When Neneh Cherry’s brash “Buffalo Stance” crash-landed into pop in late 1988, the landscape had been primed. J.J. Fad’s fast-talking “Supersonic” and Salt-N-Pepa’s winking “Push It” had proven Top 40 radio’s remit, while still hesitant toward rap, was at least able to handle female MCs. Production outfits like the hip-hop/freestyle masterminds Full Force and M/A/R/R/S flipped rare samples into gold and platinum records. And the big-tent sound of the ’80s could properly accommodate the rappers’ bravado and the producers’ bone-shaking beats. Precarious as it was, the framework was there.
Still, “Buffalo Stance” exploded it all. The Swedish singer provided something familiar yet vital that sounded both of the moment and of the future. It’s a nearly six-minute collision of synths and skronk, scratching and squealing, presided over by Cherry, whose streetwise rebukes to a gigolo looking for a new sucker were balanced out by the sugar-spun alto she used on its dreamy, yet mean-mugging chorus. She dreamed of sweetness, comforted by the way that her crew of London bohemians, the titular “Buffalo” throwing down their stance, was standing right behind her.
What makes “Buffalo Stance” more remarkable is its origin: The sophisti-pop duo Morgan/McVey’s 1987 song “Looking Good Diving.” You can hear the nuts and bolts of the song in its background, especially the victorious synth-sweep on the chorus. When the single was to be released out, it needed a B-side, so she decided to go with a remix featuring Bristol-based proto-hip-hop crew the Wild Bunch. That remix scooped arpeggiated synths out of the song’s glossed-up chorus put Cherry—then a model, albeit one who had been a member of the agit-punk crew Rip Rig + Panic—on the mic. Her vocal is tentative at first, but after she drops the Cockney-tinged “wot is he loyyyyyke?” she becomes more emboldened, leaning into the track’s bridge and setting a bar for the streetwise ebullience of its successor.
But it was Tim Simenon—who, as Bomb the Bass, had released the manic collagist hit “Beat Dis” in 1988—that reworked “Looking Good Diving” into a single for Cherry. His cut-and-paste approach transformed the musical bed into something that resembled a city, all heat action and unexpected sounds whooshing into earshot. “Tim kept coming up with these samples and it would lead you into a different section,” co-producer Mark Saunders told Sound on Sound in 2017. “If we’d have been thinking properly about how to make a hit record, I don’t think we would’ve had anywhere near as many different parts to it.” Cherry rose to the challenge, upping the ante with a shouted-out vocal and asides like “Bomb the Bass… rock this place!” that would give the song extra yell-along juice in the clubs and on the playgrounds.
“Without rejecting anything, I’m on purpose rejecting formats,” Cherry told The Guardian in early 1989, as “Buffalo Stance” was climbing the Hot 100. Raw Like Sushi built on that promise with gusto, using influences from all over the pop landscape to craft a singular statement on womanhood in the late ’80s. Instead of placing songs in boxes, Cherry and her producers let them breathe and grow, seeing where they might go—and often they’re taken to exciting places. “Inna City Mamma” is loose-limbed, its percussive pianos give its strut swing even as it’s wistful about the ways urban life can chew up a person inside and out; the verses of “Heart” summon strength from Cherry’s manic flow and a playground-taunt verse, with skittering synths retreating from view once the New Jack Swing chorus kicks in.
It’s very much a maternal record, too; two decades before M.I.A. went onstage at the Grammys while on the verge of giving birth, Cherry triumphantly mimed “Buffalo Stance” on the UK chart show “Top of the Pops” while clad in maternity Lycra and a bronze bustier-blazer combo. At its best moments, Raw Like Sushi mixes its nurturing spirit with an audacious optimism, a hopeful foresight that mirrors Cherry’s vision of a genre-agnostic pop landscape.The coming-of-age tale “Kisses on the Wind” pairs squalling guitars and malfunctioning electronics with lyrics about how puberty makes girls feel awkward, with Cherry serving as the omnisciently tender narrator of a young woman’s journey toward her next self; “The Next Generation” is a stoop conversation about politics on a sweaty day turned into a stretched-out brass jam, its clashing of musical styles coming together create a cacophonous, hopeful centerpiece. There’s raunch to be had, too, with the album’s final track, “So Here I Come,” ending with the campy declaration “I came already!”
Another mother loomed in the background as well, as Cherry’s up-from-the-underground take on pop and style inspired more than a few critics at the time to fire off Madonna comparisons. (USA Today compared the “light, pop-friendly” side of her voice to the Material Girl’s, while The New York Times reviewed Sushi against the backdrop of Madonna’s push into pop confessionalism Like a Prayer.) While the underground clubs where both drew their inspiration were spiritually simpatico, the music they released had key differences. Madonna knew how to draw within pop’s lines the way Cherry simply couldn’t, for reasons involving radio, race, and the still-strict lines between formats: “We went over [to America] with our funny little posse from London,” Cherry told Pitchfork in 2014. “And in the black department, [”Buffalo Stance”] wasn’t black enough, and in the white department it was too black. So it was this weird middle satellite, floating around.”
“Manchild,” the second track on the album, is probably the best example of Raw Like Sushi’s widescreen view; it reunites Cherry with Wild Bunch member Robert “3D” Del Naja, who by then had formed trip-hop collective Massive Attack. Anyone expecting something like “Buffalo Stance II” to be Sushi’s second single was probably surprised. Its shape-shifting, woozy synths, which floated in and out of keys, led and were led by Cherry’s soulful yet pointed vocal. She’s acting as the prodding yet sympathetic sage to a flailing other, rapping about “R-E-S-P-E and C-T” while chords quiver and hover.
Audacity was what made Raw Like Sushi such a thrilling album three decades ago, and it’s also a big part of why today it looms large, both as an example of musical possibility and as a totem of womanhood. The front of Raw Like Sushi shows Cherry in full-on Buffalo stance, her arms crossed, her gaze set, her pout square. Its back cover, however, shows Cherry in flight and lost in the music, her curls midair, her arms splayed—realizing the joy in pure possibility, and dancing along with it as fast as she can.
