Revolutions Will Be Webicized (Joi 1997)

Vibe magazine got a not-too-shabby redesign this month. The news for me wasn’t Ciara naked on the cover (very Toni Braxton 10 years ago), but their decision to totally dead the record reviews section! Back when magazines meant a lot more – in the 90s, when the Internet was just a babe – I used to crack open Vibe with bated breath, to see who got the biggest lead-off review in their Revolutions section, and to see which hiphop critic wrote it. Such things don’t matter much anymore (as well they probably shouldn’t at 37), but appar- ently I’m not alone: from now on, Vibe reviews will be exclusively over on their site.

Part of this has to be because record companies became a lot stingier about setting out advance music to skeevy journalists in the age of uploading CDs to eMule and the like. Blogs like this are probably another nail in the coffin; if I can tell you what the shit sounds like weeks before it drops, why wait for Vibe to come out? Especially if bloggers don’t have to play the same nicey-nicey politics as magazine editors. (You can’t totally shit on Jigga in a review and expect Def Jam to hand you Kanye for an exclusive interview the next month.)

Anyway, in honor of the bygone Revolutions section, here’s my never-before-published lead review of Joi’s Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome. Hiphop’s answer to Betty Davis, the funk-rockin Atlanta chanteuse got dissed not once but twice in trying to put this album out, and to this day it’s officially unreleased. Hence Vibe killing this review, which was all laid out for printing back in 1997 until EMI Records folded and the plug was pulled. Peace to all the scribblers whose leads were published over the years: Karen R. Good, kris ex, Michael A. Gonzales, Jazzbo, Touré, Sacha Jenkins, Greg Tate, Scott Poulson-Bryant, Elliott Wilson… all y’all.

The hiphop generation consists largely of black twentysomethings who came of age to the sounds of not only Run-DMC, Rakim and KRS-One, but Prince, Terence Trent D’Arby and Lenny Kravitz. The mythic wall dividing B-boys and bohos began to crumble when assailed by artistic cannonballs like De La Soul’s Buhloone Mind State and the Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head on one end, and Meshell Ndegéocello’s Plantation Lullabies and D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar on the other. Those releases proved that the aesthetic sentiments of B-boys and bohos were never as divergent as many believed. One of the musical mortars that laid waste to this allegorical barrier was Joi’s 1994 debut, The Pendulum Vibe.

In the center of 10 brothers shooting dice, Joi Gilliam stood transfixed like a diva goddess being worshipped in a photo insert for Pendulum – a star before she’d uttered a word. The brawny beats (laid by producer Dallas Austin) behind “Sunshine and the Rain” and “Freedom” displayed that Joi was weaned on hiphop. But the sister also paraded a passion for enlightenment and unrestrained living as well. “I’ll learn from my mistakes and I’ll be strong/So I can find me,” she forcefully sang on “Find Me,” her ode to knowledge of self. By the time Joi declared, “I can do whatever I want to do” on “Narcissa Cutie Pie,” her liberated confession came as no surprise.

Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome, Joi’s followup, comes at a time when the mainstream is finally becoming receptive to a higher standard of soul music. But the way Joi lets it all hang out (musically and creatively), appeasing the musical status quo was clearly furthest from her mind. An amoeba has an indefinite, changeable form, and Joi’s sophomore effort is certainly that: all throaty hardcore blues one minute (“I come like the pouring rain/Each time you call my name” Joi belts on her cover of Labelle’s “You Turn Me On”) and purring pop the next (“Baby, you are the one/And I wanna be yours forever,” she coos on the sublime “Time to Smile”). Joi’s voice comes across bright as sunshine on Amoeba‘s lighter offerings but drips like the rain with a passionate, Patti Labelle tone when she chooses to rock out.

Though obviously steeped in a hiphop sensibility, Joi is much more rock star than B-girl, fronting the equally amoebic Fishbone on many of Amoeba‘s 15 tracks. Her covers of Labelle and Betty Davis’s “If I’m Lucky (I Just Might Get Picked Up)” are no coinciding incidents; they contextualize Joi in much the same way as D’Angelo claiming Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’.” They center the listener, letting you know this is where she’s coming from – the female rocker tradition. And when she vamps loud and intensely, “I said I’m wigglin my fanny/I’m raunchy dancin, I’m movin it, movin it,” thoughts of Joi carelessly fulfilling male fantasies like some boy toy don’t necessarily come to mind. Because when she starts to plead, “Say you will take me home with ya, boy,” it’s clear that Joi’s fiercely sexual vigor is too strong to be dominated.

Joi does her share of transmogrifying, but her perspective has a clearer definition than on The Pendulum Vibe. With a title reminiscent of P-Funk, Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome‘s hard-edged funk-rock – produced by Fishbone, Organized Noize and Dallas Austin – reflects her true identity: an uninhibited rock mama. Joi’s brazen star quality takes her a long way. (“How did we get so cool?/I have to shake my head,” she sings unselfconsciously on “Ghetto Superstar.”) In her hybrid of the hiphop rock star, Joi is spiritually kin to the tattooed theatricality of Tupac Shakur.

Joi’s status as a singer and songwriter (she cowrote all of Amoeba‘s original songs) elevates her beyond a mere melanin-enhanced Janis Joplin doppleganger. But her ties with the rock music aesthetic are such that when she breathily croons, “I think I might kinda like it here/There’s no hate, there’s no war, there’s no fear,” on the escapist “If I Could Fly,” she recalls W. Axl Rose speak-singing on Guns n’ Roses’s 1991 “Coma.” Martin Terry’s guitar lines provide a plaintively expressive backdrop to Joi’s ruminations.

Just as a rock sentiment girds much of the album, Joi reveals herself to be centered in the spirit. Equating God and love, Joi incorporates spirit into her everyday. Over the descending keyboard chords and walking bassline of “Soul,” Joi indicts the Devil as “this voice tryin to break us up,” and through meditation with her lover, she resolves that “this devil’s game ain’t got no power over what we hold.” Riding the go-go rhythm of “I Believe,” laced with horns from Fishbone’s Angelo Moore and Walter Kirby, Joi testifies: “I believe/Even though sometimes my problems bury me/And even though sometimes I break down on my knees/My god stays with me/I still believe.”

Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome has its share of mood swings. Right before she declares “I believe,” Joi rants over an old lover. “The scent of your smell is still in the sheets,” she cries on “It’s Over,” and when the band finally drops out, leaving her “I don’t know if I can make it” isolated, you feel her pain. “My Brother’s Letter” is the story of a lover’s suicide note (“It said that she would go away/If that would make your day”). And midway through “Hurts Sometimes,” with its “I love you so much sometimes that it hurts” mantra, Joi scats “I love your dirty stinkin drawers” through the jazzy bridge interlude like a meditation.

Joi can be as alternately courageous and contradictory as hiphop culture itself. The generation raised on Paid in Full has no love lost for Let Love Rule either, and they’re beginning to make albums of their own. The beauty of Amoeba is that Joi conveys an innerstanding of turning out other music genres with a hiphop sensibility.