Angie Stone and Anthony Hamilton
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Neo-soul–the inheritor of Drifters soul, 70s Stax soul, and Betty Wright soul–aspires to precisely this sort of normalcy. It’s grown folks music, as BET puts it, and Angie Stone’s 1999 solo debut, Black Diamond, helped pave the way for its resurgence. Stone and Hamilton embrace traditional values as well as old-fashioned music. Their themes predate the now-era of one-dimensional people collecting material things and dead-end encounters. Their music lacks the grandiosity of R. Kelly’s sex-death-circus metaphors or Juvenile’s kiddie-lewd seduction plays; it’s sexy for its humanness, mad and raging and warts and all. Many R & B acts pay lip service to that notion, but Stone and Hamilton actually sing it.
That allows Stone to be more than just a neo-soul icon–she can be an equalizer in the gender wars. When Snoop Dogg guests on Stone Love’s “I Wanna Thank Ya” he raps sensitively about “the way we make love in the dark”–the pit bull turned reverent puppy. Stone’s at her best when she’s telling off cheating lovers, with assists from Missy Elliott and Tweet on the Stone Love breakup song “U-Haul” or alone on Mahogany Soul’s (2001) “Pissed Off.” “I wasn’t going to succumb in the battle for myself,” she told Essence in 2003. “That’s the pride people hear in my voice now. The pride of a woman.”
