Neneh Cherry's Popular Stance
by Steve Pond

On a balmy, early summer day, here's a picture of tranquility: a lush green lawn, a gentle breeze blowing through a large shade tree and a young mother sitting beneath the tree, cradling her three month old daughter. Taking a sip from a glass of iced tea, the young woman says, "I've definately got a tender, country side..." But this young mother is rising pop star Neneh CHerry, and she finishes her sentence by adding, "But I think my energy's more urban." As it turns out, the pastoral trapping mask a grittier backdrop: A block away is Los Angeles's Sunset Strip, which serenades this back yard with the relentless rythm of LA traffic, laced with the occasional wail of a siren. And the angelic looking baby girl she's holding - Cherry's second child - is named Tyson, in honor of the undisputed world heavyweight boxong champ. Even this peaceful yard has an unsettling history: The Chateau Marmont hotel bungalow where Cherry is sitting next door to the bungalow whee JOhn Belushi died. What's more, Neneh says, the last time she was in LA she stayed in the motel where Sam Cooke was killed. Neneh Cherry is used to incongruities, whether they're as simple as this back yard pocket of tranquility in the middle of a bustlingcity or as complicated as the contradictions that went into Raw Like Sushi, the album whose sudden success has spurred this trip to Los Angeles. It's a record on which sweet melodies give way to tough raps and hip hop rhythms are incoropoarted in classic sounding soul songs. It's also a record on which the songs are more apt to deal with the responsibilities of parents or the fragility of the male ego than to lapse into typical rap style bravado, as likely to confront ghetto realities as to trade in sassy street corner slang.
"Hip-hop and themusic coming from the street is taking a positive turn because people are talking about where they're coming from," says Cherry, who comes from a lot of different places herself. She divided her childhood between New York City and the Swedish countryside; her mother is a Swedish artist, her father an African percussionist; her stepfather, jazz trumpter Don Cherry, played trailblazing modern jazz with Ornette Coleman and often took the young Neneh on the road with him. Her own early experiences came with the ragged, all female proto punk outfit the Slits and London's chaotic jazzz funk punk outfit Rip Rig and Panic.
Yeah that background is why my music isn't just rap or it isn't just soul or pop or R&B," she says. "Allthe things I've been exposed to growing up are probably in the music. I mean, I'd be lying if I were just making hip-hop records. If you've been exposed to other things, you know that they're there and you can do something with them. Knowing about the way African or salsa rhythyms sound means that you can say, 'Oh yeah, that would sound good here,' or 'A jazz piano would be good here.' You work from a base, and then you add to it."
Her base, she admits, is rap and hip-hop. "Using rap is fun," she says, "becauseraps means that you can have a song song - a song with a melodic chorus that gives it the soul, and then with the rap you can hammer the blatant facts and truths down. Ans in a rap you can use phrases like cornflake packets," she laughs. "You can say things that really matter, in a fun way."
And what matters to Cherry? "I'm just trying to talk about lovers, relationships, life, death, pride, sex, existing ... Just all the things around us that make a difference."
Writing songs strictly about your won experiences, says Cherry "would become very anal very fast." But at the end of Raw Like Sushi is "So Here I Come", a song that can be taken as Cherry's statement of purpose, if not her outright autobiography. Every verse fills in a few more details about the life of an assertive young woman: feeling lost at school, getting her first kiss at thirteen, learning about urban realities. Ans at the end of each verse, there's a straightforward declaration: "I know where I'm going and where I'm coming from/ So here I come."
At this point, it's easy to see where Cherry is going: With a top fivesingle, a fast-selling album and a widely seen video, she'll move on to more singles, lots of promotional chores and a tour - perhaps, she says, with Fine Yong Cannibals.
Where she's coing from is a little more complicated. Cherry was born in Sweden, the daughter of Swedish artist Moki and African percussionist Ahmada Jah, and raised by Moki and Don Cherry, who - in addition to being a central fiure in post-Fifties modern jazz - was the father Neneh knew, "the one that gave me a hard time."
Her transatlantic upbringing had its downside; one year Neneh would go to school in Manhattan, the next she and her brother would find themselves the only black students in a Swedish school. ("I know that I'm halk black," she says of her mixed parentage, "but I feel black") Then she'd hit the road for a while, traveling with Don Cherry and band mates such as Ornette Coleman, Pharoah Sanders, Carla Bley an Gato Barbieri.
"It's the sort of life that could have become very confusing," she says. "But most of the time we were traveling between two enviroments that we knew really well. And when we changed places, it was very natural. When we were on tour, it was on a bus with beds in the back, and the whole home went. And when we stayed in a hotel, we'd set up house. There's a classic story of my mother smuggling a portable camping kitchen into a hotel under her cape and dropping it in the lobby."
At the same time, Cherry as exposed tos ome of the most venturesome musicians in jazz - not that a grde schooler, could exactly keep up with the music her dad was mkaing. "I knew that it was different, and that it was different, and tat it was about something elsse," she says. "But I think I appreciate it a lot more now. When I was about nine, my brother and I would be falling asleep next to the stage, thinking, 'God, not another twenty minute solo ..."
But even as a youngster, Neneh was able to find things to appreciate in such an unusual musical enviroment. "Don used to take us with him to rehearsals at Ornette's place on Prince Street, in Manhattan," she says with a grin."And I can remember Denardo Coleman being, like, eleven, playing the drums and being fascinated by him. It was like 'Hmm... that boy is playing the drums."
When she was fourteen, Cherry felt adept enough at making her own way in New York and Sweden that she dropped out of school; she now says that decision is "not something that I'm paricularly proud of, and I think it's because of a weakness that I didn't survive." But the following year, her biological father took her to Arica to meet her his family, and the streetwise youngster found herself in a situation she couldn't handle.
"I felt like 'Yeah, I'm from New York City, I know what's going on, I can handle myself," she says. "Ans the first night there, I cried the whole night because it was so real. There was this overwelming vibe of, like, 'You're in Africa': the smell, the heat, the way the people looked. It was more real and more African than I thought anything could ever be, and I was convinced that I would never get out of there. But the weirdest thing was that it was very familiar. I think that's what people mean when they say 'going back to your roots'.
"Ithink I hmbled myself a lot," she adds."I don't think that means becoming subservient. I think that you have to be a fighter to survive. But fightinh all the time is pointless: You just end up wearing your self out. You have to learn how to be yourself in all enviroments, without them threatening you. And I saw a security there in people that I'd never seen anywhere ese, probably because they hadn't been taken away from there."
When Cherry got back to New York, she tried office work and other straight jobs, never feeling that she fit in until she became a mucisian, almost by accident. Though her real favorites were always people like Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan and Billie Holliday, she was attracted to the energy or punk music. "It was a real identity that I could cover myself with, that would give me an excuse to be more fearless," says Cherry. She made friends with some London musicians, and in 1981 those friends asked her if she'd like to join Rip Rig & Panic, an experimental post punk outfir heavily infuenced by jazz and fuk music.
"It was my attitude and energy that made them think of me, not my singing abilities," she says with a laugh. "Cause God knows they hadn't heard me sing. I was in New York, and they called me up and asked if I wanted to come over. I said "Are you sure?' Well, okay then.Ans everyone that was involved with Rip Rig & Panic was into the music that I'd grown up with, so I found it really easy to be a part of it. They were listening to Dollar Brand , Don Cherry, Parliament/Funkadelic, Etta James, the Last Poets, and stuff like that."
She snag on three Rip Rig & Panic albums and briefly played percussion and sang in the premier all-female punk band the Slits. Rip Rig & Panic matured into another band called Float Up Cp, and Cherry began to frequent a London Club that paid five pounds to anyone who'd get onstage and rap.
"I used to go up there every week to get a fiver," she says. On one of those trips she attracted the attention of an A&R man who persuaded her to record a single of her own. The A side, "Stop the War", protested England's war in the Falkland Islands, while the B side, "Give Sheep A Chance," was a salute to the islands' chief inhabitants.
By this point Cheryy was beginning to write songs, encouraged by her then boyfriend, Cameron McVey, a London musician who goes by the name Booga Bear and whose much in evidence on Raw Like Sushi, both on his own ans one halk of a production team called the Dynamix Duo. Though she cheerfully admits that it's not hard to figure out who Booga Bear is or trace the extent of his invovement, she says the name is a bit of a sunterfuge. "He's chosen to call himself that because people are always looking for the man behnd the woman. And this makes it a little bit more mysterious."
The two worked together on her album, making demos in a "four-by-four pink bdroom" that's been dubbed Cherry Bear Studios and then bringing in outside producers to fit the individual tunes. Although the result is reminiscent of the new breed of mergers between hip-hop and soul coing out of London, the psychedic rap of De La Soul rates a special endorsement from Cherry for "opening a whole new door."
Ans somehwere along the line, it seems, music itself took care of Cherry's indecision over what to do with her life. "It wasn't until I was thrown into music that the passion surfaced, and all of a sudden it was "Oh yeah, this is what I love,' she says. "Music has always been a great force in my life, but it was so rigt in my face I didn't realize I could do it."

Neneh Cherry is still sitting in the backyard when another sound starts up. In the bedrrom of the bungalow, a babay is crying. "If she doesn't chill, I'll takeher," she yells to Tyson's nanny before reinforcement arrives in the form of Cameron McVey. Although she and McVey aren't married - "We're just hanging out together" - and the baby has his last name: She's Tyson Cherry Kwewanda McVey.
At first this might seem to be another dichotomy for Cherry, who's determined to simultaneously work her record and be a full-time mother. In fact, it's one of the contradictions that fuels Raw Like Sushi, which ws recorded just before and just after Tyson's birth. "Before the baby was born, we didn't know what she was going to be ike," says Cherry. "We had almost the whole of the album recorded, and we sorta said, "We'd better put this one month to oneside.' But as it happens, she's really placid and peaceful, so after a coule of weeks we thought, "Let's go and do another track.' And "The Next Generation' kind of fell out."
Although the song celebrates parenthood, Cherry is quick to say, "I'm not saying that having kids is what everyone should do, and I'd hate to inpsire a fourteen-year-old girl to have a kid at the wrong time. The song is saying. "yes, I've had a baby, and I'm really happy,' but it's also saying that children are our future and it's up to us to give them a fait break, so they can do something about our mistakes."
For now, though, Cherry figures that Tyson and her six-year-old sister are already doing something for their mother: They're keeping her on the eve of her twentyfifth birthday, from getting too mature. "I don't feel like I've grown up," she says. "Yesterday I had some pictures taken where I had my hair pulled back and I was wearing red lipstick, and it really made me feel like a sort of weird little girl."
She considers this last phrase for a minute, and then the contradictory pop star giggles. "Yeah,' she says with a nod. "A weird, dementedsort of female girl-freak."
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