For Your Consideration: Keyshia Cole

from Critical Noir @ Vibe

Waiting for Keyshia
by Mark Anthony Neal

The lack of experience by producers and vocalists often adds to the dissonance that resonates in the vocal quality of figures like Mary J. Blige or Faith Evans, who have become easy targets for a generation that is regularly thought to be out of tune—musically, morally, and politically—with the Soul singers of the 1960s and 1970s. But I’d like to suggest that such dissonance is not simply the product of a generation of singers who are out of pitch—and lacking the training to know so—but a response to the ways that post-Civil Rights generations hear the world. The nostalgic harmonies of the Civil Rights Generation (and their parents, many of whom are in the 80s) strikes discord in the lives of post-Civil Rights generations, notably Generation Hip-Hop, which have never had a tangible relationship to concepts such as “freedom” and “liberation” that some in the old guard presumed was transferable. Issues like the crack cocaine epidemic, the prison industrial complex, police brutality, voter disenfranchisement (largely based on race and class), depressed wages, lack of access to quality and affordable healthcare, misogyny, the failing infrastructure of public schooling, homophobia, as well as a populism of common sense (which by definition is stridently conservative and anti-intellectual), have often left post-Civil Rights generations grasping for straws, much the way Keyshia Cole—who I offer for your consideration—seems to frantically grasp for notes in virtually every song that she sings.

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