The mid-2000s were an explosive era for women in R&B. The decade of shiny-suit rap had elevated hook queens to star status, while the maturing neo-soul movement was becoming more playful and varied. The energy of a new millennium had inspired a more direct approach, and as the Neptunes began to define pop radio, beats across the board were acquiring a spacy sheen. The R&B mixtape circuit was thriving like never before, with DJs and labels alike aware that even crooned ballads had to pop with the streets first. New sounds seemed to evolve across every subgenre, no matter if the artist was established or emerging. There were big, shiny soul statements (Beyoncé, Amerie, Nicole Wray), songwriting innovators rooted in tradition (Keyshia Cole, Brandy), a whole crop of Mary J. Blige-informed mixtape one-offs (Deemi was my favorite), and of course Mary J. Blige herself. The pop-R&B spectrum was particularly fruitful, defined by an experimental, gossamer production aesthetic that gestured towards the synth smoothness of the early ’80s, glossed up by technological advances in production.
The clear citadel of this shift was Mariah Carey’s 2005 masterpiece The Emancipation of Mimi—a suite of songs whose high-shine production elevated the glittering effervescence of Carey’s harmonic range and triple-time cadences. It arrived just after Kelis dropped the gleaming Tasty, and just before The-Dream came along and blasted radio playlists with candy paint. But the influential, somewhat obscure indie-label predecessor to all of this was Complex Simplicity, the full-length debut from the lithe-sounding singer and songwriter Teedra Moses, a low-key powerhouse from New Orleans. Released a year before Emancipation, Moses’ album exemplified a sea change, and continues to enjoy cult classic status among R&B obsessives and fellow musicians alike.
Moses had spent years writing the songs that would become Complex Simplicity, but by the time it dropped, she and her producer collaborator, Paul Poli, were already influencing the charts with other artists. Working alongside a young vocal arranger named Shaffer Smith, who would eventually be better known as Ne-Yo, the duo had co-written “Still in Love,” the opening track on Nivea’s 2001 debut, as well as the sensual, charango-sampling “Dip It Low” for Christina Milian. (In a neat example of 2000s messiness and the insularity of the music industry, both Nivea and Milian would later marry, then divorce, The-Dream.) “Dip It Low,” a nasty midtempo dance single that practically body-rolled its way onto the charts, remains Milian’s biggest hit and one of the marquee tracks in a mid-2000s crop of airy, dancefloor-focused singles by burgeoning pop starlets like Ciara, Cassie, Teairra Marí, and Nina Sky that borrowed chutzpah from hip-hop and crunk. These women were starting to break out of the familiar R&B rubric of love and heartbreak, proving their relative youth wasn’t a hindrance to demanding what they wanted, and getting it.
But Moses was 27, writing all her own music, embarking on her second career—she had abandoned a path as a fashion stylist after breaking her leg on the job—and already a mother to twin sons with the rapper Ras Kass. The confidence endemic to a little life experience broke through in her songwriting, and though she wrote evocatively about matters of the heart, there was a depth of soul and resonance within her easy, airy soprano. On “You’ll Never Find (A Better Woman),” which sweetened a majestic boom bap and a verse by Jadakiss, she made plain the painful nuances of an on-again/off-again relationship (a “ghetto love affair”), its chorus as much an admonishment to her man as a reassurance to herself. The vocal arrangements formed simple poetic stanzas, an ode to her inner conflict:
You’ll never find A better womanOr a bigger fool[Tell me what you know about breaking up and getting back together]You’ll never findA better womanOr a bigger fool[Tell me what you know about love]
The track worked on radio at the time, or at least it did on New York’s then-legendary Hot 97, in part because of Jadakiss’ ubiquity, but also because the songwriting was both of the moment and timeless. Though Moses grew up with a gospel singer mother who tried to keep her away from most secular music, she matches vocal runs and vibes with ’80s soul, and felt indebted to Aaliyah: “I didn’t really want to come in and change nothing,” she told Vibe in 2019. “I just wanted to make an album that sounded like ‘Rock the Boat.’” The slinky sensuality of that classic is stamped all over Complex Simplicity, whether on a molasses-tempoed entreaty to love (“Be Your Girl,” which she later admitted was about her fantasy crush on Nas), a sultry song about sticking in a difficult coupling solely because of her man’s stroke game (“Backstroke,” though the track is hardly about being dickmatized), or just grappling with age-old existential questions of legacy and the afterlife (the stunning, melancholy “Last Day”). Even “Take Me,” a Raphael Saadiq-featuring love jam that showcases his signature classic-soul pocket, mirrors the mahogany rollick of an Aaliyah B-side, with Moses chirping out the chorus in a nostalgic fever dream. She practically cascades: “Take me/Back to the day/When you made me fall.”
While each track is silken and polished, Complex Simplicity remains totally approachable, Moses’ diaristic lyrics arranged as if the phrasing pauses are exactly where she turned the page in her notebook. On “Caution,” which she credits Ne-Yo for helping spiff up, she slips into a Cherrelle-style groove and vamps around her own irresistibility: “I don’t think you realize/That you/You don’t even have a chance/When I spit my G at you I bet you won’t know how to act.” And the tense crunk track “You Better Tell Her” details her reaction when that attraction goes south with infidelity: “Listen daddy, I’m too cute to fight/You better get that bitch told tonight.”
Lil Jon produced the latter track with a minimalist, dirty-South crunch, and the crunk godfather’s presence might paradoxically explain why Complex Simplicity followed the trajectory of a cult classic. At the time, New York-based record label TVT was acting as a clearinghouse for the crunk explosion and Southern rap stars in general, releasing hit records by Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz and the Ying Yang Twins, as well as albums by Yo Gotti, Jacki-O, and Pitbull’s entire pre-megaclub discography. (Pitbull and Lil Scrappy appear on a remix of “You Better Tell Her.”) While their crunk stable was solid, they weren’t known so much for R&B, a genre with a reputation for difficulty in breaking new talent—women artists, for one, cost labels more money in the form of styling and glam that men weren’t expected to maintain.
Compared to its major-label counterparts, TVT’s promotional abilities were necessarily limited. Moses dropped just one Hype Williams-directed video, for “Be Your Girl,” and opened on a small, Seagram’s-sponsored tour with CeeLo and Tweet before TVT went bankrupt, having lost a fight over Pitbull’s back catalog. Still, Complex Simplicity has reverberated through the years and its impact remains widely felt: Kaytranada’s 2018 take on “Be Your Girl” helped establish the producer as a maestro of the R&B club remix, and a wide range of singers like Katy B and Ari Lennox have cited Moses as an influence. (In January, SZA called Complex Simplicity a “flawless fuckin masterpiece.”)
Yet as Moses has evolved—three albums and several mixtapes in, she continues touring and releasing fantastic singles—it seems like Complex Simplicity’s cult status worked out the way it was supposed to. Moses sees the record almost like a personal blueprint: She told Vibe that in 2004 she had been a “little broken girl singing those songs, acting so tough,” and has now grown into the “confident woman that people thought they were listening to.” In retrospect, the album feels characteristic of a young woman just beginning to understand her own complexities and grasping to come into her own—a lilt of trepidation, perhaps, when asserting her man will “never find a better woman,” where one might expect a growl—but at 27, who isn’t? The certainty in her melodies and musicianship was always unwavering. The emotional resonance still hits. The timelessness is why it remains one of the best albums in R&B.
