Neneh Cherry wants a new home. For a while she thought about moving to SPAIN. Now she's enthusiastic about New York. So for most of this December morning, Cherry and husband Cameron McVey have been apartment hunting in Parl Slope, a Booklyn neigborhood that adds a multiracial balance to suburban comfort. This search makes her more than a half hour late for our meeting in midtown Manhattan.
Her voice arrives before her body. "Beat me! Beat me!" Cherry shouts from the hallway of the Virgin Records office. "I'm so sorry." The apology sounds extreme, but its offered playfully; it typifies the macho values she mixes with traditional feminism.
Her family, which also includes daughters Naima, 10,and Tyson, four, currently resides in London. "England was a good place to get started," Cherry says removing a long Azzedine Alaia sheepskin coat and sitting on a green leather sofa. Because the country's only pop roadio station plays all different types of music, she explains, "people from different cultures and communities have to deal with each other. The influence of reggae and soul is a lot more integrated there." Then, as if to certify her empending status as a New Yorker, she orders a pastrami sandwich.
The principle of integration - musical and cultural - has defined her 28 tumultous years. It began witha childhood f itinerate intellectualism, herded by three artists parents of two races, and now has culminated in a bold, trendsetting pop career.

Cherry is a poster girl for postmodernism, a model of multiculturalism, and her music has more colors than a Bennetton catalog. "I'm just naturally drawn to mixing and matching things because I was neither one nor the other," she explains in a voice that tilts upward for British inflections, especially when she says "d'ya know what I mean?"
After Raw Like Sushi, her debut that included the breakthrough dance-pop hit "Buffalo Stance", Cherry was typcast as a sexy working mom. On the cover of her recnt second album, Homebrew (Virgin), she pokes funat that image by posing glamourously while leaning on an empty baby carriage. "It was more like a pisstake", she chuckle. "Like, I don't know where the kids have gone."
Hmebrew is a potent brew of hip-hop attitude and soul balladry, intoducing sensuous bass lines and jazzy piano to ough beats, gracefully blurring the line between rapping and singing. Cherry decries materialism on the crackling "Money Love", and on "Ain't Gone Under Yet, she adopts the voice of a troubled but determined woman who won't leave the ghetto, because "the city has soul and that's what I'm about." Guest stars are wisely deployed: Cherry duets with R.E.M.s Michael Stipe on "Trout", a plead for sex education in schools, built out of hard rock samples from Led Zepplin and Steppenwolf; on Sassy, Guru of the rap group Gang Starr delivers a paean to Cherry's brain and independence.

More itinerant than an Army brat, Cherry was raised as a jazz brat by Moki Cherry, a Swedish painter and esinger, and her stepfather Don Cherry, brilliant avant-garde trumpeter. "It was a wonderful life " recalls Don, whose own musical daring has brought him onstage with everyone from Jazz visionary Ornette Coleman to punk godfather Lou Reed. "Neneh's always been around museums and painters." During out half hour phone interview, he retraces a facinating family life of global bohemianism, a quintessential late-sixties adventure: He and Moki would load Neneh and her younger brother into a van and travel like Renassance minstrels.
"Organic music theratre, we called it," he says. Moki created their clothes and made back drops from tapestries, paint and whatever object could be recycyled. ("She was always ahead of her time" Neneh says proudly) They circles Sweden, went to Paris, lived in New York, and visited Istanbul at the invitation of James Baldwin, who asked Don to compose music for the play Fortune and Men's Eyes. "It was very secure and steady," says Neneh. "There were alwasy other people around, and we'd gets lots of attention."
In 1970, when Don and Moki decided the kids should be in school, they settled in Targap, Sweden. "Me and my brother were the only two black kids," Neneh recalls. "We uniformed into the system just to protect ourselves. I adapted myself to wherever I went". She laughs when recalling some of the trendy outfits she wore ("Diana Ross to the max, with the flaked - out strainghtened hair, blue Polo, and purple lips") to fit into the local styles. "Adapting doesn't mean that you're that your're denying yourself. It's like going undercover, to protect a little flame. I don't feel confused about what I am - I definately see myself as a black woman. nd that confidence has made it possible to live in these different places."
In 1979 she travled through Africa with her father, Ahmadu Jah, a bandleader from Sierra Leone who had split up with Moki soon after Neneh was born. "The spirit of Africa was so powerful," Neneh marvels, "so strong and natural, so alive. Lagos makes New York look like Pittsburgh. That was a big turnaround in my life." "When she came back," notes Don, "she had really matured."

Neneh left school, moved to London, and hooked up with the city's fetile art and fashion crows. She sang with the Slits, an abrasive punk / reggae battal championed by the Sex Pistols, then joined Rip, Rig & Panic and Foat Up Cp, two daring art-funk groups she calls "a bit mad". (Their records were never released in the United States). She was also raped, which she'd kept a secret, even from her mother, until last year.

"I was determined it wasn;t going to destroy me," she explains clmly. "It was just 'Ok, this is not what sex is about. It's a complete violation of my body and brain, but I've got to move on'. The worst thing is, it makes some women feel ugly and disgusting. They feel somehow it was thier fault. I've talked about it quite a lot with good friends - that's just a way of spitting ittle bits of it out. I talk about it," she says, chuckling, "whether somene wants to hear it or not." Still, no stoic determination could deny the psychological impact of rape. "I immediatel became lovesick, and wnated protection and a shield." She married Bruce Smith, a drummer for Rip Rig & Panic and had her first daughter at 18. Three years later they split, and she soon met McVey.

Asked if she now regrtes naming her younger daughter after Mike Tyson, the boxer who was convicted of rape last year, Cherry responds rore the question has been completed. "No, I'm not the jury that sat through the court case. There was as much evidence pointing at William Kennedy Smith's being guilty."

Maybe, but the argument doesn't reduce the incriminating evidence against Tyson. "Of coure," she agrees. "I'm not going to sat it doesn't matter. But he also achieved something great as a fighter. And when I look at my kid, I'm goning to remember his strength ans spirit."

THose are the same qualties Cherry admires in rap, a music form se says has "a great many poets who ae saying brilliant things." Nor does rap's common depiction of women as materiaistic 'ho's" spoil her taste for the music. "Maybe there's something wrong with me, but if someone goes 'ho' on a record, I don't think, I've got to take it off. It's down to us women to help them change their opinions. I've had guys come up to me and go, 'Yo baby, you're the baddest thing I've ever seen.' And I've ended up being really good friends with them. Som guys think that's how they have to deal with women. There's a lot of nervousness and awkwardness in making contact with the opposite sex - the flirtations, the sexual intrigue. God forbid if that ever went away."

THe ironic thing, looking at Cherry's career, is that rock 'n' roll may be the ideal job for a working mother. She and McVey (credited on the album as "Booga Bear") coproduced Homebrew with Johnny Dollar at a studio built into their London home. "A woman has a right to work and enjoy herself and be comlplete. I've gotten a lot more stuff done as a mother because you have to think ahead and be very structued. I'm lucky - I can write at home, and I can afford a permanent baby sitter who travels with us. It makes it possible for me to know that the kids are cool."

Cherry wil start her first tour this year - shows to promote Raw Like Sushi were canceled after she contracted Lyme disease - and she trying to decide whether to take Naima and Tyson on the road. "Touring is pretty tedious; on and off buses, in and out of hotels. Also, it'd be hard for me to be with the kids in the way I would like to, beasue there's always interviews that have to be done. I wouldn't be able to set things up in the same way my mom did when we were out there.

"At the same stime," she reconsiders, "I don't want to be away from the kids for weeks and weeks. Because it's not healthy for either of us. Especially me."

Amid the demandsof motherhood, she has manged to forge a distinctpersonal style that reflects her muticutural outlook. Consider the two designers she thanks in the credits to Homebrew - Alaia and Shawn Stussy. "Two extremes," she ackwoledges. Today, under her Alaia coat, she's wearing an oversize blue and white Stussy work shirt, black leggings, and sturdy work boots, with two silver earings in each lobe

"THere is this contradiction or integrtion in the look," she continues, "the classic with the hardcore. It's also what the music is about. Stussy's very street based : It's classic American, kinda lumberjack, but with a nineties edge. Alaia just kinda gives me these things, but we just try and use them in a way that fits with what I am - slick but crusty. D'ya know what I mean?".