Meshell Ndegeocello

Ndegeocello, Meshell [Johnson, Michelle Lynn; Bashir-Shakur, Meshell Suhaila] (b Berlin, Germany, 1968). Electric bassist, singer, and songwriter. As a teenager she changed her name to Ndegeocello (“free as a bird” in Swahili), the spelling of which has shifted over the years. Since 1997 she has also called herself Meshell Suhaila BashirShakur, a reference to her (professedly unconventional) affiliation with Islam. Raised in Washington, DC, she attended arts schools, debuted at 17 as a jazz bassist, and cut her teeth in the local go-go scene. A jazz history major at Howard University, she dropped out to have a son, and was among the first musicians to sign with Maverick. Ndegeocello refuses most identity categories, but describes herself as “a female Homo sapien . . . sexually functional with both sexes” and black. Traversing genre, her music draws from soul, R&B, funk, hip hop, jazz, go-go, dub, and rock. Plantation Lullabies (1993, Maverick), a self-produced album featuring Ndegeocello on most instruments, garnered attention across the United States and Europe, contributing to the soul revival with a politically conscious musical examination of African American history and contemporary politics. Recorded with a full band, Peace Beyond Passion (1996, Maverick), bravely critiqued homophobia in the black Christian community while developing her signature sensual, spiritual, funky musicality. In 1999 she released Bitter, an intimate, jazz-influenced album that garnered critical acclaim but proved a commercial disappointment and signaled growing problems with Maverick, which considered her music “not black enough.” As a response she released Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape (2002, Maverick), which intersperses clips of famous black activists (often Marxists) with “go-go” spoken word and song, set to black and Latino dance beats. Comfort Woman (2003, Maverick) fulfilled her contract. She subsequently formed the Spirit Music Jamia (an Arabic word for gathering or school), an instrumental jazz fusion sextet with a DJ with which she released The Spirit Music Jamia: Dance of the Infidel (2005, Shanachie). Following albums, The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams (2007, Decca) and Devil’s Halo (2009, Mercer Street), contend with decades of strife over musical and personal identity through philosophical, stylistically shifting music. Weather (2011, Naïve) hearkens back to Bitter’s acoustic intimacy and zen-like sparseness. Pour une âme souveraine: a dedication to Nina Simone (Naïve 2012) makes material Ndegeocello’s connections to the late “High Priestess of Soul”. As of 2011 Ndegeocello had been nominated for ten Grammy Awards. Bibliography L. Burns and M. Lafrance: Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity and Popular Music (New York, 2001), 133–67 M. Mockus: “MeShell Ndegéocello: Musical Articulations of Black Feminism,” Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom, ed. C.D. Acampora and A.L. Cotton (Albany, NY, 2007), 81–102 S. Goldin-Perschbacher: Sexuality, Listening, and Intimacy: Gender Transgression in Popular Music, 1993–2008 (diss., U. of Virginia, 2008), 60–102 Shana Goldin-Perschbacher