Skip to main content

Classic Recordings: Ari Lennox – Shea Butter Baby

Thirteen tracks from the album that made a Washington DC singer the most quoted R&B voice of 2019 — and did it mostly by being funny.

Ari Lennox: Shea Butter Baby (2019)

Ari Lennox was the first woman signed to Dreamville, J. Cole's label, and Shea Butter Baby is the record that justified the signing several times over. It is a debut that sounds like a third album: confident, specific, structurally sound, and written in a voice that is recognisably one person's rather than a genre's.

The thing that separates it from its contemporaries is tone. Most R&B debuts of that period aimed for either seduction or heartbreak. Lennox writes about rent, roommates, being broke, wanting to be left alone, and enjoying herself — and she is genuinely funny, which almost nobody in the genre risks.

The voice does the rest. It is a rich, slightly husky instrument with an old-fashioned quality that makes even her most contemporary production sound like it belongs to the seventies.

What to listen for

"Shea Butter Baby" with J. Cole is the title track and the best-constructed single — a groove built on almost nothing, with a chorus that arrives sideways.

"BMO" is the one everyone quotes, and it is the clearest demonstration of the humour.

"New Apartment" is the album's thesis: a song about living alone that is entirely about freedom rather than loneliness, which is a rarer subject than it should be.

"Whipped Cream" is the emotional centre and the best vocal performance here — a song about self-sabotage delivered without any self-pity at all.

"Broke" with JID is the label-mate collaboration and the funniest track, and "Up Late" and "Static" are the deep cuts that reward repeat listening.

"Chicago Boy" opens the album beautifully, and "Get Close" closes it.

Go deeper

The PHO EP (2016) is where the sound was worked out, and age/sex/location (2022) is the follow-up.

The Dreamville roster — JID, Bas, EARTHGANG — is the immediate context. For singers in the same lineage, Erykah Badu is the obvious ancestor and Yasmin Lacey the British contemporary.

Why it holds up: debut albums usually give away their inexperience in the sequencing — too many ideas, no shape. This one is thirteen tracks, under forty minutes, and every song is doing a specific job. That discipline is rarer than a good voice, and it is the reason people still play the album rather than the singles.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more