Macy Gray - "The Sellout"

Aided by flourishes of funk guitar, drum machines and tambourine, the second song on Macy Gray's inappropriately titled second album The Sellout creates two simultaneous flashbacks. The first place it sends you is your teenaged bedroom in New York in 1979 listening to Paco's show on WKTU on your second-hand stereo with your eyes closed and the track-lighting in your room turning into mirror balls. Well it does if that was part of your life. The second place is one that is a bit more recent but one which still seems far away: the summer of 1999. That summer sounded like Macy Gray and I really don't care how much the cool kids rolled their eyes or how overplayed it was ... you just couldn't help being knocked cold by ‘I Try’. I found myself happy just hearing it when ABC used it in promos for their sitcoms. Every time I'd hear a bit of it, ‘I Try’made me want to play the CD.

On How Life Is was monumental to me. I loved Macy's gravelly voice. It was a real voice at a time when pop stars started seeming to meld into a homogenous mix. Macy doesn't sound like anyone else. And while there are plenty of stars of the past who have distinctive voices, and plenty of unsung heroes of mine in modern times who would never be mistaken for another, I lost all patience with Top 40 radio when every voice started blending in together. But here was a complete original who was all over the radio. You couldn't escape ‘I Try’ and I didn't want to. But I was also struck by the places she was willing to go. ‘Still’ shocked me. The vocal was desperate and vulnerable, the tune driving and powerful, the subject matter nearly unbearable: "In my last years with him, there were bruises on my face" she starts with sadness and before the drums kick in, she defiantly sings "I'm going back to stay." The blunt honesty of it couldn't be found anywhere else on the pop charts. ‘The Letter’ was the happiest suicide note ever recorded.

I stayed loyal through the next three albums and the rewards started off pretty great. The Id contributed the zany rush of ‘Oblivion’ and the ecstatic ‘Freak Like Me’. And then there were a couple of other albums. I bought them. I listened to them more than once. I can't name a single song or hum a tune off of either.

This seemed impossible coming from someone who seemed like the next great diva. It also seemed like the most depressing illustration of the Peter Principle ever witnessed. According to some of the press material floating around for The Sellout, the title is meant to be an inside joke. So desperate for a hit, Macy started off trying everything she could to make this album sound like everything else on the charts only to turn around when she realized she couldn't put herself second to the hit-making machine. And yet, this album sounds like something that should only be heard on AM. It's timeless and comforting and joyful in a way that Gray hasn't been for a while, whether she believes that or not. So why does this kick so much ass? Maybe it's that thing that happens where everyone tells you you're through so you come back and find your best from the deepest part of your gut. Meet Macy Gray, the Andre Agassi of R&B. Which brings me back to ‘Lately’ and also the lyric that makes me giddy every time I hear it. The song is about a woman trying to coax a wronged love back into a relationship:

Lately, I've been comin' up
Just like a palm tree
You should come back to me.
I'm popular!
They say I'm pretty!
You should come back to me.

Now, I could go as far as to say this could also be a metaphor for Macy and her audience. But she actually faces them head on. The first song on the album is called ‘The Sellout’ with lyrics about being willing to do anything to hold on to an audience, and the last song is called ‘The Comeback’ but seriously, we didn't need those bookends. The songs in between are so good that they may even top the masterworks on On How Life Is. When the material is so solid, there's really no reason pointing out your recent pratfalls. She should listen to the immortal words of James Todd Smith: "Don't call it a comeback!" (For this reason, I'm deducting a Hellbomb from what would otherwise be a 10-Hellbomb review.)

But, you know, it's a comeback. And luckily Macy moves away from inside-baseball talk for most of the rest of the album to get back to what's important in a pop song: Totally fucked-up romance. From song to song, she's either apologizing for an infidelity, or dumping one man for the next one she met in a library or a museum, or taking back someone who treats her cruelly, or nursing a broken heart. Occasionally she’s in the middle of a wonderful romance too, but mostly this is the type of stuff that helps in those moments when you’re nursing a broken heart while laying on the bed with headphones on. ‘Still Hurts’ hurts with that smoky voice performing gorgeously with the whole works: the strings, the organ, the weeping background singers, the ambrosiac wall-of-sound as she sings "You ain't coming back like I want you to, but baby there's no getting over you." And only Macy Gray would write a song that is so classically tender and put her stamp on it with "I wish I had the nuts to ask you for another chance."

And only Macy Gray could put together something like ‘Beauty in the World’. Almost a kid's song, it's about looking at our cruel divisive times and getting through them by concentrating on butterflies and flowers. Really, it is. And that might be enough to make me roll my eyes with those cool kids that I'd mentioned earlier but with infectious grace and joy. Macy and her collaborators make the whole thing sound like sunshine wrapped in joy wrapped in candy. Hey, The Beatles had ‘All You Need is Love’. And yes, I just compared Macy Gray to The Beatles. Also, the sugar goes down a lot easier when sharing space with songs with names like ‘Let You Win’ and ‘The Stalker.’

There is some gimmickry. Slash guest stars on ‘Kissed It’ along with Velvet Revolver. While that could be considered a cynical play for rock radio - it's so much fun that those fears go out the window. It's perfectly trashy and there's a lot of irresistible trashiness to spare in a short span of time. ‘That Man’ is a beaut. If ‘Lately’ is homage to the disco era, ‘That Man’ feels like it could have been played on Hullaballoo accompanied by day-glo mini-skirted go-go dancers. (At one point, the bounciness starts to sound so much like the 60s that the background singers end up singing "THAT MAN!" in the style of the Batman TV theme.) And she can still plant silly sexy joy ("He's my brand new Mercedes/ He's my piece of pie/ He's my own very personal Jesus Christ") into the real world:

I said "He stole my heart and he's killing me softly"
"He stole my heart and he's killing me softly"
She said "OH! If he's stealing and killing he must be a “black” man!"

Even more fun is the duet with Bobby Brown; fun because of the faux flirty phone conversation that opens the song. And fun because it's so typical of Gray - the song is written and arranged as a song to make love to. But the bedroom voices sing the craziest seduction lyrics ever written:

Baby I will kiss you even when you have the flu
I'll be good to you when you're bad
Love you love you baby
Lay you down and save you
I'm your superhero, I'm a fan.
(Classic Bobby voice echoing: "I'M A FAN!")

Every song takes you into classic pop territory - in turns heartbreaking and funny. Credit must be given to Manny Marroquin who goes from one pop genre to the next getting every bit exactly pitch perfect. And credit must all go to Concord Records who released the album after Geffen allegedly dropped Gray and turned down the album with the statement "I don't know how to get a 40-year-old woman on the radio. If she was 20, 25, this record would be incredible." (This quote coming from Macy in a recent blog entry she made to The Huffington Post.) It would have been a shame to let this record sit on a shelf.