A few post-Essence observations:
—Raphael Saadiq has explored his musical inheritance by restaging it. After The Way I See It, his shows relied heavily on the album and its Motown sound and vibe. I worried that staying in the ’60s mode might get old for him, but on the main stage in the Superdome, he integrated his own musical past into that style, drawing on songs as far back as Lucy Pearl and Tony! Toni! Tone! Those songs opened up like tracks on Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? and simultaneously fit and pulled his show incrementally forward in time, making it seem less retro despite the wardrobe and dance moves.
By Erika Goldring
—Most of the coverage of Janet Jackson’s show at Essence focused on the simulated S&M sequence, when a fan was pulled out of the crowd, strapped into a harness and teased by Jackson. It was the natural extension of shtick she’s been doing for years, and as numerous critics have observed, Jackson’s flirtation with S&M in her music dates at least as far back to 1997 and The Velvet Rope. The sequence seemed to provide insight into the show as a whole, and certainly everything after it. Whether dancing on her own or with her troupe, she remained, in, well, Control, and little seemed to bring her any obvious pleasure. When she grabbed a dancer’s crotch or simulated mashing his face into hers, it was familiar but without portraying any real connection. When the set ended with slides of her and Michael on the rear screen as she sang “Together Again,” it carried emotional weight not only because it recalled Michael, but because it showed that something touched her.
—I amused myself on Twitter during Estelle’s set Sunday. She embodied so many show biz cliches that I couldn’t let them pass without wisecrack. She introduced a song that sounded like her other songs that she claimed was a nod to the 1950s, a time of “Diana Ross and James Brown.” Nice try, but the Supremes started having hits in the early 1960s, and while Brown’s first brush of R&B success started in 1955, his career-defining funk tracks were cut in the 1960s and later. Not surprisingly, at Essence she also dispensed empowering thoughts like “love yourself” and “be happy,” both of which were likely intended as cutting-through-the-nonsense wisdom but sounded like so much less. To be fair, though, much of the crowd took the thoughts the way she intended.
Musically, I kept flashing back on Soul II Soul and that era of enlightened British dance music. Nothing else caught like “American Boy,” but seeing her wasn’t time ill-spent.
—Mary J. Blige and Essence Music Festival are made for each other. She’s the hip-hop generation’s Aretha Franklin, and her songs of good love, bad love, pain and triumph were speaking to many women in the dome Sunday night. When she sang “I’m Going Down,” the crowd sang the whole song so loudly that Blige added nothing but a word, a phrase, or a vocal embellishment, and none of them were needed. When she sang “No More Drama” as an emotional exorcism, half of the crowd was shaking out demons with her. Again, I’m not the empowerment audience, and when she told the audience to love themselves and love their imperfections, my brain said that the message seemed to give people permission to stay in their own messes. Musically, though, I can’t deny that it sounded like a personal healing and the audience took it that way.
—After Blige, Earth, Wind & Fire sounded content-free by contrast. They were, in effect, the afterparty for those who weren’t done at the end of Blige’s set, and starting with “Boogie Wonderland” might have been a good idea on paper but sounded meaningless in context. Their set was more musically adventurous than it had to be, so they delivered more than just an oldies show. Still, “Sing a Song” and “That’s the Way of the World” were too light to keep the crowd from trickling away. It was a slow-jams set that stabilized and won the crowd, and in retrospect, that makes sense after Blige. A medley included “Head to the Sky,” “Devotion” and a snippet of the Stylistics’ “Betcha By Golly Wow” before “Reasons” showed off the range of Phillip Bailey’s falsetto, and they got couples up and dancing in the aisles. After that, “September” and “Let’s Groove” fueled the electric slide that has become a tradition on the last night of the Essence Music Festival. The set wasn’t the dance party people expected, but it materialized eventually.
See Kim Welsh’s photos of the first night here. See David Dennis’ night-by-night coverage here, here and here.
