April 26, 2022 1:04 pm
There are albums that have had the misfortune of coming out too soon. The pendulum vibe singer, rapper and songwriter Joi is one of them. Joi Elaine Gilliam was born in 1971 in Tennessee, her father was American football player Joseph Wiley Gilliam Jr. and in the early nineties she joined the Atlanta hip hop collective The Dungeon Family. Over the decades since that collective have passed key artists of the soul, funk and hip hop scene of the southern United States such as OutKast, Cee Lo Green, Janelle Monáe and Bubba Sparxxx. And Joi started right in the OutKast crew.
In 1994 Joi released her debut album, The pendulum vibeentirely produced and written together with Dallas Austin, then a young and promising producer from Columbus, Georgia, who in those months was also working on the debut of the girl group that would revolutionize pop music of that decade: Tlc.
At the beginning of the nineties hip hop, rap and r & b were in a phase of profound evolution: they were increasingly hybridizing with each other and more and more often they proved capable of breaking the barrier of mainstream pop. In 1994 two other important albums were released: CrazySexyCool of the Tlc e My life by Mary J. Blige: the former is an irresistible fusion of hip hop and radio pop and the latter, masterfully produced by Sean “Puffy” Combs (Puff Daddy), combines hip hop with the noblest and bloodthirsty tradition of soul. It is precisely in that year that hip hop becomes, without the possibility of returning, the connective tissue of a large part of contemporary pop music.
1994 is also fundamental for another reason, more tangential but no less important: it is the first time that the term “afrofuturism” appears in the US academic world. The critic Mark Dery, in an interview with him entitled Black to the futurehe coined this term and defined it: “speculative literature that deals with Afro-American themes and interests, bringing them back to the context of the technocentric culture of the twentieth century”.
The pendulum vibeJoi’s debut album, all recorded live in just three weeks, is affected by all these upheavals and evolutions, and is a very modern album on the present and the future seen from the point of view of a young black woman. The pendulum vibe it is less pop than CrazySexyCool and less soulful than My life; is more related to the hippy and psychedelic hip hop of bands like De La Soul and Arrested Development (also from Atlanta), is full of funk and psychedelia and anticipates what in a few months would be called neo soulo nu soul. Joi arrived well in advance of the artists considered to be founders of the genre such as Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, Maxwell and above all Jill Scott, whose extraordinary debut of her, Who is Jill Scott? (2000) owes much to the sounds and aesthetics of The pendulum vibe.
The album starts with an invocation and a chorus (“We will not bow to racism, we will not bow to injustice, we will not bow to exploitation … I will remain standing”) that explodes in Freedom, a piece that mixes gospel and funk and talks about sisterhood and liberation. Joi turns to her sisters and sings: “We will take our freedom: freedom for my body, freedom for my head, freedom for my spirit.” Freedom it does not even come out as a radio single but, the following year, it was chosen by director Mario Van Peebles as the soundtrack of the film Panther, dedicated to the history and struggles of the Black Panther movement. The song, re-sung by a cast of 90s R&B stars including Aaliyah, Mary J. Blige, En Vogue, Queen Latifah, Monica and Me’Shell NdegéOcello, has a good success, while the extraordinary album from which it was taken slowly ends up in oblivion.
Nevertheless The pendulum vibe is a vibrant and unique work in the musical panorama of the early nineties: in the premises it is a classic rhythm’n’blues album but then, according to the spirit of improvisation typical of southern hip hop, it takes other, unpredictable paths: the sound it’s still not as glossy and combed as in the better known Dallas Austin productions, and while full of detail, it still has something urgent and dirty about it. The only single that has had a certain echo is Sunshine & the raina piece with one foot in the acid jazz of the early nineties and the other in a utopian afrofuturo in which technology and spirituality mix. Sunshine & the rain it is a mantra that is repeated, like a spell, on a memorable groove (try to stay still by listening to it): “I need a push that catapults me up, the exit is too narrow and takes my breath away and my life … “. The theme of the album is the research and conquest of one’s own voice and uniqueness (I found my niche“I found my niche”) and of one’s own identity, even sexual: in Narcissa cutie pie Joi sings about the beauty and sensuality of an erotic experience with another woman. Sexual experimentation today is a fairly obvious theme thanks to artists like Rza or Janelle Monáe, but it wasn’t exactly common in R&B of those years. In Fatal lovesick journeyanother piece with different shades of funk and jazz, Joi exudes a surprising confidence in herself and in her own sexuality in a 22-year-old debut performer.
The pendulum vibe it has no success when it comes out: the critics and the R&B community notice Joi but not the public and the radios. Surely Madonna notices that, after having listened to the album, she wants to meet her and decides to be produced by Dallas Austin. Herself, promoting her album Bedtime stories says of Joi: “I wanted to know who this girl was. What is this music? How did it come out? “. Songs like Survival, Secret e Don’t stop they are indisputably Madonnesque but are affected by the sound and aesthetics of The pendulum vibe.
Like all true innovators Joi came too early and was not understood by the public: her second album, Amoeba cleansing syndrome, also produced by Dallas Austin, never came out and only circulated as a pirate recording. In 2002 he finally released his second solo album, Star Kitty’s revengeand his piece on the joys of oral sex (Lickwith rapper Sleepy Brown) has some success thanks to the action movie soundtrack XXX with Vin Diesel. To this day Joi is not a superstar but she is a respected name in the American soul and r & b scene: she recently re-sang her in full The pendulum vibe in a packed hall in Atlanta and from that performance a docufilm was made with the title 20 years of Joi.
Joi
The pendulum vibe
Capitol, 1994