CRYSTAL WATERS
NATURAL THING
Although the dance-music boom (aka the disco revival) of the late 80s and early 90s is over, dance music is alive and well. Artists with commanding voices are releasing diverse and often superb full-length CDs, and several labels have taken to smartly packaging compilations of current club singles. Finally dance music has taken root, nourished by the fertile ground of cultural and technological change. This is no small feat; for almost two decades dance music survived as a club-based singles music with very little help from its friends. Major-label support was scant or misguided. The few critics who followed the scene seemed more interested in career advancement than in the music itself. Producers stuck to a limited set of styles. And dance-music partisans rarely provided adequate rebuttal to charges that the music was aimed at their feet, and not their minds.
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But the millions attracted to this music are not mindless. The dance constituency is predominantly comprised of minorities, women, and gays, groups that don’t buy into rock’s promised-land-is-full-of-backstreets ethos. These folks sought their pop transcendence from those moments on the dance floor when the beat of the music and the beat of the heart are in sync. In these instances the song and the music become pure emotion, and the perils inherent in being “the other” fade into the distance. This shared catharsis is at the core of dance music. Where rock–the music of marginalized and futureless youth–traffics in anger, dance music, an anthem of people just as disenfranchised, advocates shared faith as empowerment.
Waters’s release is the best of the three; it fulfills the promise shown in her 1991 hit “Gypsy Woman.” Waters has the driest, grainiest voice of any pop singer since Stevie Nicks, and she puts it in the service of her own complex and often topical lyrics. No silly love songs here. These attributes ignite when combined with the eclectic sensibilities of her producers, the Basement Boys. The songs range from jazz-fusion (“Is It for Me”) to 60s soul (“I Believe I Love You”) to hip-hop-inflected alternative soul (“Ghetto Day”), with a smattering of house tracks thrown in for good measure. Waters’s jazz phrasing and understated inflections provide a dynamic alternative to the conventional approaches.
