Not long after K. Michelle released Anybody Wanna Buy a Heart in 2014, I got into a spat with a student who threw shade at the singer. “She’s Kmart,” he said, wrinkling his nose. Of course she is, I said, but that’s description, not criticism. The star of “Love & Hip Hop Atlanta” and “K. Michelle: My Life,” whose R&B career has thrived despite the absence of pop crossovers, has no pretensions toward high culture. She’s your older sis or youngest aunt, laughing her ass off at Thanksgiving over a glass of wine.
Even as the Billboard Hot 100 becomes, thanks to Cardi B and Camila Cabello, more receptive to women of color who aren’t cooing support on a rapper’s tuff-love track, KIMBERLY: The People I Used to Know won’t get Michelle into the singles Top 10. Hell, at this point it won’t make many year-end top 10s either; a 21-track album may leave listeners winded. But she gives fewer fucks than she ever did, which results in a vocal commitment that makes her three previous albums look like warm-ups.
Vituperative but joyous in its command, “Kim K” is the album’s centerpiece. Besides her considerable vocal chops, a large part of her appeal is the projection of realness. “Black girl who’s angry/Media can’t stand me,” she sings over chopped-up piano chords and a sample of DeBarge’s “A Dream,” “I get to be in my feelings.” And it’s for those feelings that black women like Michelle are dismissed while, in her reckoning, black men pull the same shit yet are awarded Grammys. As usual with Michelle, she eschews psychobabble for blunt talk; there’s little trace of Mary J. Blige’s influence on this Memphis native, whose cadences evince a deeper affinity for hip-hop. Keyed to a beat mimicking submarine sonar, opening track “Alert” makes those affinities clear, with “clarity” always her lodestar. In a call-out to “HUMBLE.,” Michelle even gives Kendrick Lamar what-for. “Fuck them rappers who mumble,” she spits, perhaps scowling at fellow Georgians Future and Migos.
Whatever else, Michelle’s her own person, free to revel in her often splendid bad taste. No doubt some listeners will recoil from the thought of Michelle working with Chris Brown—I did, especially on a track called “Either Way” dedicated to thumbing its nose at haters. As we learned in “Kim K,” she relishes her independence. If a Chris Brown collaboration will get her streams and urban radio play, then she’ll do it: “I may never get this Grammy/But I’mma feed my family.” And she enjoys the perks, which include “Sleeping good at night, in the morning eating eggs and steak.” Producer Lil Ronnie’s stuttering beat hammers in every boast.
Included in this projection of realness is a submission to lust, even if she ends up looking abject; Michelle may have recorded “Talk to God,” but her desires are of the toned legs and hot butt variety. As she admits on another track, “Heaven couldn’t save me.” Finger snaps and gospel piano chords color Eric Hudson’s “Brain on Love,” a valentine to a lover who insists on his pound of flesh: “I know I’m a handful/That’s why you’ve got two hands.”
Bawdy, courting foolishness, K. Michelle is a throwback to an earlier era of R&B and an ideal social media personality. Her voice is the unguent. KIMBERLY: The People I Used to Know may lack a thumper like “V.S.O.P.” or a slow jam as urgent as “Drake Would Love Me,” still her greatest performance, but it continues a remarkable four-album streak. And we need her as much as she needs us.
