A couple of months before the UK release of her first album, Speech Therapy, before she received a surprise Mercury Prize nomination, Speech Debelle mused on Twitter, "There are some white people in the music business who think im not black enough... lol". No shit: Even in a "post-race" world, street sells. Certain British journalists predictably pounced on lyrics about a period in Debelle's late teens idled among London's demimonde of crack mums and minor crooks, spinning a tiny bit of flash into blinding bling. Fact is, she was raised in a middle-class Jamaican neighborhood south of the Thames where she, uh, attended school and studied music and wrote poetry. Debelle doesn't so much map "street" as girl-next-door or Speech-from-the-block. Wherever she's from, anyway, some hip-hop fans will likely write her off because the usual American rap signifiers-- samples, seething synths, bombastic beats, and buckets of braggadocio-- play scant part in her artistic agenda.
But if Debelle can't win the authenticity game, so be it; The baby-faced, mature-minded 26-year old has debuted with a fine, fresh, serious (yet never dour) album that speaks for itself, thanks. Wayne Lotek (Roots Manuva, who makes an appearance) produces the 13-track set on a spacious, spontaneous, even improvisational-sounding jazz tip with understated string, key, woodwind, and brass arrangements. It's hard to imagine a more effacing intro to someone being billed as UK hip-hop's next big thing as "Searching"'s tremulous guitar and brushed cymbals, which only slowly crack the door to a secret of skittish beats and Debelle's anxious "2 a.m. in my hostel bed, my eyes them red, my belly ain't fed." Elsewhere, Lotek deploys everything from Afrobeat guitar lines to trumpet solos to new-agey bell tones, providing texture without upstaging Debelle's low-resting-pulse cadence. He's not trying to upstage her, anyway. Knockout single "The Key" is cool for Debelle's relaxed, conversational delivery, but gets its heat from a clarinet's serpentine swish and the way all the instruments pile on her voice in the last minute like a hill of ants on a dropped donut.
Ultimately, though, Speech Therapy isn't a producer's record, but an MC's. And the title's no feint: Speech lies supine on the couch for the full 50 minutes. Fortunately, whether she's sifting through the anguish she's caused her mother and the trouble she's having finishing her album, or realizing that good sex can make for bad boyfriends and that even sucky jobs serve some cosmic purpose, she generally cuts through the crap without pretending to have easy answers. If you think you've heard everything about absent, irresponsible fathers and the children who tear their own insides out loving them, Debelle, in "Daddy's Little Girl", is casual but ruthlessly right-on: "Daddy, I think I love you 'cause I hate you so much that I must love you".
Which isn't to say she doesn't sometimes copy captions from baby animal posters. Debelle credits tough American female MCs like Lil' Kim with artistic inspiration, but her outlook's far more pacifist and optimistic-- even erring on the side of naïvete. The same song ("Spinning") that kills it with the couplet, "This is for the tat on my wrist/ This is for the black of my fist," also whimpers "One day all people will be all equal/ Until that day comes I'll just be singing my song". To make sense of such inconsistencies, it helps to think of Debelle in relation to a less-violent Brithop tradition and to impossible-to-peg (and, yeah, inconsistent) contemporaries Lady Sovereign or Micachu. (The latter pops in on "Better Days" to don her Miss Ubiquity 2009 sash and execute an underwhelming smile-wave-turn move.)
Hip-hop could use a less rigid paradigm, less insularity, more girls on the mic. I suspect plenty of people with a greater investment in this genre would disagree and dismiss Speech Therapy as coffeehouse rap. Debelle anticipates that reaction, though, with the record's final lyric: "I understand this is my speech therapy, this ain't rap." But it could be.
