The Philadelphia singer Jazmine Sullivan is such a singular artist there's an easy temptation to contrast her latest album, Reality Show, with everything else—to define her work by its negatives, by the paths it avoids rather than those it follows. For example: No one will look to this album's sonic signatures to discover the texture of R&B's future. But if it's more difficult to speak to what Sullivan does, that's our failure, an inability to recognize R&B as a discrete, heterogeneous genre. Because more than any artist, Sullivan encapsulates the breadth of R&B's emotional range not by riding the margins, but from a proud position at its center. Every maneuver can appeal to about as wide a range of R&B fans as exist, in 2015—aside from those looking exclusively for something "different." They'll have to deal with something exceptional instead.
"It's almost impossible to break as an African-American woman right now without TV," R&B singer and reality TV star K. Michelle said about the harsh economic realities of being a performer to Fader magazine late last year. "Reality TV put eyes on me—but it makes it difficult when it comes to Grammy nominations." Sullivan has built a strong fanbase without a show and despite this catch-22. Of course its hard to imagine a performer of her talent wouldn't be more widely celebrated in any other era. But though R&B's commercial fortunes dropped precipitously over the past decade, Sullivan's creative success and consistency over the course of three albums (she released the equally accomplished Fearless in 2008 and Love Me Back in 2010) defy gravity. Though the title of her album can be read as coy commentary on R&B's dependence on television for star-making, it can also be read simply as truth in advertising. Like many of the stories she tells, Sullivan works in layered meanings for a more convincing realism, leaving a definitive interpretation in doubt.
The strand running through Reality Show is Sullivan's performance itself, rather than any particular approach to production. Every character she inhabits is one of hard-earned principle: You may judge their choices, but they are performances of unblinking honesty and an acceptance of consequence that makes our judgement beyond the point. This often means a certain fatalism: "#HoodLove" is cinematic in its portrayal of a relationship's loyalty down to the .45 its protagonist packs in her purse, but the couple are poised at the precipice. "I'ma rock this bitch till the wheels fall off," she sings with the conviction that they'll both be around to see exactly that happen, until finally at the end: "And he ain't always right, but he's just right for me." Doomed though they may be, she finds meaning in conviction.
Sullivan's earlier albums had a more distinct sonic approach: '90s R&B in sensibility (2010's "Holding You Down (Goin In Circles)" used Nas' "Affirmative Action" beat, a familiar maneuver for many Clinton-era R&B acts), Sullivan's performance was still at center stage, locating joy in demonstrative vocal runs. Here, melisma is dimmed to a purposeful shadow; when she does explore the range of her powerful voice, it's as if to indicate the loss of self-control. On "Veins", her voice arcs with searing, yearning electricity. Like many moments on the album, it feels like several songs at once: Its slinky rhythm and backgrounds suggest an external world of physical seduction, while the intensity of her main vocal implies the burning internal passions of anxious obsession.
Though the production is unobtrusive, it seldom holds on to a single style (opener "Dumb" is a march, "Stanley" is a disco record, and "Stupid Girl" is an incredible song with Winehouse-lite production that may be the album's only real misstep). It's still Sullivan who gives the record its shape and tone. Her voice is one of R&B's best instruments. There's a slight grain to one frequency, like a stripe of prematurely grey hair, which gives her vocals an immediately recognizable character and resonates with her stories of hard-won wisdom. Men are eyed with suspicion; "Stupid Girl" is a cautionary tale, but like every song it suggests multiple interpretations—"Run after the boys, or take over the world," Sullivan suggests, but how sincere is she? "When you love 'em like I do, you'll be a fool." Even on "Masterpiece (Mona Lisa)", about the realization of self-love, her voice suggests the dimension of pain into which it was born.
Inevitably we have to make a comparison between Reality Show and R&B more broadly, but it's as easily expanded to popular music as a whole. Sullivan, better than singers and songwriters in almost any genre, creates worlds where relationships take on more complex dynamics, but are immediate in their effect. "Mascara" is complicated in its construction—the character portrait is sympathetic, damning, or neither, depending on how you hold it up to the light. Her songs work so well because they allow the listener to experience them at face value or more holistically, shifting perspectives as rapidly as in life itself. Despite this, Sullivan does not equivocate. Her point of view is not muddled. The album's closer, the rushing, cathartic "If You Dare", makes its argument for moral courage explicit.
