Anastacia was already an international sensation by the time I got my hands on her sophomore album Freak Of Nature, which came out in the United States on June 18, 2002. The album was released internationally 7 months earlier, and was a top ten album in over a dozen countries, […]
Very little has been written about Aretha Franklin’s 1977 album Sweet Passion. Of the three most significant written accounts of Aretha’s life, none of them dedicate more than a paragraph to the album, focusing instead on her budding romance with second husband Glynn Turman and the resurgence she experienced with […]
Melanie Fiona had me from the first note. It takes a lot to hook me that early on, but for me, she has “it.” “It,” referring to the combination of the voice and the application of said voice. There’s soul, there’s style, there’s technique. There’s talent. I still remember that […]
Most people have never heard Aretha Franklin’s sophomore album, 1962’s The Electrifying Aretha Franklin. The same goes for her debut album, 1961’s Aretha With The Ray Bryant Combo, and the half dozen albums that followed. Columbia Records did a knockout job of holding onto their recordings of Aretha Franklin, modestly […]
“The music’s no good without you baby, come back to me,” laments a haunting Cher. “The Music’s No Good Without You” is the lead single and international opener to her 2001 album Living Proof, which served as the commercial follow-up to 1998’s triumphant Believe. The song’s music video shows Cher […]
For a while there, there was an upward trend in the life and catalog of Mary J. Blige. She seemed to transcend her biggest demons on No More Drama, find love on Love & Life, and begin navigating the pains of life beyond love on The Breakthrough and Growing Pains. […]
Have you ever listened to a record and truly felt seen? Like the lyrics are telling stories you’ve lived, experiences akin to your own, and fully and completely could represent you? For gay men, there’s historically been a lack of that in popular music. To supplement, we gravitate towards grandiose […]
I was around 8 or 9 when I got my copy of Aretha Franklin’s Young, Gifted and Black. It arrived via one of the storied, long-defunct CD clubs (some do still exist but now exclusively push DVDs). For those who weren’t attune to those clubs, they would send alluring catalogs […]
Since 2020, Nas has forged a winning partnership with producer Hit-Boy, and unleashed two stellar albums, Kings Disease (which earned Nas his first-ever Grammy Award) and Kings Disease II. “KDIII on the way, this just to feed the buzz,” Nas reassuringly declares in the middle of “Ugly,” track 3 of […]
This Christmas season, the staff of THE 97 will be sharing their favorite holiday songs via our new 97 Minutes of Christmas Playlist series. Each playlist contains 1 hour and 37~ minutes of Christmas jams personally curated by the staff writer. VOLUME 5, CURATED BY ANDREW How do you boil Christmas […]
