Word: ree
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Britain of late has not been the crunching chords of rock but the soulful sounds of rhythm and blues. The juxtaposition of reserved Britons and emotion-laden R. and B. may seem incongruous to some-like casting Hugh Grant in Panther. Well, burn those stereotypes. English diva Des'ree, with her relaxed vocals and optimistic lyrics, has sold a million copies in the U.S. of her new album, I Ain't Movin', and secured nearly constant airplay on vh1, an American music-video channel intended for an older audience than mtv's. The band Portishead smoothly combines feathery, angelic vocals...
...what might be called alternative R. and B. Performers such as Tricky, Portishead, singer Carleen Anderson, Seal and others have enlivened the accepted, sometimes constraining formats of R.-and-B. songs with offbeat rhythms and the kind of enigmatic lyrics one would usually expect from alternative rock. Says Des'ree: "I think British soul tends to be less conventional. American soul music seems to be going through a phase now where most of the songs are quite similar. They've found a formula that works, and I don't know if they've exhausted it, but they're employing...
...sure, these are a diverse group of performers, with varying musical agendas. Des'ree's pop-radio-friendly I Ain't Movin' is a series of personal affirmations set to music, with such lyrics as "Time is much too short to be living somebody else's life" and "Go ahead release your fears." Says Des'ree: "I've always tried to turn negative situations around." The more experimental Portishead, on the other hand, wallows in negativity: nearly every song on the band's gloomily ethereal debut CD, Dummy, deals with guilt or fear, or both. On one track, the tentative...
Despite their differences, these performers are united by a love of disunity -- by their willingness, even eagerness, to defy categorization and expectation, to mix and match several musical genres and traditions in order to make new sounds. Des'ree was born in London, but her mother is from Guyana and her father from Barbados; she spent her formative teenage years in Barbados listening to calypso and reggae, both of which can be heard gently rocking her songs today. Tricky, son of a Jamaican mother and a "half-white, half-African" father, comes from the British city of Bristol, a multiethnic...
...teenager, British folk-soul singer DES'REE, now 26, imagined herself a star. "I'd be on the stage," she says. "I could hear the applause, the musicians. But I didn't tell anyone." At last her secret is out, and her single, You Gotta Be, is No. 6 on the charts. What she never imagined was that she would appear on Saturday Night Live, as she did last weekend-she'd never heard of it. With her coffeehouse sound she avoids the clichas of big-piped soul singers. "I can wail, and I can shout," she says...