Monica - The Boy is Mine (1998)

I took something of a funny turn around halfway through the nineties, one effect of which was that I spent about a year listening to very little which wasn't R&B performed by young black women with a penchant for that fucking annoying shaky shoulders dance that everyone was doing for a while. This was partially informed by a desire to hear music performed by persons other than white blokes in shitty trainers with guitars, and while it meant that I ended up listening to a certain quota of things that really weren't very good at all, it wasn't all bad.

Monica is probably best remembered for the single after which this album was named, a duet with Brandy who was also in the biz at the time. The two of them fell out over who got to name their album after the duet, apparently getting into an actual fist fight on live television during a show which had brought the two together for the sake of quashing the rumours of animosity - which I repeat here mainly because it's amusing. Anyway, the upshot was that Monica won.

The problem with this kind of album was usually the space taken up by the stereotypical balladeering R&B sludge. You know the sort of thing - slow as buggery, piano tinkling away, endlessly warbling vocal exercises, sounds as though it was lifted from the soundtrack of a Disney musical and was probably written by Diane fucking Warren as almost all of those drearily epic unit shifting love songs seem to be. Here we get five of the wailing fuckers, thus rendering approximately 38.5% of this thirteen track album effectively unlistenable, although it could be argued that the cover of Eddy Arnold's Misty Blue is borderline.

However, if you ignore these tracks you have something about the same length as a traditional vinyl album which is otherwise pretty great. Most of the production comes from Dallas Austin, a couple from Rodney Jerkins, and even a decent offering from the customarily annoying Jermaine Dupri. It's almost traditional soul music with a heavy, heavy, heavy emphasis on the blues, seeing as Monica is from Georgia, retooled as a series of weird staccato beats and samples because it was 1998; except done with the sort of heart and dedication to what seems like a fairly expensive production as you might expect from persons who don't sound like they'd ever bother with autotune, and would probably be insulted if you asked. Monica's voice has a certain vulnerable quality, and you might even say it's thin in comparison to some, but her strength is that she sounds like a human being rather than a series of ostentatious vocal exercises.

So no, that shaky shoulders music didn't all sound the same in the event of anyone wondering, and occasionally there was an album which made you wonder why the others bothered; and if this one is played by robots, they're robots with real soul in their chips and circuits. Just be sure to skip tracks eight, ten, twelve, and thirteen - also five if you're having a bad day.