from The Root
The Fantasia/Jennifer Hudson duet is not just a catfight on wax. It's part of a long tradition of soul singers venting about their man.
Woman to Woman:
How R&B singers have used soul music to vent about troubles in the black family
by Mark Anthony Neal
“I’m His Only Woman,” Jennifer Hudson’s duet with her fellow American Idol alumna Fantasia, is enjoying heavy rotation on black radio. On the extended version on Hudson’s self-titled debut album, the song opens with Fantasia phoning Jennifer to talk “woman to woman” about the man whom they share.
Fantasia: … I’m calling right now to formally introduce myself. My name is Fantasia …
JHud: Did you just say introduce yourself?
Fantasia: Yeah…
JHud: Well, I don’t need no introduction. I am his woman, and I am Jennifer Hudson. If this was 10 years ago, I’d be at your front door ready to whoop your ass. But you know what? I’m too grown for that. I ain’t got nothing else to say.
What looks like a classic catfight on wax is actually another example of how soul music continues to tell the social temperature of black America. Just as black women’s fiction in the late 1990s in the Terry McMillan vein gave voice to a post-civil rights era of the successful black professional woman, soul music continues to express our anxieties about the state of the black family. In recent years, songs such as Destiny Child’s “Independent Woman” and “Bills, Bills, Bills,” and Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” have only heightened tensions.
With large numbers of black men continuing to drop out of mainstream life due to drug addiction, incarceration and the general feeling that they couldn’t be the “man of the household” without a job, it shouldn’t be surprising that the pressures black women feel to share available black men would show up in pop culture. These could be real-life issues for Fantasia—the single mom who against all odds became an American Idol—and Hudson—whose hardscrabble come-up from Chicago’s South Side took a tragic turn late last year.
The black women’s blues tradition of the early 20th century is filled with examples of women openly challenging each other about the men in their lives, and you really don’t have to look that far back in time for recent examples of female R&B singers drawing battle lines in song over some man, with Monica and Brandy’s “The Boy is Mine” perhaps being the most popular. But “I’m His Only Woman” is really a throwback to an earlier time.
Fantasia: … I’m calling right now to formally introduce myself. My name is Fantasia …
JHud: Did you just say introduce yourself?
Fantasia: Yeah…
JHud: Well, I don’t need no introduction. I am his woman, and I am Jennifer Hudson. If this was 10 years ago, I’d be at your front door ready to whoop your ass. But you know what? I’m too grown for that. I ain’t got nothing else to say.
What looks like a classic catfight on wax is actually another example of how soul music continues to tell the social temperature of black America. Just as black women’s fiction in the late 1990s in the Terry McMillan vein gave voice to a post-civil rights era of the successful black professional woman, soul music continues to express our anxieties about the state of the black family. In recent years, songs such as Destiny Child’s “Independent Woman” and “Bills, Bills, Bills,” and Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” have only heightened tensions.
With large numbers of black men continuing to drop out of mainstream life due to drug addiction, incarceration and the general feeling that they couldn’t be the “man of the household” without a job, it shouldn’t be surprising that the pressures black women feel to share available black men would show up in pop culture. These could be real-life issues for Fantasia—the single mom who against all odds became an American Idol—and Hudson—whose hardscrabble come-up from Chicago’s South Side took a tragic turn late last year.
The black women’s blues tradition of the early 20th century is filled with examples of women openly challenging each other about the men in their lives, and you really don’t have to look that far back in time for recent examples of female R&B singers drawing battle lines in song over some man, with Monica and Brandy’s “The Boy is Mine” perhaps being the most popular. But “I’m His Only Woman” is really a throwback to an earlier time.
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