Jazmine sullivan insecure instrumental
On this album, she’s both Deena Jones and Effie White she can be an easy-listen or an all-consuming one. Sometimes her voice is choppy and conversational, sometimes it sounds like rapping, and it’s almost always a delight to sing along to. The colloquial bursts of specificity in these vignettes are a feat of songwriting, and the restraint a power-vocalist like Sullivan shows in her delivery is as important. Sullivan’s songwriting is agile: These conflicting judgements and desires live in women-and both can live in one woman at once.Īll over Heaux Tales, Sullivan contends with what can be lost and gained through sex, from a secure sense of self (“Get it together, bitch,” she tells herself on “Bodies.” “You gettin’ sloppy.”) to crazed pleasure (“I spend my last ’cause the D bomb,” she proudly admits on “Put It Down”). Ho-ing goes from a source of pride and abundance to one of shame. sing of the hos in Fashion Nova dresses who steal their love interests away from them. “Amanda’s Tale” is followed by “Girl Like Me,” in which Sullivan and H.E.R. Then, on one interlude, Sullivan’s friend of 20 years, Amanda Henderson, dejectedly admits that looking to sex for power leaves her feeling insecure. Paak-assisted “Pricetags,” sex is a bold means of empowerment, financial or otherwise. On songs like “The Other Side” and the Anderson. The album’s perspectives do contradict themselves at times. “I just want to be taken care of/’Cause I’ve worked enough,” she reasons. Her words are followed by Sullivan’s searing performance of “The Other Side,” a vivid daydream about moving to Atlanta to be with a rapper who can provide for her. In one of the spoken intermissions, a woman named Precious Daughtry says a childhood of deprivation repels her from men without money.
’Cause you always feel like somebody’s judging you.” Throughout Heaux Tales, though, the motivations and makings of women who do or wish to earn material things through love and sex are considered with more kindness and clarity. “We all want to be that confident person,” Sullivan said about the song at the time. On “Mascara,” from her 2015 album Reality Show, Sullivan personified a proud gold digger with an attitude to match. There is a direct throughline between the archetypal portraits Sullivan has painted in the past and the more dynamic accounts here. Heaux Tales, by contrast, commits to simpler, more timeless soundscapes, like the snaps and synths of “Bodies” or the standout guitars of “Lost One” and “Girl Like Me.” Over the comparably minimalist production and instrumentation, the album’s narratives of agency are made central. Her music has jumped from reggae to disco to boom-bap to marching band and more as she explored the lives of women and men in the throes of crime, passion, and addiction. One of Sullivan’s breaks into popular R&B was with the 2008 revenge tango “Bust Your Windows.” The scorned lover in the song is one of many personas Sullivan would act out over the course of three albums that pulsed with drama and camp. Sullivan strategically activates her regal voice with stories that are sharp, intimate, and addictive. Across eight songs connected by spoken-word interludes from different women, Heaux Tales unfurls a patchwork of origins, outcomes, thrills, and disasters of coital indulgence in her most cohesive work to date. Her fourth album is expansive and inclusive, embodying as many women’s insights into love and sex (read “ Heaux” as “ho”) as 32 minutes could reasonably allow.
Heaux Tales itself looks to something bigger, too, beyond Sullivan as its subject or star.