A white executive told Ndegeocello she needed Blacker music. She meant “Cookie” (2002), with its flexing racial declamations, as comic revenge. (Its opening track is a stuttering, Timbaland-esque thump called “Dead Nigga Blvd, Pt.1.”) The album never sounded like satire. But at the time, I heard an artist backed into a Blackety Black corner. Now I can hear catharsis, too. By the end of this stretch, epiphany had dawned. “I’m a musician,” Ndegeocello recalled realizing. “I don’t want to be a star. I just want to be a working musician. I want to have a career. I don’t want to have one hit.”
The sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll didn’t mess with her. Attention did. “I mean, I got laid before I got a record deal,” she said. “But the power of being admired can make you lose your way.” There is, she learned, “a price for being popular. But I wasn’t popular in high school. My own mother didn’t like me.”
Ndegeocello’s drummer Abe Rounds said of early recordings, “That music comes from a very traumatic place for her.” She was so young, he added, “and she’s evolved so much as a human being that I don’t think she feels as connected to that music.”
A significant part of that human evolution includes Ndegeocello’s relationship to gender. When I inquired how she’d like to be identified for this piece, whether that relationship has changed over the years, she marveled that she rarely asked and left the matter of pronouns for me to decide, while making clear that the binary has never personally applied. She invoked Daoism and African and Native American cultures, Big Freedia and Prince. “I’m not a woman. I’m not a man. I am something that you’ll never understand,” she said, quoting the opening lyrics of “I Would Die 4 U” as if they were scripture. For now, the pronouns are less crucial than how Ndegeocello experiences gender, as kaleidoscopic as much as telegraphic: “I’m here to show you another way. I don’t need the language.”
In the band, she’s assumed what, of late, could be described as a recessive role, less the star of a show and more an integral element of a sound that incorporates the ingenuity, skill and imagination of the fellow players. Rounds, whom Ndegeocello brought on while he was a student at Berklee College of Music; Christopher Bruce, a guitarist and producer, who’s been working with her since “Bitter”; a veteran keyboardist, Jebin Bruni.
Ndegeocello’s vocals aren’t always the most prominent in this configuration. That role goes to Justin Hicks, who can soar as high as Ndegeocello can luxuriate in her lower comfort zone. Kenita Miller-Hicks, his wife, fleshes out the harmonies. “My energy has changed,” Ndegeocello said, “and being up front doesn’t really appeal to me as much. I have here a lot of music in my head, things I can’t sing.” Hicks realizes her visions; now, she’s producing an album of his music.
Read More: Meshell Ndegeocello Could Have Had Stardom but Chose Music Instead
