#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s PickJazmine Sullivan Ponders Love and Materialism on ‘Heaux Tales’The singer and songwriter’s first album in five years is also her bleakest.Spoken-word “tales” from six women are followed by songs that flesh them out as character studies on Jazmine Sullivan’s “Heaux Tales.”Credit…Myesha Evon GardnerJan. 7, 2021Updated 12:55 p.m. ETHeaux TalesNYT Critic’s PickJazmine Sullivan has never prettified romance. In her songs, love nearly always leads to pain: rejection, infidelity, heartbreak, violence. She opened her 2008 debut album, “Fearless,” with “Bust Your Windows,” taking revenge on a cheating boyfriend, and a few songs later, the singer ends ongoing domestic abuse with murder. Her narrators don’t spare anyone who wrongs them; they don’t forgive their own failings either.Sullivan’s music carries the churchy, high-stakes emotionality and down-to-earth detail of vintage Southern soul into the everyday situations and electronic soundscapes of hip-hop. And in case no one noticed before, her fourth and bleakest album, “Heaux Tales” — arriving five years after “Reality Show” — makes clear that her stories were never meant to be hers alone.“Heaux Tales” is schematic, a successor to didactic concept albums like “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” and the visual version of Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.” Spoken-word “tales” from six women — confessions and hard-earned observations — are followed by songs that flesh them out as character studies. (Although the spoken-word tracks get some accompaniment from electronic beats and gospel organ, the songs alone stand up far better to repeated listening.)“Heaux” is a Frenchified version of “ho,” placing a longtime insult at an analytical distance. In the songs on “Heaux Tales,” Sullivan looks behind dismissive stereotypes — party girl, avenger, sex addict, gold digger, cheater, castoff — to show complicated human longings behind them.Sullivan released “Pick Up Your Feelings” in November in two versions: as the album’s audio track and as a live version. It’s a cutting, unforgiving farewell to a cheating lover, by no means the first in her catalog. “I deserve so much more than you gave to me/Now I’m saving me,” she declares to someone she’s caught “double dippin’.”The live version, with Sullivan accompanied only by electric guitar and backup singers, matches virtuosity to vehemence as she switches among long swoops, cascading runs, quick jazzy syllables and wide leaps. The album track, with drums, retro-sounding strings and disorienting studio-reversed piano chords, is more dismissive and colder in its fury; Sullivan flings short phrases like a knife-thrower.But the righteous anger of a breakup is one of the album’s easier stances. Other songs venture into trickier, more ambivalent territory. In “Lost One” the singer is the betrayer; it’s a confession of pure despair, moaned in Sullivan’s low register over a hollowly echoing guitar, as she watches the one she cheated on have rebound affairs and begs, “Try not to love no one.”She also embraces female desire as compulsion and challenge. In “Put It Down,” Sullivan sings in crisp, near-rap cadences about letting lust override all her better judgment, while in “On It,” she and Ari Lennox coo over a slow-swaying groove as they tease a lover to “prove why you deserve it,” adding some hints on technique.And with some spoken-word goading, Sullivan ponders the ways sex can turn into a material transaction — being a “heaux” — in “Pricetags,” “The Other Side” and “Girl Like Me.” In “Pricetags,” the singer’s simple greed is answered by Anderson .Paak with comic, escalating exasperation. “The Other Side” has a more sympathetic narrator. She’s broke and struggling, with her voice yearning and sailing upward as she sings, “I got dreams to buy expensive things”; then, over a brisker beat, she reveals her plan to “move to Atlanta” and “find me a rapper” who can afford all her imagined luxuries.Sullivan ties the album’s themes together in its finale, “Girl Like Me.” Joined by H.E.R., with their voices overlapping over a handful of syncopated, descending guitar chords, the singer is wounded and adrift. Her boyfriend moved on with no explanation, leaving her insecure about her body and wondering what he wanted: “What you asked I would have given.” She’s sure “It ain’t right how these hos be winning,” then reconsiders: “That’s what you wanted, that’s what you get/A ho I’ll be.”It’s not a happy ending, much less a role model’s advice. It’s just a way for one scarred character, on an album full of them, to persevere.Jazmine Sullivan“Heaux Tales”(RCA) AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Ellis Marsalis, a pianist and educator who became the guiding force behind a late-20th-century resurgence in jazz while putting four musician sons on a path to prominent careers, died on Wednesday in New Orleans. He was 85.The cause was complications of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, his son Branford said in a statement.Mr. Marsalis spent decades as a working musician and teacher in New Orleans before his eldest sons, Wynton and Branford, gained national fame in the early 1980s embodying a fresh-faced revival of traditional jazz.Mr. Marsalis’s star rose along with theirs, and he, too, became a household name.“Ellis Marsalis was a legend,” Mayor LaToya Cantrell of New Orleans wrote on Twitter on Wednesday night. “He was the prototype of what we mean when we talk about New Orleans jazz.”That was not always so. Mr. Marsalis’s devotion to midcentury bebop and its offshoots had long made him something of an outsider in a city with an abiding loyalty to its early-jazz roots. Still, he secured the respect of fellow musicians thanks to his unshakable talents as a pianist and composer, and his supportive but rigorous manner as an educator.Once they reached the national stage, the Marsalises’ advocacy of straight-ahead jazz made them renegades of a different sort. Wynton, a trumpeter, boldly espoused his father’s devotion to heroes like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, and he issued public broadsides against the slicker jazz-rock fusion that had largely displaced acoustic jazz during the late 1960s and ’70s.Photogenic, erudite and fabulously talented, Mr. Marsalis’s children and many other young jazz musicians he had taught — including Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison Jr., Harry Connick Jr. and Nicholas Payton — became the leaders in a burgeoning traditionalist movement, loosely referred to as the Young Lions.“My dad was a giant of a musician and teacher, but an even greater father,” Branford Marsalis said in a statement. “He poured everything he had into making us the best of what we could be.” More

Instagram

Under home confinement upon his release from jail due to coronavirus concerns, the ‘Fefe’ rapper is allowed to ‘conduct employment-related activities outside of the residence.’
Apr 30, 2020
AceShowbiz – A judge has granted rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine permission to shoot music videos on his property.
The star put in a request to shoot promos in his New York backyard while under home confinement and now he has been given the green light to do so.
According to documents obtained by TMZ, Judge Engelmayer gave the rapper permission “to conduct employment-related activities outside of the residence but within the confines of the rented property.”
Tekashi is allowed to carry out two hours of employment related activities per week and can work on new music in his basement but it’s “limited to no more than an 8-hour period per day,” with his schedule subject to approval by his probation officer.
The “FEFE” star, real name Daniel Hernandez, was released from prison earlier this month and allowed to serve out the rest of his federal sentence at home due to coronavirus concerns as he is an asthma sufferer.
Tekashi, 23, was sentenced to 24 months behind bars for gang-related activity in December 2019.

You can share this post!

Next article
Joe Giudice Maintains He ‘Belongs in the United States’ After Third Deportation Appeal Is Denied

Related Posts More

WENN

To be released on November 27, the new LP has the Green Day frontman covering classic hits such as The Bangles’ ‘Manic Monday’ as well as Tommy James and the Shondells’ ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’.

Nov 24, 2020
AceShowbiz – Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong’s covers collection “No Fun Mondays” is a reflection on a turbulent 2020.
The star has been sharing weekly cover versions online of classic hits like The Bangles’ Manic Monday and Tommy James and the Shondells’ “I Think We’re Alone Now”, and will release all 14 tracks on his new LP, which is out on[] Friday, November 27.

Speaking to British music website NME, Armstrong reveals the project began as “something to just keep me busy because I knew that the rest of the year was getting cancelled,” amid the pandemic.
“The response was really good,” he says. “Everybody was saying that it was just nice to hear some music and feel a little bit normal. The sentiment was right.”

  See also…

Other cover versions on the album include John Lennon’s “Give Me Some Truth” and The Clash’s “Police on My Back” which, according to the hitmaker, relate to the U.S. election and the Black Lives Matter movement.
“‘Give Me Some Truth’ and ‘Police on My Back’ were tied to a lot of the toxic political atmosphere that’s going on right now – especially with ‘Police on My Back’ and what happened with George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests,” he muses.
The death of African-American George Floyd in May, at the hands of Minneapolis, Minnesota police officers, sparked a new wave of Black Lives Matter protests globally.
“It’s interesting just how many of these old songs are still relevant, probably more now today than ever,” Armstrong adds.

You can share this post!

Next article
Miley Cyrus Admits to Relapsing During Pandemic: ‘It Was a F**k Up’

Related Posts More

H.E.R, who led the nominations with eight, walks away with two trophy, whereas Monica secures Lady of Soul title and Brandy collects the coveted Certified honor.

Nov 30, 2020
AceShowbiz – Chris Brown was a four-time winner at the 2020 Soul Train Awards in Hollywood on Sunday night (November 29).
The singer was named the night’s Best R&B/Soul Male Artist while his “Go Crazy” collaboration with Young Thug nabbed Best Song, Best Collaboration, and Best Dance Performance.

  See also…

H.E.R., who went into the ceremony as the leading nominee, with eight nods, picked up two – she was named Best R&B/Soul Female Artist, while her protest track “I Can’t Breathe” scored the Songwriter’s Award.
It was also a big night for former duet partners Monica and Brandy – Monica was named Lady of Soul and Brandy picked up the coveted Certified honour.
The full list of winners is:

You can share this post!

Next article
Joe Biden Diagnosed With Hairline Fractures After a Fall

Related Posts More