This is not a jazz album. It's an R&B album, Erykah is sort of a Rickie Lee Jones of R&B in that she has an affected unique stylizing where she jazzily messes with the beat and phrasing of sung notes and sounds. I don't know how to explain it otherwise.
You would either like it or not. I like it. I like her work because she's not garden variety twenty-first century R&B, she's offbeat, a bit full of herself but actually poking fun at being full of herself, a bit hippy-mystic and trite, but an accomplished entertainer and to my thinking more of an accomplished musician than the garden variety pop singer.
Did I mention she's a lovely woman?
I think she's quite sexy.
As for the "African-Americanization of America". . . I keep running into that phrase from online political posters (amateurs, not professionals) who are "right wing" to the hilt and are not at all happy with Obama (think Ed!). I post on a Harley site about bikes and the political forum there is one place I see this a lot. It's a fear, in my opinion racist-motiviated, that America is going to be "ghettoized" or "jived" over, that our public institutions will be somehow transformed and "African Americans" will be "misproportionially positioned" or some such, that the culture will change to something they are obviously afraid of and/or (I say and) don't understand.
It's a big bowl of tripe. I was playing around with the title of the CD and this tripe. This album would probably piss off someone concerned about the "African-Americanization" they may imagine and fear. It's sort of a concept album of a future America. . . it's funkier in most places than her earlier work and this has a sort of Parlaiment/Funkadelic feel in places.
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