Teena Marie's Path To Soul City

With the untimely death of the great Teena Marie, I decided to dig into my archives and reprint portions of my first – and a personal favorite - article on Lady Tee from the December 5-11 1990 issue of The City Sun newspaper. The result follows....

Teena Marie’s ninth album Ivory is another chapter in the continuing saga of one of music’s most idiosyncratic performers. Tunes by this professional multihyphenate (singer-producer-musician-songwriter-arranger) contain such disparate influences as Marvin Gaye, Nikki Giovanni, Stevie Wonder and, of course, her mentor and frequent duet partner, Rick James.

Marie’s albums have always been an interesting mixture of flower-child lyricism, unabashed romanticism, street-wise posturing within a neo-traditional R&B/urban structure. In other words, homegirl wants you to cry a little, make love a lot, then party afterwards.

Much like Wonder, she’s a classicist; her music seems to evoke rather than provoke. A Marie production is professional in the highest sense of the word. The sound is crisp. The ballads are replete with gorgeous harmonies (Irons in the Fire’s title track, It Must Be Magic’s “Portuguese Love.”) The dance tracks pump with the rhythm section out front, augmented by melodious keyboards and a light sweetening of strings (Irons in the Fire’s “I Need Your Lovin’” and Lady T’s “Behind the Groove.”) The self-proclaimed Lady Tee isn’t interested in breaking new ground; she’s a refurbisher, a nurturer. Her songs are the progeny of the past. They’re subliminal aural candy.

Her career can be divided into two periods: her internship at Motown and her attempts at crossover marketability at Epic. Her first album, Wild and Peaceful bore the distinctive touch of its producer Rick James but the LP seemed more a James project than a Teena Marie one. Except for “I’m a Sucker for Your Love,” Marie’s personality didn’t come through. The result was listenable but disposable.

The follow-up Lady T, produced by Richard Rudolph, was much better. It contained the blueprint for future Teena Marie albums: start the first side with a long dance cut and slowly wind down till it’s time to flip the record. Here was her first outstanding single, “Behind the Groove” and superb slow jam, the introspective “Aladdin’s Lamp.”

“Aladdin’s Lamp” was the prototype of what would become the Teena Marie ballad: an overflow of dense imagery sung with an innocent romanticism. In anyone else’s hands (or voice) “Aladdin’s Lamp” would’ve been utter drivel but because Marie believes what she’s singing and understands what the song is about in relation to her personal views, she becomes convincing. Like Gaye and Wonder, Marie is basically an uncoverable artist. With them, one must listen to their records as a whole for it is their voices that give their songs conviction.

The next two albums, Irons in the Fire and It Must Be Magic, were Marie’s first self-productions and followed the Rudolph formula to a Tee. Both were entertaining and contained many worthwhile cuts. Besides the Magic jam “Square Biz” - with her quintessential line “You’ve heard a boatload of other ladies rap/but they ain’t got nothing on me” - there was Fire’s sensual “You Make Love Like Springtime” and Magic’s “Portuguese Love.” These two discs, together with the incendiary duet on James’ Street Songs, “Fire and Desire,” showed Marie as a comer. They seemed warm-ups for her Talking Book or What’s Going On. Instead, there was a contract dispute with Motown and her career became Epic in label only.

Robbery, her first album for Epic, was, with the exception of “Casanova Brown,” unmemorable. Starchild seemed a smooth recovery with “Lovergirl,” “Out on a Limb” and the very best of the Marvin Gaye tributes, “My Dear Mr. Gaye.” But all forward motion ceased with Emerald City, a misguided attempt to climb aboard the Prince bandwagon. For the first time Teena Marie was churning out product and it showed.

Naked to the World was a back-to-basics album. Intimate and closely scaled, the LP had an emotional weight the bloated Emerald City lacked. With soulful songs like “Ooh La La La,” Marie was concentrating on her strengths and succeeding.

Ivory, her latest album, is a direct result of that confidence. “Here’s Looking at You” is another funk-rap hybrid. “Sugar Shack” begins with a man reciting tributes to such musical legends as Sarah Vaughan and Charlie Parker over a jazzy orchestration with Teena Marie’s scatting and segues into an all-out dance jam with an outrageous cameo by Bernadette Cooper. “If I Were a Bell” and “Miracles Need Wings to Fly” are typically sumptuous torch songs. “Mr. Icecream” is the obligatory Teena "cutesy" track, a punning song that only she can get away with. Here she dishes out every frozen allusion you can think of. Every.

Where Teena Marie has succeeded is in exploding stereotypes. She isn’t your typical white girl trying to sound Black nor is she promoted in that freak-show fashion. Marie isn’t part of that glossy urban-contemporary scene. She’s one with the culture, as gutbucket as she can be. Hers isn’t a minstrel act or an approximation of Norman Mailer’s White Negro myth. Her music isn’t wrapped in the guise of homage like a George Michael. It’s a logical outgrowth from a woman immersed in a sea of Blackness and enjoying the swim.