Teena Marie

[koganbot]

I used her as a challenge, a battle flag, and a question mark, and what I wrote about her really pissed her off.* The challenge was that she created music way better than anyone like me seemed able to anymore - "people like me" being the children of Dylan and the Stones, now a musical marginal intelligentsia that was constantly tripping itself up and rolling itself into the fetal position, a little ball. The question for me was how do I achieve what she achieved while still remaining myself, and the answer was that I couldn't remain myself, I had to take in more than I'd been able to so far. That eventually meant committing myself to what I do best - which is to write - and to demand of myself that the writing live in a wide open space, as big a world as possible. When I was working on my review, Leslie put the problem of how to describe Teena, "How do you capture..." and then she held her arms out in a giant, reaching embrace. And so I started, "Naked To The World - that ridiculous title-... It's more like the world is naked to her, and she slurps it all up."

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*Or so I heard third-hand through either Doug Simmons or RJ Smith, and Chuck subsequently confirmed when he interviewed her.