Jill Scott True, Scott’s music does contain lots of “can-do” rhetoric – she can even “stain and polyurethane,” as she sings in “The Fact Is (I Need You)” of off 2004’s Beautifully Human: Words and Sounds Volume II – that could be misconstrued, upon first listen, as mere cocksure artifice. However, Scott doesn’t make these proclamations by claiming that she can do any of these things better than you – knuckle-headed separatist boasting being the Achilles heel of most current soul – but that she can, in fact, do them, and furthermore can do anything she damn well wants to – which, it seems, includes releasing beautifully human contemporary soul records that espouse positivity over posturing, sensuality over sexuality, and emotional heft over erotic huff and puff. Ovens Auditorium (Timothy C. Davis)
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2008.
