Nneka can sound wrenching and uplifted in a single note held with exhausted strength. The panted plea of “Heartbeat”‘s chorus with an almost panicked crash of drums tumbling beneath it, has a breathless emotional puncture in its chorus. In part, that works because her artistry is infused with her beliefs and she’s not simply accessorizing celebrity with tragedy. What’s remarkable about Nneka’s record is its capacity to unravel the Uniceffed Bono damage to the world of good causes. The reason Erykah Badu and Lauren Hill come up as much as they do probably comes from the desire to connect her style to pop figures that pack power and enchantment into their chops.Īt this point in the pop culture wars, I’m completely jaded by my own cynicism. The dirt in the the ethereality compels the listeners to return again and again to hear a new pitch, break, or effortless extension of her flex. Her cadence also traverses several incarnations from the breezing ease of “Uncomfortable Truth” to the pinched ratatat chant on “Suffri”. Nneka’s voice has bracingly unique qualities of contrast: the breadth between beeseching and bruising on “Walking” absolutely kills. While it’s fun to trace the seams in each genre patchworked track, her singing has the greatest gravitational pull. Nneka, despite DJ Farhot’s intricate aural canvases beneath her, vocally stands in front of of every single track. Both share a love of the polyrhythmic breakdown, though Badu seems to be carving out a path with increasingly dense Curtis Mayfield foliage, sublimating her vocals to the level of the finishing signature. Badu makes some sense, but frankly, her aim is narrowly, deeply niched and more intellectual. She also reveals few regrets about using pop as the idiom of her activist bent and spiritual leanings whereas Hill seemed, especially on MTV Unplugged 2.0, to have placed pop and depth in false opposition. Unlike Hill, Nneka seems publicly liberated by her sincerity. Frequent comparisons to Lauren Hill and Erykah Badu capture incomplete tangents of her sound. Nneka evokes lots of American touchstones, reference points that both overshoot and under illuminate. Nneka’s representation of God is fungible and easy to project through, like hearing “Jah” in a reggae song without necessarily bothering to ponder the divinity of Haile Selassie. Honestly, it’s hard to find offense with someone that generously reaches for common ground even if the language is freighted with exclusion. But Nneka has a soft-touched missionary’s zeal, directly addressing people who don’t believe in God, praising God, thanking God, quoting the Bible, pretty much proseltyzing like a Jehovah’s Witness at your door, but with the kind of soundtrack that would compel you to let them in. Normally, I would elide something like this entirely because everyone comes to the world with a certain value system and its inevitable that predominant spiritualities will wend their way into metaphor, into analogy, into the inspirational core of an artist’s sound. By that, of course I mean, I had to let go of it because nearly every single song makes explicitly religious pleas from an avowedly spiritual worldview. The God thing: at this point you need to let go of it. Clearly the themes of oppression and salvation, repentance and authenticity, aren’t meant to be tethered too tightly to time and place. Africa seems like Nneka’s biographical backdrop for the earnest longing of a fabulist pop star, who sings in English about God and the human condition. When you see writers bring up Fela Kuti or the word “African” in reference to Concrete Jungle, surely they must do so as form of colonial penance, because I won’t pretend to adjective 47 countries in order to find an artificial center for an artist that has clearly, like all of many of us, soaked up jazz, reggae, electronica, and hip-hop, genres so thoroughly cross cut in continental origin, that a lineal question that seems so quaint, has probably always been so. While trying to tread without meaning offense, the “African” elements of this record are no more geographically destined than the African elements of the Police or Sade. The barriers are now more the cumulative habits and desires of individual listeners. There are no more technological walls to prevent the Cincinnati Bengals from listening to the greatest hits written in Bengali. In fact, Nneka seems like the poster child for the post-national play of interconnected pop culture. This biographic thumbnail seems more generically presumptive than culled from anything present in the music. Much of the ink thus far spilled on Nneka thoroughly covers her Nigerian-German ethnic split, with all the supposedly dispositive clichés that one attaches to the torn between two worlds.
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