Jazmine Sullivan - Reality Show (2015) [Official Digital Download]

The Philadelphia singer Jazmine Sullivan encapsulates the breadth of R&B's emotional range not by riding the margins, but from a proud position at its center. She's such a singular artist, there's an easy temptation to contrast her excellent new album, Reality Show, with everything else.

The Philadelphia singer Jazmine Sullivan is such a singular artist there's an easy temptation to contrast her latest album, Reality Show, with everything else to define her work by its negatives, by the paths it avoids rather than those it follows. For example: No one will look to this album's sonic signatures to discover the texture of R&B's future. But if it's more difficult to speak to what Sullivan does, that's our failure, an inability to recognize R&B as a discrete, heterogeneous genre. Because more than any artist, Sullivan encapsulates the breadth of R&B's emotional range not by riding the margins, but from a proud position at its center. Every maneuver can appeal to about as wide a range of R&B fans as exist, in 2015 aside from those looking exclusively for something "different." They'll have to deal with something exceptional instead.

"It's almost impossible to break as an African-American woman right now without TV," R&B singer and reality TV star K. Michelle said about the harsh economic realities of being a performer to Fader magazine late last year. "Reality TV put eyes on me but it makes it difficult when it comes to Grammy nominations." Sullivan has built a strong fanbase without a show and despite this catch-22. Of course its hard to imagine a performer of her talent wouldn't be more widely celebrated in any other era. But though R&B's commercial fortunes dropped precipitously over the past decade, Sullivan's creative success and consistency over the course of three albums (she released the equally accomplished Fearless in 2008 and Love Me Back in 2010) defy gravity. Though the title of her album can be read as coy commentary on R&B's dependence on television for star-making, it can also be read simply as truth in advertising. Like many of the stories she tells, Sullivan works in layered meanings for a more convincing realism, leaving a definitive interpretation in doubt.

The strand running through Reality Show is Sullivan's performance itself, rather than any particular approach to production. Every character she inhabits is one of hard-earned principle: You may judge their choices, but they are performances of unblinking honesty and an acceptance of consequence that makes our judgement beyond the point. This often means a certain fatalism: "#HoodLove" is cinematic in its portrayal of a relationship's loyalty down to the .45 its protagonist packs in her purse, but the couple are poised at the precipice. "I'ma rock this bitch till the wheels fall off," she sings with the conviction that they'll both be around to see exactly that happen, until finally at the end: "And he ain't always right, but he's just right for me." Doomed though they may be, she finds meaning in conviction.

Tracklist:

01. Dumb
02. Mascara
03. Brand New
04. Silver Lining
05. #HoodLove
06. Let It Burn
07. Veins
08. Forever Don't Last
09. Stupid Girl
10. Stanley
11. Masterpiece (Mona Lisa)
12. If You Dare



All thanks go to the original releaser