Friday’s Essence festivities kicked off at the Convention Center with a series of panels dubbed the “Empowerment Experience.” Since the target audience was female, black and upwardly mobile, I came in with three strikes. Still, it’s hard to resist a panel called “Embracing Your Inner Naughty Girl”—You never know when you’ll need that kind of advice. It turned out, however, that Essence panels nearly always stay on point, and the point is always positive and motivational—so the panel mostly confirmed that you’re sexy when you feel good about yourself and maintain a relationship with God (and use sex toys—That off-message advice was snuck in by Kenya Moore of Real Housewives of Atlanta fame, who confessed less need for a partner now that she keeps a drawer full of devices). We hoped that Prince’s ex-wife Mayte Garcia would have a bedroom story or two, but it was not to be. She only let slip one nugget—that she was getting up close with a new partner recently and Prince’s “Do Me Baby” came on his make-out mix. She asked him if he could put on some Maxwell instead.
But Friday night’s show at the Superdome made up for the panel’s lack of sexiness, since all four of the performers—Brandy, Maxwell, LL Cool J, and Jill Scott—were sex symbols of one stripe or another. While Brandy started out with a fairly wholesome image, she’s grown out of her teen-pop roots by now, and the high point of her set was a three-song tribute to her friend and former mentor Whitney Houston. It did, however, point out one thing Whitney and Brandy have in common: Both are superior singers who get stuck with too many ordinary songs.
What wasn’t sexy was the sheer volume of commercials between sets; easily an hour’s worth when you add up the four breaks. Video saturation wasn’t enough; you also had live ads with celebrity guests, including once-innovative rapper MC Lyte pitching insurance and Destiny’s Child member LeToya Luckett trying to get the crowd to sing a McDonald’s jingle (an irony, since her ex-groupmate Beyonce should have no trouble leading sing-alongs on Sunday). Half of Wal-Mart’s representatives were apparently onstage at one time or another; and you’ve never seen so much begging for Twitter posts: You’d have blisters on your fingers if you’d sent one to every hashtag offered up by one company or another.
All of that went away when LL Cool J hit the stage. As one of the few rappers to take his career into its third decade, LL has a long history to draw from—but he wisely did an old-school set, keyed to his breakthrough hits from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Even the new duet, with a pre-recorded Chuck D, was based on Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome” from that era. Backed only by DJ Z-Trip, LL’s set was low-tech by modern standards—His live vocal got lost in the mix more than once—but proved that a good rap show still hinges on the performer’s verbal dexterity and MC charisma. He displayed plenty of both, and knows by now that when he does a romantic number (like 1988’s then-controversial hit “I Need Love”), he has to follow that right up with something tougher.
Jill Scott’s set was the standout of the night, and an early contender for best overall set at Essence. Often pegged as a retro-soul diva, Scott is really more than that: She’s a musical maverick who draws from jazz, modern R&B and old-school funk, and a songwriter with an idiosyncratic touch (During “Whatever” she made this pledge of love: “For you I would ride on a Greyhound, right next to the toilet”—Who could resist that?) The set was loosely structured to follow the trajectory of a relationship, with an emotive peak in “Quick” (apparently about a real-life affair that resulted in her becoming a mother), and it peaked again with the finale, “He Loves Me,” which found her singing an operatic section in Italian. Her voice had enough power to fill the Superdome and while it can be hard to make this call in stadium shows, I would venture that the singing and playing in Scott’s set was 100 percent live.
Maxwell often gets compared to Marvin Gaye (and he used Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” as entrance music Friday) but he doesn’t share Gaye’s darker side: Maxwell is eternally cool and dapper, which doesn’t hurt his sex appeal (there were plenty of screams through his set), but sometimes keeps him from getting more interesting. Tellingly, he noted onstage that he’s lately turned 40, and said that “When I was in my 20’s, I was making music for the age I am now”—sophisticated grown-up music, in other words. But his set offered one truly odd moment, a cover of Kate Bush’s very female “This Woman’s Work”—a duet or sorts with Bush on tape, then Maxwell taking the next verse in a surprisingly similar, falsetto voice. Since he still had the women screaming after this bit of musical cross-dressing, his mojo has got to be good.
