ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY / NOV. 20, 1992
CHERRY JUBILEE, by kate meyers
After her smash debut album, Neneh Cherry, took five with
her family. Now she's serving up a spicey and very
personal "HOMEBREW".
Neneh Cherry wears contradiction stunningly. The part
African, part Swedish, singer-songwriter composes
urban street music in the heart of the Swedish
countryside. She keeps her family close without
settling down in one place for too long. She loves to
don sexy underwear beneath her army pants. What she
thinks about her music easily applies to her life. "I
like not having a formula," Cherry says. "The whole
time it's like tossing coins - I'm a bit allergic to
the obvious".
And it's clear that when Chery 28, toses a coin, the
odds are in her favor. When she released her first
album in 1989 'Raw Like Sushi', and rocked the world
with Buffalo Stance, 2 million people antied up. When
she then took 3 years off, her fans waited. And now,
as she resurfaces with Homebrew - the year's
freshest fusion of hip hop, rap and dance music,
establishing her as a radiant pop star - people are
talking like she never missed a beat.
"I was completely milked out by the end of the last
album," says Cherry, who at the time had just given
birth to her 2nd daughter. "For this record to be
really, really worth listening to, it had to come in
its' own time. We had to absorb something before we
got going again." The we refers to her 8 year partner
in love and business, Cameron McVey (aka Booga Bear)
with whom she wote Homebrew.
Not that she was simply slacking off. During her
apparant hiatus, Cherry was traveling in Spain and
England, recording Cole Porter's "I've Got You Under
My Skin" for Red Hot & Blue, spending her time with
her daghters, Naima, 10, and Tyson, 3 1/2, moving her
family and some business enterprises from London to
Sweden devoting the better part of a year to
producing the new album with Booga Bear and Johnny
Dollar, and planting her very first vegetable patch.
Somewhere in there, Cherry and Booga Bear ("he picks
his nose a lot" she offers) even found time to stop at
a London Registry office to get married. "I felt it was
important to have the guts to admit to one another
that we wanted to make the commmittment," she says.
"I fond someone who was actually willing to see me
for what I was. Someone who recognied my weaknesses -
and that was freaky."
Recogniing her own srengths came early to Cherry.
Though she's still in touch with her natural father,
Sierra Leonen percussionist, Ahmadu Jah. She grew up
with her mother Moki, a Swedish artist, and her
stepfather, American Jaz trumpeter, Don Cherry,
shuttering between his musical gigs on the road and
their homes in New York and Sweden.
By age 13 she was soending entire nights hanging ot
in Manhattan clubs. Her fromal education ended a 15,
when Cherry went to London," turned myself into a
punk overnight," and began singing with a ragged
all-female outfit called the Slits.
She went on to join the punk-funk fusion group Rip
Rig & Panic and then its offshoot Float Up CP. At 18
she married Rip Rigdrummer Bruce Smith and gave birth
to Naima. Within 3 years they'd split up and she'd
begn a successful love and writing relationship with
McVey, which blossomed into Raw Like Sushi. "She's
the best songwriter I've ever worked with." says
McVey, 35. "She's a woman of her time, and I suppose
only a few of those exist in any generation."
What's evident on the new album is that the writing
cuts closer to the bone. Cherry vividly remembers
penning the lyrics to twisted (I think I cold give
myself up to you/ 'Cause you pushed our way through my
attitude) a song she considers her most
autibiographical. Before the move to Sweden, she
says, she was sitting in a shed near the house they'd
rented in the English country side. "I remember pacing
out in the field and talking into the Dictaphone when
I got stuck. It was so simple, what I was trying to
say, trying to describe the things that you're up
against when you just want to be naked with someone -
your paranoia, the feedback from the outside world."
And she has used her feelings about her children in
'Trout', which includes her plea for sex education.
"It's so demeaning when you see kids treated as
though they deserve the information they should have
to protect themselves and gain the knowledge they
need to be out in the world."
Since last spring Cherry has been living ("at least until it gets cold") where she started out, at the former schoolhouse her mother still owns in the Southern Swedish village of Hasteveda. Cherry describes the place as "very ragga, crusty like it grew out of the ground", and admits that this summer's paint job was the 1st in 20 years. She's set up a studio in one of the schoolrooms and plays with her girls before starting work. The influence of mother hood, she says, has been monumental." I knew it was going to be a life saving grace, a reason to be up and make the best of my days."
Though her routine sounds heavily earth-motherish, Cherry admits to a few extrvagances, "a bottle of champagne if I'm really splashing out and really nice underwear." Ans somehow the title of her song, "Move With Me" seems like an anthme for her lifestyle. Always traveling, always picking things up as she goes, adapting to the moment ("I hate to geat lies ahead") and using the tension of ransition creatively.
McVey affecctionately, refer s to his wife as "feminist slag". "She does more justice to the movement by the fact that she doesn't behvae in a traditional femist way," he says. "She's not Emily Dickinson". Maybe that's how she's able to go so effortlessly from smooth rapping to souulful crooning and back, or how she exudes sexuality, whether in army boots and baggies, or army boots and a skin tight mini. Or why she a moving parody. If you run into her, she'll be the sweet one in the corner, speaking loudly, and with plenty of attitude.
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