Me’Shell Ndegeocello: Black & Blue
“Women are probably closest to God,” says Me’Shell Ndegéocello, 27-year-old mother, rock & roll activist and funk philosopher. She raises an arched eyebrow and gives a confident shrug. “We make life.” She’s in New York, in her favorite Harlem breakfast spot, discussing Peace Beyond Passion, her new album. In the plainest of T-shirts and jeans, she leans her diminutive earth-brown frame forward in her straight-backed chair and pours sugar on her grits, Southern style. “What I think is lost in so many religions — and I was just reading this in the Koran — is that the greatest thing the Creator ever did was create,” she says. “We talk about all the laws, we get lost, we forget that he created! And women constantly have that ability to create, even if you don’t have children. You always know.”
With her feline eyes, puggish nose and motor-mouth, Ndegéocello comes on like some supernatural imp, part baby and part crone, eager to turn you on to the secrets of her universe. “This whole world,” she says, a little wonder gathering in her voice, “the good, the bad, but still — he created it.” We’re in the M&G Restaurant, on 125th Street, and although the food’s still fine and the folks inside welcome her, Ndegéocello is saddened by the sight of the traumatized neighborhood. It’s one of those moments that make a person realize that the gifts of this world always come with a complement of grief. Harlem, and specifically the M&G, are high up on Ndegéocello’s list of everyday treasures: She’s got a loft space in Los Angeles now, but she used to live right around the corner during her days as a working member of the African-American musicians’ group the Black Rock Coalition. That was before her first record, 1993’s Plantation Lullabies, made her the kind of rising star who gets asked to do a Gap ad. When she misses her old life in New York, what she longs for is this neighborhood, her Black Rock Coalition compatriots and the grits.
But nothing stays the same in a world of endless genesis — it hasn’t for Ndegéocello, and it hasn’t for Harlem. Once we land at the M&G, Ndegéocello runs around like a school kid, hugging the staff, recommending everything on the menu, sitting down for less than a minute before jumping out of her seat with a quick “I just gotta go, there’s this barbershop right up the street.” Ndegéocello’s girlfriend, Winifred Harris, whose statuesque bearing and long dreadlocks complement Ndegéocello’s ball-of-fire vibe, smiles in a way that says she’s been left in this lurch before. “You can’t keep her still,” Harris says. A few minutes later, Ndegéocello is back, carrying some newly purchased incense and a disappointed look. “The shop’s not there anymore,” she says, eyes downcast. Decay has overtaken her old block since she left her struggling days behind. “You forget how people live,” she mutters.
It’s not in Ndegéocello’s nature to forget. Instead she shapes her experiences of love and outrage into groovewise meditations. The songs on Plantation Lullabies railed against racial oppression and radiated black pride; the album’s hot-tempered flow dipped into hip-hop and ’70s soul, jazz and funk. Plantation Lullabies won Ndegéocello three Grammy nominations. Rolling Stone declared her rock’s Brightest Hope for 1994, and she earned another Grammy nod for her 1994 duet with John Mellencamp on the Van Morrison chestnut “Wild Night.” Ndegéocello was seen as a musician who might go anywhere.
Alone with her thoughts, though, Ndegéocello felt like a spirit torn. Her mission as a political artist was to expose painful truths, and yet she keenly felt the need to heal. She decided to follow both impulses at once. “This album is all my questions and all my fears,” she says of her new release. “And sometimes I find peace.” Her pride remains, as does her anger at oppressive institutions — especially religion, which has been as comforting and damaging to Ndegéocello as it has been to the African-American community as a whole. But she’s more willing to pause now, to take in all the ambiguities. On Peace Beyond Passion, answers aren’t the point: What’s most important is the pilgrimage, and she’s still deep in the middle of it.
Me’shell Ndegéocello was 12 when she had the dream that kicked her ass and sent her forth into the world. It was a bluesman’s dream, a prophet’s revelation — so classic that when she describes it, you can’t believe she’s not making it up on the spot. “I still remember it as if it were yesterday,” she says. “It was 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.”
Me’Shell Ndegeocello: Black & Blue, Page 1 of 3