musician; singer; songwriter
Personal Information
Born Michelle Johnson, August 29, 1968 in Berlin, Germany; daughter of musician and health-care worker; children: Askia;
Education: Received music degree from Howard University.
Career
Musician and singer-songwriter, c. 1980s-. Signed to Maverick Records and released album Plantation Lullabies, 1993; appeared on recordings by Madonna, John Mellencamp, Marcus Miller, and others, 1994-95; contributed music to theatrical productions What's Behind Door 1, 1994 and Whispers of Angels, 1995; opened for The Who, 1996; joined H.O.R.D.E. music festival, 1996; recorded with Rolling Stones, 1997; nominated for Grammy award for 1996 duet with singer Chaka Khan, 1997; contributed song "Poison Ivy" to Batman & Robin film soundtrack, 1997.
Life's Work
Rolling Stone called Me'Shell Ndegéocello "one of the few artists who really matter" in the R&B world. With her daunting, unconventional style and free-ranging artistic ambition, the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has enthralled both critics and audiences. After a debut that hinted at her impressive reach and scored a hit single, she released a hugely adventurous follow-up that explored many of the thorny issues with which she grappled. Even so, Ndegéocello repeatedly expressed ambivalence about her career path.
Born Michelle Johnson in Berlin, Germany, Ndegéocello grew up in Washington, D.C. Her father served in the U.S. Army, and played tenor saxophone, she has noted, at several presidential inaugurations. Although her father's love of jazz had a positive influence on Me'Shell, she was adversely affected by her mother and father's rocky relationship. "It was horrible watching the way my father treated my mother and not feeling I could help her," she told the Los Angeles Times. "I've seen my father cheat on my mother several times in front of my face, and I wasn't strong enough to tell my mother that. Even though I knew she knew, I felt like I betrayed her by not telling her."
During her adolescence, Me'Shell often experienced sexual feelings that she recognized as unusual. Although she has mostly addressed male lovers in her songs, Ndegéocello identifies herself as a bisexual. Me'Shell's bisexuality and a sense of musical mission helped form her unique creative identity. At 12, she related in Rolling Stone, she had "a dream where I was running from the devil. I kept on reciting the Lord's Prayer in my brain, begging myself to wake up. It seemed like the dream lasted days; finally I woke up, covered in sweat. I didn't sleep again for four days." Like pioneering blues artist Robert Johnson, who was alleged to have signed a pact with the devil, Ndegéocello has made her flight from various demons the focal point of her work.
Inspired by funk, soul and rock records in her brother's collection, Me'Shell learned to play the bass and began writing songs at age 16. Performing in local bands, she focused intensely on music and began to pursue a music history degree at Howard University. "I hated school," she related in YSB. "I went because my father got me in. I just simply was not mature enough to handle college at that time in my life." She later moved to New York and continued to hone her musical skills by playing in various bands. She also gave birth to a son, Askia, but has chosen not to publicly identify the child's father.
Changing her last name from Johnson to Ndegéocello, which she identified as the Swahili phrase for "free like a bird," Me'Shell began crafting her own unique musical style. Working in the melodic, groove-oriented idiom of such soul music luminaries as Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, she avoided the "retro" tag by adding elements of pop and jazz and exploring painful and often controversial subject matter in her lyrics.
In 1993, a tape of her material found its way to some music industry figures in Los Angeles, who arranged for her to perform a special "showcase" gig there. One of those in the audience was Freddy DeMann, an executive for Maverick Records, the label founded by pop megastar Madonna. "She was incredible, mesmerizing," DeMann recalled in the Los Angeles Times of Ndegéocello's performance. Me'Shell quickly signed with Maverick Records because she felt they offered her a greater opportunity to express herself more creatively than other labels.
Ndegéocello entered the recording studio and began work on her album Plantation Lullabies, but the pressures of her career began to weigh heavily. "Everything happened so fast," she averred in the Los Angeles Times. "I was playing a club and within a week or two weeks, I was signed. Then I was in a studio, working 18 hours a day. I thought I could handle it, but I couldn't." She vanished briefly from the recording studio, taking refuge in crack cocaine. However, she quickly stopped taking drugs, returned to the studio, and completed the album. "Actually, I think I was having a spiritual death," she told Entertainment Weekly. "I had thought that making a record would solve my problems--lift my self-esteem, make people from my past love me the way I wanted to be loved. But instead I felt as if every bit of joy I had was dying." When rock star Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994, Me'Shell remarked that she understood Cobain's pain and despair and felt a sense of kinship with him.
Released in 1993, Plantation Lullabies demonstrated Me'Shell's range and ambition. One of the album's tracks, the playful "If That's Your Boyfriend (He Wasn't Last Night)," became a hit; other tracks covered more serious territory. Essence described Me'Shell as "sonically and spiritually the daughter of [60s jazz-folk singer] Nina Simone and [political rapper and Public Enemy leader] Chuck D." Vibe hailed Plantation Lullabies as "a stunning debut," saying that the purported meaning of Ndegéocello's name "might account for the ease with which she flutters through musical styles." Spin dubbed the album "a bodacious, invigorating, self-assured suite of songs that accent the best elements of soul, funk, jazz, and their aggro-meltdown in hip- hop's style wars." Plantation Lullabies appeared on the Village Voice's 1993 Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, one of the most respected polls in the music industry.
With her shaved head and deep, sultry vocals, Ndegéocello presented a striking departure from the manicured sirens of the R&B world, and her open bisexuality challenged virtually everyone. "People see me as a heretic," she ventured in the Los Angeles Times. "Homophobia is rampant in the black community, so I am a traitor to my race, and gay people don't like me because I'm not gay enough." In The Voice, she noted the common roots of sexism, racism and homophobia. "I realize that in terms of the global totem pole, as a Black woman I'm at the bottom of it," she lamented, "and as a gay woman I'm at the bottom of the bottom of the totem pole. So there is no point in trying to fit in." She also expressed ambivalence about being openly gay. "Sometimes I think it was naive to come out, and sometimes I regret it," she explained. "Obviously it intrigues people and often it makes them intolerant; it also makes them assess me more quickly. They think they understand and know me, but that's very untrue."
Ndegéocello impressed audiences with her live performances, which showed her stretching into jazzy improvisation. Playing bass and vocalizing in a husky style influenced by both rap and classic soul, she demonstrated a range reminiscent of such genre-busting pop innovators as Prince. Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn saw in one performance "a sense of freedom and sweep in her music that was nothing short of intoxicating in its best moments," and felt that despite the artist's occasional lapses, her show "rests on a foundation of potential greatness." Rolling Stone named her "Brightest Hope for 1994."
Yet it was in a duet with a white rock star on a cover tune that Ndegéocello reached her biggest audience. In 1994 she joined pop hitmaker John Mellencamp for a version of the Van Morrison song "Wild Nights," lending both her smoky voice and fancy fretwork to the track; it became a hit and helped both of their careers substantially. But Ndegéocello didn't restrict herself to such high-profile enterprises. She collaborated with writer-choreographer David Rousseve on a theatrical production entitled Whispers of Angels, and worked with her life partner, choreographer Winifred Harris, on the production What's Behind Door 1, for Harris' Between Lines dance company.
Ndegéocello's search for personal direction and inner peace -- which included obsessive reading of the Bible and perusal of the Koran -- led to the 1996 release of her introspective second album, Peace Beyond Passion. This album combines her relentless, atmospheric grooves with lengthy meditations on religion, freedom, and sensuality. "This album is all my questions and all my fears," she asserted in Rolling Stone. "And sometimes I find peace." The record ignited some controversy with its lead single, "Leviticus: Faggot." A pro-tolerance song detailing the persecution and eventual death of a gay man, the track's repeated use of such a homophobic term ruffled some feathers. Along with gay leaders and radio personnel, Me'Shell's record company offered their support, asserting that "Leviticus: Faggot" conveyed a positive message. This support helped to garner some positive reviews for Peace Beyond Passion. "Some records just leave you speechless-- filled with emotion and perspective but grappling for coherent words of expression," wrote Billboard columnist Larry Flick. He dubbed the single "an intense, brutally honest cut that has us driven to distraction and reaching for words that are worthy of the song's potentially revolutionary impact." Ernest Hardy of Rolling Stone declared, "With intimacy and purposefulness, Ndegéocello fulfills the promise of her first album and puts the pop, hip-hop and R&B worlds on notice: She's one of the few artists who really matter." Scott Frampton of College Music Journal (CMJ) observed that "Her bass is still the prominent force in her music, but more as an anchor for a more soulful sound that reaches back, successfully," to her R&B influences. Details, however, was not alone in asserting that "Occasionally the religious concept-album trappings get too heavy for the music to carry the load." Salon's Michael E. Ross, however, disagreed. "It's perhaps a little early to think in terms of a breakthrough record, but the signs are right," Ross wrote of Passion, adding that on the album "she's created a sonic structure by turns bumptious languid and abrasive. This is music that, even as it explores social problems on a broad scale, is intensely personal."
Ndegéocello was invited by The Who's Pete Townshend to open three dates of their Quadrophenia tour, after which time she joined the high-profile H.O.R.D.E. festival. Yet despite such honors, she expressed continued doubts about her career, declaring that Peace would be her last solo album and that she might either leave her pop career behind or join a band. Her live performances continued to enthrall audiences, as a reviewer for The Voice newspaper observed, dubbing her "the undisputed funkiest heavyweight champion of the world."
"I want some sort of collective experience," she claimed in the Los Angeles Times, "I've seen what can happen to you if you think you're invincible in this business . . . I know one thing: I'm not willing to let it destroy me." Yet in her 1996 essay accompanying the release of Peace Beyond Passion, she declared "I no longer spend my days in worry of tomorrow; instead I keep the thought of God ever present, in hope that my days are filled with love for myself and others." The competing pressures of stardom and parenthood continued to be an issue for her, as she told Lynna Reid of YSB. "You never know," she reflected, "if you are making the right or even the best decision for your child." She even mused about leaving the industry. "You have to ask yourself: Do you want to be what America finds digestible?" she mused aloud to Reid, adding that one day she might turn to "making my own music and selling it through the Internet or out the back of a van, or start my own jazz band."
In 1997, Me'Shell played bass on "I'm Not a Saint," on the latest album by the Rolling Stones. Meanwhile, her duet with soul icon Chaka Khan, "Never Miss the Water," earned her a Grammy nomination. She also contributed a version of the oldie "Poison Ivy" to the Batman & Robin film soundtrack.
Awards
Named "Brightest Hope for 1994," Rolling Stone magazine; Best Bass Player, Gibson Guitar Awards, 1996.
Works
Selective Discography
- Plantation Lullabies (includes "If That's Your Boyfriend (He Wasn't Last Night)"), Maverick, 1993.
- John Mellencamp, Dance Naked (appears on "Wild Nights"), Mercury, 1994.
- Peace Beyond Passion (includes "Leviticus: Faggot"), Maverick, 1996.
- With Chaka Khan, "Never Miss the Water, " Reprise, 1996.
- "Poison Ivy," Batman & Robin film soundtrack, Warner Bros., 1997.
- Also appeared on recordings by Madonna, the Rolling Stones, Marcus Miller and others.
Further Reading
Sources
- Amsterdam News (New York), November 25, 1995.
- Billboard, May 18, 1996.
- College Music Journal (CMJ), July 1996.
- Details, July 1996.
- Entertainment Weekly, June 21, 1996.
- Essence, January 1994.
- Gannett News Service, March 25, 1994.
- Los Angeles Times, August 30, 1994; November 6, 1994; May 18, 1996; August 25, 1996; May 25, 1997.
- Musician, August 1996.
- Rolling Stone, July 11, 1996; September 5, 1996.
- Salon, July 22, 1996.
- Spin, December 1993.
- Vibe, October 1993.
- Village Voice, March 1, 1994.
- The Voice, August 13, 1996; January 13, 1997.
- YSB, October 31, 1996.
- Additional information was provided by publicity materials from The Mitch Schneider Organization, 1996.
— Simon Glickman
