The rollout and presentation of Teyana Taylor’s latest album was all wrong. This was her third and final project for G.O.O.D. Music and supposedly her big farewell to the music industry altogether. But she released The Album at the worst possible time, societally speaking — this was June 2020, when Trump and Fauci were still uncomfortably together on TV every other afternoon making the White House Coronavirus Task Force look like end-stage Roc-A-Fella Records — and you can’t fault Taylor for that, of course, but then she also went and said some hotheaded shit on Instagram about social distancing guidelines in response to criticism of her listening party. And you know how that goes.
As for the album itself, Taylor put this thing together like a ransom note for some reason. It’s sorted into five parts, each a lettered “studio,” e.g., “Studio A,” all of them in sequence spelling out “ALBUM.” Girl, what! Are we listening to Prince?! This and so many other crèativè dècisións on The Album, yes, including calling it The Album, seemed just a little too convoluted and pretentious for an otherwise straightforward work of ringtone throwback R&B. I’m surprised Grace Jones didn’t turn up in Time Out with one of her devastating rebukes.
It’s a shame, too, because musically The Album is more impressive than I’d expected. The reviews were good, and the streams were popping, but I don’t know — well-meaning people made this thing out to be a sort of conscientious art heaux slog and also a solemn commemoration of Juneteenth rather than an album with homegirl singing, on a track called “Shoot It Up,” IIIII-II-III CAN’T BEEE with another NI-I-I-IGGAAAAAA, in all seriousness, with her guest, Big Sean, presumably standing in some far-off corner of “Studio B” and nervously chugging a liter of water. Hark! Behold! Teyana Taylor was restoring the feeling! The Album is admittedly very Old Millennial, in several parts an homage to 2000s R&B in various forms but chiefly Bad Boy. It’s easy to read praise from the target demo for this sort of thing as the sign of a succesful nostalgia con and not necessarily an indication of an effective album on other merits. But The Album deserves a bit more credit than that. The music is (I’d still insist) pretty straightforward but it’s also very nicely detailed.
Mainly The Album got me thinking about the mix-and-match quality of so many star-studded projects. I know I opened this newsletter with jokes about the nominal structure, but it turns out Taylor does more or less get what she’s going for conceptually: a project where guests really do sound like guests in the breakout rooms of some larger outlook. With “Boomin,” for instance, Taylor fashions a potentially ill-advised novelty pairing of Missy and Future into a collaboration so seamless and effective that I’m surprised no one else thought to put them in a studio together sooner. Taylor even manages to make Quavo — Quavo! — sound a bit more capably grown-n-sexy than he’s typically able to pull off on slower songs. I hate to say that the one plug-n-play collaboration on this thing that simply doesn’t work is “Come Back to Me,” with my main man otherwise, Rick Ross, rehashing fragments from 20 other guest verses he’s laid as far back as DJ Khaled still going by Beat Novacane. Her mans in a Gallardo! Go home, William! That’s the first full song on the album, too, so it’s a rather unfortunate blunder for your girl.
And that’s all setting aside the fact of the solo songs being the (even) better stuff on the album — sorry, The Album.
Some prefer Taylor’s previous album, K.T.S.E., for its brevity and potency. That was yet another case of an album succumbing to its own rollout in the ill-fated G.O.O.D. Music Wyoming campaign that famously culminated with my quitting Twitter. “3 Way” is still Taylor’s best song, but I could take or leave some of the soul sample stuff on K.T.S.E.; I’m just not a huge fan of “Rose In Harlem.” I prefer The Album for its tantric commitment to its own guests and its own influences. (God, remember when Puffy in the late 2000s wouldn’t shut the fuck up about tantric sex?)
I thought to revisit The Album in light of Taylor’s recently starring in the hard-knocks family drama, A Thousand and One, in a performance that my friend Alison Willmore, film critic at New York, praises pretty highly. I haven’t yet watched A Thousand and One, but of course I’m familiar with the earlier theatrical works of Teyana Taylor. Surely you’ll recall her leaping over gym equipment, showering sexily (that’s right) with her then-fiancé Iman Shumpert, and ultimately making literal her transformation into Catwoman in Kanye’s music video for “Fade.”
This woman had just given birth eight months earlier! She swears by the power of dance! She’s the Let’s Move! initiative we needed but never sufficiently funded under Obama.
A couple years ago, Taylor told Cam Newton she was “underappreciated” by G.O.O.D. Music. This is a tricky subject. Ye ran her ragged, for sure. The label made her seem small, putting her last in line in Wyoming — behind Nas! who wasn’t even signed to G.O.O.D. Music! — even as her ambitions swelled to the size of The Album. But I also get the sense that Teyana Taylor is a tough sell to a lot of people regardless of her rollouts. She’s a variously, genuinely talented woman who works herself in circles around the fact that, in the context of R&B, she’s not a straight-up hit-maker but she’s also not quite rightly regarded as an artístè. She’s great! But she was aimless. The Album, with its mixed messages, was never going to clarify that ambiguity of expectations, and it’s unclear to me which path she’d have personally preferred. Perhaps Alison is right, and this will all prove moot soon enough, as we watch Teyana Taylor take the Oscar. By the power of cínëm̃á!