Love, Kiki: Can Her Testimony Keep Pace With Her Stardom?
Kierra “KiKi” Sheard’s “This Is Me” is vibrant with very fresh ideas and smartly devised echoes of things past. Of course, carrying the legacy of a Gospel legend (grandmother Mattie Moss Clark) on your back is a heavy responsibility. Perhaps as a result, KiKi can only be but so frank because a lot of careers are intertwined with hers, her own mother’s being not the least of which. To KiKi, I’m sure This Is Me was painful and difficult and risky and edgy. But it’s all shadows and I’ve got to assume a lot about what she’s referring to. There’s not a whole lot of risk here. It’s very planned and well executed. It seems like the future of the Moss dynasty indeed rests with this very young woman. The problem is, This Is Me sounds like she’s all too aware of it.
It’s
the eyes.
The beguiling wonder of a woman. Chambers behind locked doors
hiding secret wonders and pain so deep most men could never
understand. KiKi Sheard has soulful doe eyes that capture and
interrogate. It’s difficult to explain, this teenage girl stare:
partly defensive, partly curious. It’s a raw sexuality that
eclipses anything available at a strip club or adult film—those
eyes that convict us, that unmask us. Like she can read our
mind. She’s not quite old enough to know how to rein those
horses in, to temper that power with wisdom. Teens and young
adult women tend to just wander around unleashing hell, like
Superman’s Heat Vision, melting us indiscriminately because,
although they’ve been handed the keys to their life, they’re
still not quite potty trained. So they waddle about, breaking
hearts and making a mess. That look. Wondering. Convicting.
Inviting. At nineteen, I missed the whole point. Girls were just
a game to play and a contest to win. At 45, I recoil like a
vampire caught by the dawn, suddenly uncomfortable in my own
skin. It’s like she caught me looking at her. And she knows I
was looking at her. This look—it isn’t gratitude. It’s
introspection. It is, after a fashion, violence. Because pain is
a component of this look. Not pain I caused, but surely pain
some male, some boy, some man, caused. And, while an 8 year-old
will run to us with so many hugs and kisses, at age nineteen,
Kierra “KiKi” Sheard is lit with the warmth of promise and the
cool of caution.
That’s the look plastered all over her new album, “This Is Me,”
a CD I’ve hotly anticipated for months now. The look is
appropriate for the content of the album—a neo-soul grab-bag of
introspection and confession that succeeds on most levels.
I’m really happy that KiKi is doing much of the writing. I don’t
think it’s impossible for third-party writers to get inside an
artist’s head, but things are always that much more personal
when the artist gets involved herself. Sheard gets personal
here—nowhere near the nude self-evisceration of Tonéx’s Oak Park
92150, but this is certainly a work birthed from deep within a
famous offspring of a famous family. That fame, which began with
her grandmother, the late Dr. Mattie Moss Clark, is actually the
Moss Dynasty, perpetuated by Clark’s children, the legendary
Clark Sisters and their respective families. Key to this dynasty
is KiKi’s mother, Karen Clark-Sheard, who is herself poised to
join Yolanda Adams and Kirk Franklin in the every small pantheon
of Gospel artists whose artistry and fame transcends the music
genre.
Yolanda Adams can be racked anywhere in the music store, and
Clark-Sheard’s strong offerings with 2nd Chance and The Heavens
Are Telling had her nicely positioned to come alongside Adams
and Franklin. But Clark-Sheard stumbled with her current
release, It’s Not Over, where she feinted right, turning from
mega producers PaJam (urban gospel mega producer (and Clark-Sheard
cousin) J. Moss and PDA Allen) towards praise and worship flavor
of the moment Israel Houghton, who produced an album that
sounded much like Israel Houghton and New Breed featuring Karen
Clark-Sheard. The album also sports a puzzling and bizarre
choice of photos for Clark-Sheard, one of the most beautiful
women in Gospel music. She banished far more attractive photos
of herself to the CD booklet. The overall result is a fine album
that works just fine for the church folk crowd and should surely
please Christians everywhere. But it lacked the edge and the
vibrancy of Clark-Sheard’s more dynamic work, Houghton having
rounded the edges off and submerged Clark-Sheard in a cloud of
Houghton.
KiKi nearly makes the same mistake, here, relegating PaJam to a
single track while leaning heavily on “Uncle Freddie” Jerkins,
whom I assume is somehow related to Rodney Jerkins, perhaps the
most popular and powerful producer in urban music today. Uncle
Freddie doesn’t disappoint, but the overall feeling is vaguely
off, like watching Charlie Murphy on Chapelle’s Show: he reminds
us of the real thing, but something’s just a bit off, and
there’s the stink of coattail-riding.
Which isn’t to say the CD is bad—by no means. Debuting at #1 on
Billboard’s Gospel chart, This Is Me is certainly the hit we
expected it to be. With her mother’s Israel Houghton stumble,
KiKi now stands poised to overtake her mom by putting out a CD
that is simply good music, and better than most music out
there—Gospel or secular.
The CD is short. This owes, I suppose, to the current trend in
urban music to keep songs short—under four minutes, sometimes
under three. It’s possible that, in our Xbox and Nintendo 64
world, urban youth suffers from a severely short attention span.
Soon as you’re enjoying one song, it starts fading out a la
1965. The disc clocks in at a malnourished 60 minutes. The
Special edition disc offers five additional tracks and a live
session of the title track, but also accomplishes something I
doubt EMI intended: the “special edition” seems designed to
insult our intelligence by offering, essentially, a normal,
full-length CD at a premium price, while the “normal” CD doesn’t
come across as lean and focused (which it actually is) but,
because of the cheap “special edition” stunt, the normal CD
comes across more as an under-stocked rip-off. This is some
heinous marketing on EMI’s part. First they make no apparent
effort to reach new fans, then they follow up by insulting the
intelligence (and pocket books) of existing ones.
Regardless of whether Tonéx’s “retirement” actually sticks,
Kierra Sheard has unparalleled potential to become the dominate
voice in urban Gospel. Her youth and magnetism gives new voice
to the breezy familiarity of the Clark Sisters music many of us
older listeners grew up listening to. More important, there is
simply nobody else out there with quite the edge and the bite
KiKi Sheard has. Mary Mary and Virtue speak to an older audience
than KiKi. Kim Burrell has, for al practical intents,
disappeared at the height of her popularity.
Tye Tribbett traded in his own neo soul D’Angelo cool for the
broader silliness of Victory, his carnival follow-up to the very
promising and riveting Life; Tribbett’s soulful sensuality and
sober focus now transformed into an androgynous Tim Burton
Corpse Bride freak show which I am certain cost him credibility
among music purists even as it has apparently gained him a top
Billboard position. Kirk Franklin exists primarily on inertia
now, having run out of things to say long ago, and even normally
ignorant church folk are tiring of Kirk’s constantly getting in
his own way to the extent that it is largely impossible to use
Kirk’s music for worship purposes without invoking the
obnoxiously self-serving spirit of Kirk himself. And, as I
mentioned elsewhere, Karen Clark-Sheard, KiKi’s own mother,
seemed destined to dominate the Gospel industry but instead took
a right turn just before hitting the winner’s tape. I don’t just
think KiKi is about to become the dominate force in urban Gospel
just because she’s good, or cute, or the living embodiment of
Mattie Moss Clark. I’m sure of it simply because there’s no one
else there. It’s a simple numbers game.
Which makes EMI’s choices, here, even more bizarre, that nobody
at her record company apparently appreciates how important this
young woman is at the moment. My personal nitpicking
notwithstanding, this album is quite good. It seems even better
by comparison to the stale reheated leftovers we’ve been served
up lately by acts like Tribbett who’d demonstrated limitless
potential.
When Verity broke Out The Box, Tonéx’s groundbreaking
double-disc, they broke the album like a secular album. There
was a huge rack of them at Wal-Mart, with pockets from eye level
to the floor filled with copies of the fire engine-red CD cover.
This was what made me buy the thing. I figured, if the record
company is investing that much in this guy, maybe he’s worth a
listen. Wal-Mart had the $19.99 2-disc set on sale for about
$12.99, which made the CD—which Tonéx literally crammed with
nearly two and a half hours of music—well worth the money.
I therefore found it curious that This Is Me, the most hotly
anticipated urban Gospel CD of the year, arrived here in local
stores with absolutely no fanfare. No point-of-purchase display,
no posters. Certainly not the wall-o’-discs Tonéx enjoyed. This
Is Me was not on sale, another oddity as most new releases at
Wal-Mart arrive at $9.99 before assuming a $12-13 price point. I
could buy as much cussing, as much salacious booty shaking as I
wanted for $9.99 a pop, but for KiKi I had to pay $13.99. The
only real bargain was the Special edition version, which
Wal-Mart priced at $15.99, four bucks off it’s $19.99 MSRP. But
I had to dig for the disc to find it. Wal-Mart ordered, maybe, a
half dozen copies, and nobody—church folk included—seemed to be
terribly aware of this album or the implications for this bright
young artist.
All of which suggests EMI Gospel, KiKi’s label, either doesn’t fully appreciate what they have in Sheard or they’re just really bad at marketing. The entire point of Verity’s Tonéx push was to position him for crossover acceptance without crossover compromise, something Oak Park excels at (although, ironically, Tonéx is refusing to allow Verity to release it). This Is Me held the same promise, of inviting young people who’ve never even heard of Kierra Sheard to sample This Is Me based solely on the fact there’s a huge stack of them near the cash register. I’m going to assume Verity made Out The Box returnable and overshipped the CD for this precise purpose: to create buzz by sheer volume. This Is Me is such a good album that it transcends musical genres and cultural barriers. If you like neo-soul and hip-hop, you will like this album—perhaps in spite of the album’s Christian message.
