypal portraits that Sullivan painted in the past and the more dynamic accounts here. In “Mascara”, from his 2015 album Reality show, Sullivan personified a proud gold digger with an attitude to match. “We all want to be that confident person,” said Sullivan of the song at the time. “And it is difficult to be that way. Because you always feel that someone is judging you. ” Over Heaux Taleshowever, the motivations and qualities of women who do or wish to earn material things through love and sex are considered more gently and clearly. In one of the intervals spoken, a woman named Precious Daughtry says that a childhood of deprivation keeps her from men without money. Her words are followed by Sullivan’s ardent performance of “The Other Side”, a vivid daydream about moving to Atlanta to be with a rapper who can support her. “I just want to be taken care of / because I’ve worked enough,” she argues.
The album’s prospects sometimes contradict each other. In songs like “The Other Side” and “Pricetags” assisted by Anderson .Paak, sex is a bold means of empowerment, financial or otherwise. Then, in an interlude, Sullivan’s 20-year-old friend Amanda Henderson, discouraged, admits that looking for sex for power makes her insecure. “Amanda’s Tale” is followed by “Girl Like Me”, in which Sullivan and HER sing about women in Fashion Nova dresses who steal their love interests. Ho-ing goes from a source of pride and abundance to a source of shame. Sullivan’s composition is agile: these conflicting judgments and desires live in women – and both can live in a woman at the same time.
All over Heaux Tales, Sullivan struggles with what can be lost and gained through sex, a secure sense of identity (“Get together, bitch,” she says to herself in “Bodies”. “You’re getting sloppy.”) crazed pleasure (“I spend my last cause of the D bomb,” she proudly admits in “Put It Down”). The colloquial outbursts of specificity in these vignettes are a feat of composition, and the restraint that a powerful vocalist like Sullivan shows in her presentation is so important. Sometimes her voice is choppy and colloquial, sometimes it sounds like rap and it’s almost always a pleasure to sing along. On this album, she’s Deena Jones and Effie White; she can be easy to hear or consume everything Since the wrinkled performance of “Put It Down”, its most powerful singing is mixed in the background, as if to make it a little less superhuman.
R&B has long offered women space to express their sexual appetites, from fundamental dirty blues songs like Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ‘Em Dry” in 1935 (“Say I fucked up all night and the night before, baby / And I feel just like I want to fuck some more ”) to Adina Howard’s 1995 hit,“ Freak Like Me. ”After six years between projects, Sullivan joined adjacent R&B and R&B stars like Summer Walker and SZA, who updated the genre with music that complicates desire with confusing reality. Old archetypes like The Gold Digger and new ones like The Instagram Baddie start to fall apart, leaving women fuller in their wake. Sullivan’s friend Amanda Henderson told the Philadelphia Inquirer that she was nervous to include her revelation in Heaux Tales, but has since found relief in the number of fans who have connected with him. Even in the way Sullivan’s Tiny Desk was organized – with lush instrumental breaks, opportunities for his background singers to gain prominence and an appearance by HER – of course Heaux Tales it is communal.
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