Jazmine Sullivan contains multitudes in Heaux Tales
And she’ll pay your rent if you’re nasty enough.
RCA Records, released January 8, 2021
Many of us met Jazmine Sullivan by proxy through a memorable performance of her biggest hit (Bust Your Windows) on an early Glee episode. Even back then, the stories penned and performed by Jazmine through her music lent themselves impeccably to the expression of heartbreak through a variety of lenses. Now she’s back with a panoramic view of the female experience through it all: not only does she deal in heartache, she also devotes significant energy to remind the listener women are sexual beings like their male counterparts (notably erasing women that identify as asexual or have a low libido). How they choose to act on impulses and satisfy their needs and desires gives rise to a multitude of experiences - of which a wide panel of them are put on display in this thirty two minute anthology.
Jazmine slips in and out of shoes throughout the short EP, interwoven with interludes from friends that speak on agency and sex, and supplements the actual conversation with fictitious interpolation through the music. The woman of ‘Bodies’ wakes up groggily in a stranger’s bed, contemplating a habit she feels ambivalent about: there’s acknowledgement of destructive tendencies, “getting sloppy”, and a suggestion that the cycle of hook-ups is not stopping anytime soon nevertheless. First single ‘Lost One’ paints a different corner of the romantic experience. It’s about mourning a relationship and making unrealistic demands of the former recipient of her love in the hope that they will hasten healing. A different speaker flips the script in ‘Put It Down’: she rewards a lover with respect, attention and surprisingly, money. The sugar mommy of ‘Put It Down’ thinks of sex as an exchange of goods, turning the tide and reversing the genre stereotypes of this kind of relationship in the culture.
Jazmine gets in her own way when songs begin to feel more like displays of ability than threads in a unified melodic fabric. There’s a clear propensity to escalate vocals to bursts of ad-libs, runs galore and overblown self-harmonizing throughout the EP. ‘Pick Up Your Feelings’’ first chorus leans into the ceremonial with sporadic choral harmonies which have no doubt caused a stank face or two - and deservingly so. By the end of the track, the technique feels overused, having fallen prey to overindulgence. While ‘On It’ provides a nice change of pace about halfway through the EP, the track fails to sustain its sensuality in this writer’s opinion. The composition is set up for a languorous take-off but the constant vocal outbidding between its two carrying stars messes the landing up for the listener. To put it in perspective, ‘On It’ feels like a raunchy The Voice knockout round (Jazmine wins in this fantasy). More often than not in Heaux Tales, the songs’ instrumentals are pretty underwhelming. Take ‘Bodies’ or ‘Put It Down’ for instance: stripped of the vocal acrobatics there isn’t much to hold on to for substance - especially the latter, whose autotune-heavy bridge is another unfortunate distraction. The choice to lead the conversation around vocal dexterity and range more than musical risk-taking and creativity was Jazmine’s to make and she is certainly unapologetic about it. Take it or leave it.
Heaux Tales’ best tracks come to fruition when the story and the music work hand in hand on equal footing. Those moments of clarity appear when the music isn’t a means to an end, but IS the end. The victorious daydream of ‘The Other Side’ is such a high, further showing Jazmine doesn’t have to do away with the conjuring of fiction to tap into the best of her musical instincts (although we will note that the song was co-written with four other individuals and produced by three). The SZA-esque musical pipe dream reads pretty much the same lyrically and melodically. The instrumentals are center stage and, if it wasn’t for its clumsy production (let’s be honest, the song is pretty messy), it would stand as one of Jazmine’s all-time best. Another highlight comes with the empowering ‘Price Tags’ where Anderson .Paak sprinkles some of his signature nonchalance. The song feels like the conjunction of a consolidated sound and yet another lyrical point of view. Conspicuously, the only male featured on the album plays the role of a guy getting played by a confident woman.
The EP closes with the swoons of a H.E.R. collaboration. It depicts yet another facet of reacting to romantic attachment and the aftermath of its falling apart. Remarkably it concludes Heaux Tales with “And I ain’t wanna be / But you gon’ make a hoe out of me”, suggesting that behavior that used to raise many an eyebrow now seems like the winning hand. Heaux of the world, unite!
Favorites: Price Tags, The Other Side (5/10)
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