Devil in the White City

GO-GO WITH THE FLOW Ndegeocello was part of D.C.’s go-go music scene.

Photo: Merk Seliger

Singer-songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello gives us fair warning: She doesn’t love being interviewed. One journalist, she explains, had some pointed things to say about her 1993 song “If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night),” in which the openly bisexual musician sings effusively about stealing another woman’s man. “I had an interviewer who just berated me about that and thought I was this horrible person,” Ndegeocello says.

It wasn’t the only time she had to consider her lyrics’ impact on listeners. Her 2002 album, Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape, tackled racial inequality, corporate greed and the Almighty, and featured song titles like “Dead Nigga Blvd” and frequent use of the f-bomb. “Cookie is the first record I couldn’t play in front of my kid or any other kids,” Ndegeocello says, referring to her then-adolescent son. “It had such explicit language in it, I felt almost a bit ashamed about it. It made me a little uneasy.”

Her just-released eighth studio album, Devil’s Halo (Downtown Records), finds the 41-year-old multi-instrumentalist and ten-time Grammy nominee still outspoken, if a bit more introspective. On October 16, she’ll perform tracks from Devil’s Halo at the Old Town School of Folk Music as part of the Decibelle Music and Culture Festival.

Ndegeocello (an adopted surname that means “free like a bird” in Swahili) was born Michelle Lynn Johnson in Berlin, and raised in Washington, D.C., where, in the late ’80s, she played in the flourishing go-go scene, a funk subgenre. In 1993, she was the first female solo artist to sign with Madonna’s Maverick Records, which released her debut album, Plantation Lullabies.

A self-proclaimed army brat, Ndegeocello moved around a lot as a kid, a habit she’s continued into adulthood (though for the past three years she’s lived in the Hudson Valley with partner Alison). Constant change, she says, inspires her eclectic musical tastes. The tender opening of “Slaughter,” for example, the first track on Devil’s Halo, is suddenly gutted by loud rock & roll guitar riffs. That’s followed by the soulful “Tie Me On,” a Sade-esque gem full of sultry, gossamer vocal prowess. The album also spans R & B, spoken word, jazz and other genres with great aplomb, though sometimes also to the confusion of a fanbase that can’t readily predict her next musical step.

For such expectations, Ndegeocello partly blames an artist-compartmentalizing record industry. But she also sees the old model fading with the advent of online listening. “I’m hoping music listeners will start to realize [music] is no longer controlled by a machine that uses these generalizations for marketing tools,” she says. “You as a human being, you can make choices. I know we have our likes and dislikes, and that’s great, [but] I’d rather you just say you don’t like my music instead of saying, ‘It wasn’t like what I expected before.’ That’s the only thing that would truly bore me.”

While Devil’s Halo was recorded in just seven days, a first for the artist, she says the wordplay of bands such as the Pogues inspired her to work harder on lyric construction. And this time, perhaps, the taciturn musician would rather not have to explain her message. “On other records, I’ll do a song in a day,” she says. “I worked on these songs for over a year. I wanted them to not be questioned. Either you get it or you don’t.”

The album’s title, Ndegeocello says, refers to understanding the good in evil and vice versa. “I have a devil’s halo,” she says. “There’s parts of me I need to work on and there’s parts of me I’m becoming more comfortable with; I chose songs that would give people an audible view into that part of myself.”

Meshell Ndegeocello plays the Old Town School of Folk Music October 16.

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