Today marks the one year anniversary of Teena Marie’s passing. When I heard about her death (via Twitter, like we do), I was stunned. Even thought she hadn’t had a hit in a few years, she was still releasing albums and touring, and I easily could have imagined her becoming the grand dame of R&B. Leaving this world as soon as she did should not have even been an option.
For those of you who don’t know, Teena was not only a white woman who found success singing R&B, she was also a pioneer in the business, inadvertently leading the charge on how artist contracts were drawn up and how artists were paid. While that in itself is something to be proud of, I would be surprised if that’s a victory she would have even claimed. From the way she chased down a recording contract to the innovative way her career laid itself out, Teena Marie was no one’s puppet. She was her own woman, and even when being molded by a producer and writer as strong-willed as Rick James, her power never flagged. In fact, James was gasoline to Marie’s flame, and there is no stronger proof of this than their duet “Fire and Desire” from his 1981 album Street Songs. The clip below is a rare video of the two of them in their prime performing “Fire” live, and the passion between those two fiery souls must have been amazing to witness live:
While I knew the music that Teena Marie was making in the early 80s, it wasn’t until 1984′s Starchild with the #4 pop hit “Lovergirl” that my attention was fully captured. Starchild hit high rotation on my tape deck, but it was “Out on a Limb” that quickly became my jam. I was 15 years old, but somehow this woman’s ode to an amazing love resonated with me. We speak about “the best” this and that, but for me, “Out on a Limb” is one of the greatest R&B ballads of the past 50 years. It was timely and timeless, all at the same time, and Teena’s delivery elevated it above just a solid song into a blueprint of how you sing a ballad. Singers like Shirley Murdock owe Teena Marie a great debt for utilizing her influence in making their own hit records. While the song was not a hit at the time, it quickly became a Quiet Storm staple on R&B stations across the US.
Surprisingly, some of Teena Marie’s most enduring songs were never hits. Along with “Out on a Limb” is “Deja Vu (I’ve Been Here Before),” a song that appeared on her first album Wild and Peaceful. Despite it never being a single, it is a signature Teena Marie track that remained a favorite at her concerts up until her death last year. You would never know that the song was written by Rick James by the way she sang it because the conviction of her delivery made it her own from the opening lines: “I’m young and I’m old/I’m rich and I’m poor/I feel like I’ve been on this Earth many times before.”
No matter what adversity or challenges she experienced in her life, it was clear that music was her passion instead of her job and nothing would deter her from sharing it with the world. We should all be that lucky. Rest in peace, Lady Tee. Your memory and your music lives on.
If you want to talk about one of the classiest pop songs of the ’90s, you wouldn’t have to look any further than Annie Lennox’s debut disc Diva, which yielded several top 10 hits around the globe, although she just hit the Top 40 in the US with two singles. In fact, Diva only reached #23 in America, which was a bit stunning to me, given how pervasive that disc was in my life when it came out. While songs like “Little Bird”, “Precious”, and “Walking on Broken Glass” are all great songs, it is “Why” that has to be considered a highlight of Annie’s career. 
However, a friend of mine in academia brought to my attention that there is a segment of the population that is not taking Taylor’s side, and is actually praising Kanye for what he said and did. Former students of his that are African-American males are taking up Kanye’s cause, saying that they are proud of him for speaking the truth. That was a bit of a shock to me, because nowhere in my sphere of contact with pop culture over the past 24 hours had I seen one voice outright defend Kanye.
Part of why this whole situation pains me so much is that Kanye, for all of his faults, means well. Even in this outburst, I am sure he felt like he was righting a wrong inflicted upon Beyonce for not winning the award. He will always have some support from me because he is one of only a few rappers to speak out against homophobia in hip-hop, and he has suffered a good amount of character assassination as a result. Granted, some of that comes from his actions in other arenas, but being outspoken on social issues, combined with a good dose of metrosexual modeling, is a bad combination in the machismo-infused hip-hop community.
Do we have a different standard for people of different ethnicities in how they are perceived in the media, and even in our own minds? Possibly. Until we as a society can step out of our neatly maintained boxes of cultural decorum and understand that other cultures handle situations in very different ways, we will never get over these cultural divides that keep us divided as a people. Sadly, this is not going to happen any time soon, especially if you look at how a minority of the American public view the President of our nation, simply because he has African ancestry.
I’ve been meaning to get back to my Mixed Tapes series for a couple of weeks, but it got shuffled to the back of my brain, and my memory got jogged this morning as I heard New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give” on Radio 1.
Brainwashed opens with “Mother We Just Can’t Get Enough”, and really sets the anti-establishment tone of the album. The song itself talks about a love (to my ears, I’m not sure if it’s a person or a drug, but these songs are open to interpretation), and “mother” is referenced in a way to say that she doesn’t approve, but she better get used to it. The ending, though, gets to the social commentary, talking about how everything in society is tied to numbers and money, as an automated recording says
The highlight for me on this disc, though, is the ballad “Someday We’ll Know”, which describes the aftermath of a relationship, and uses a series of analogies to question why the relationship didn’t work out. As a twenty-something questioning why relationships never seemed to last for me, this song connected personally as well as musically. 
So a day after professing 
Shayne Ward, who 
Speaking of duet partners riding coattails, can we talk about Colby O’Donis (or Adonis, as 
If you haven’t picked up on it from previous mentions (such as comments I have left on certain blogs), I have a “thing” against Wal-Mart. When I lived in Atlanta at the turn of the century, I worked for a company that did business with Toastmaster, who sells small appliances. Toastmaster was approached by Wal-Mart about reducing their price point, and great folks that they are, they already had it figured out. Close down your US production, move it overseas to China (“we’ve got a facility already picked out for you”), and make something that’s cheaper to ship back to the US than to actually make it there. We didn’t lose that many jobs, but just the concept of what went down was disgusting to me, and I swore that I wouldn’t support such a company.
Nine years later, I personally think Wal-Mart has played a small role in our economic downturn by making us more dependent on foreign imports for the sake of saving a buck or two here or there, and not doing enough to protect US jobs. That’s why when I heard that Bruce Springsteen had 
If a ban occurs, it couldn’t occur at a worse time, because Bruce not only has a Greatest Hits out, but he also released his 16th studio album, entitiled “Working on a Dream”. In originally defending the Wal-Mart exclusive, Springsteen’s manager 
- Leona Lewis is 
- Great article on Kara DioGuardi over at CNN.com, talking about the type of dynamic they think she’s going to bring to the show. Qualifications, anyone?
Stumble It!
