Just don't call me a wuss
She's still tough and sexy - but Foxy Brown now has a sensitive streak, says Caroline Sullivan
Foxy Brown
Broken Silence
(Def Jam)
***
£13.99
Caroline Sullivan
Fri 27 Jul 2001 04.38 BST
It is the fashion for female rappers to glory in their hardness, as if to express the least shred of uncertainty or fear would be tantamount to announcing, "My name is Li'l Kim, and I'm a wuss." For a rapper to be dubbed, as one contender has been, "a pit bull in a skirt" is high praise indeed because it warns the competition, male and female, that the first sign of disrespect will be met with some terrible unspecified punishment. (Though it's more likely that in fact the pit bull's self-image will crumble and the whole teetering "bitch" persona will come tumbling down in a blizzard of designer labels.)
And then there's Foxy Brown. Although her first two albums, Ill Na Na and Chyna Doll, were crammed with just this sort of Gucci-wrapped machismo, Broken Silence breaks new ground for its genre.
While falling short of proclaiming absolute wussiness to the world, it at least admits that there are days when Foxy just isn't up to being Foxy. Not only does it reconsider the ever-contentious issue of explicit sexual language (the trademark that made her career and that of long-time rival Li'l Kim), it admits to frailty and vulnerability, to "feeling like I'm falling" and "hurting so bad inside". The track The Letter even purports to be a suicide note from a Foxy who has found that even Prada hasn't filled the emptiness inside.
The story behind all this is that the 22-year-old Brooklyn rapper has spent the two years since Chyna Doll bouncing from one crisis to the next. Two court appearances - for spitting at a hotel worker and driving an unlicensed car - were followed by several hospitalisations to treat an addiction to painkillers, and in February members of her entourage exchanged gunfire with a group of Li'l Kim associates. Broken Silence, which alludes to these exploits, conveys the impression she was close to the edge and pulled herself back with considerable effort. That, though, is no reason to end the album with a song that samples Mr Mister's 1985 "classic", Broken Wings, whose sickly sentimentality epitomises everything Foxy isn't. It's a disappointing end to a record that otherwise deals with difficult subjects in a dignified way. Instead, check out the swirling, gypsyish 730 (slang for "crazy"), which tries to analyse where fame went wrong and features her most vehement vocals; or The Letter, a ballad apology/suicide note to her mother ("When I did the Vibe cover holding my crotch/ I knew you were praying for me, hoping I'd stop") rendered even more melancholy by Ron Isley's background crooning.
Melodramatic? You bet (get a load of the title track, in which Foxy's brother discovers her after she's overdosed), but no less heartfelt for that. You come to care about her to the point that even her shy attempts at patois on the ragga-inflected Oh Yeah and Na Na Be Like are endearing. The Jamaican tone, by the way, is felt throughout the album, with guest vocals from dancehall figures Baby Cham and Spragga Benz. Their gruff presence redeems a few otherwise superfluous bits of braggadocio such as Tables Will Turn, and marks a shift away from pure hip-hop (as does Run Yo Shit, a whooping funk ensemble piece that could be George Clinton circa 1975).
But the sexually provocative Foxy of old isn't completely extinct. She surfaces on the lilting Candy, bragging that her "na na" tastes "just like candy" - Twix or Starburst, dearie? - and proclaims on So Hot her general bad-assness ("I'm still BK's illest dangerous bitch"). On songs like these it's as if she regrets the candour of the rest of the album, and perhaps with good reason. Having exposed herself as fragile, vulnerable and, well, human, there's no way back.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeands...g.artsfeatures