Happy 30th Anniversary to Teena Marie’s ninth studio album Ivory, originally released September 7, 1990.
CBS label Epic Records was Teena Marie’s tabula rasa in 1982. “I like CBS,” she affirmed. “They don’t argue with record sales … they don’t get in my business.” Their arrangement was simple. She made great music. They made sure people heard it. But then she delivered the forward-leaning Ivory on September 7, 1990 and what should have been a shoo-in stalled out at #132 on the Billboard 200. So what happened?
For context, on Ivory’s best week, pop rappers MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice were the two bridesmaids tussling over the #1 bouquet. Marie observed the antics from a distance, decked in windblown straw curls and bohemian shells (a stunning cover image by renowned lenswoman Randee St. Nicholas). This bakers’ dozen of tunes couldn’t have been more dissimilar to Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em. And Vanilla Ice would snatch the bouquet away from him the following week with To The Extreme. Maybe Marie never stood a chance.
Like her ‘70s musical peers, she was in a class of artists bred to captivate audiences in a live setting. Many found themselves increasingly disenfranchised by drum machines and synthesizers by the mid-‘80s. Even if they evolved, like disco-rooted funk crew Skyy who scored miraculous dual R&B #1s in 1989, they still lost their deals. Those who were once “the future of the funk” were about to be neatly folded and put away.
Hip-hop was sun-warping the vinyl surface of R&B in 1990, but Lady T wasn’t afraid. She’d been rhyming since “Square Biz.” The music was changing, but she was too. Fans didn’t know what to make of this new “progressive Teena” when “Here’s Looking At You” popped its cork. Marie had summoned James “DJ Reesso” Reese, Prince’s favorite Glam Slam nightclub DJ, to embellish her lead single. Armed with beefy beats, scratches, and a sample-dense Public Enemy feel, its house party vibe would reach a respectable R&B #11.
That wasn’t bad, but a warmer radio response was likely expected. She got that with “If I Were A Bell,” a dreamy morning-after ballad that pulls apart slowly like a moist, chocolate chip cookie. “Bell” resounded loud enough to be heard at #8 on the R&B charts.
The LP was more than radio fare though. Its B-side threatened to outclass “If I Were A Bell” with the slow-grooving “Cupid Is A Real Straight Shooter.” Flirtation becomes child’s play on “Mr. Icecream.” The acoustic guitar-framed “How Can You Resist It” invokes Hejira-era Joni Mitchell. The most sumptuous experience, however, is the amorous interlude “Ivory (A Tone Poem)” (“How supple your lips / the kind that were meant for kissing / I remember you / warm and brown… / Do you remember me?”).
The conundrum was that Marie’s fanbase wanted hits like “Portuguese Love” and her only #1 “Ooh La La La,” but radio was losing interest in old school anthems. The table was being cleared for arbiters of a new cool who would trade her “Fire and Desire” for Method Man & Mary J. Blige’s “I'll Be There for You/You're All I Need to Get By.” This caught our heroine between a rock and some harder beats. After hearing the finished product, Marie got word from label execs that Ivory had been placed “on hold.”
“It seemed Epic hadn’t heard ‘a single’ on the album and had what they considered the ‘brilliant’ idea of flying Teena to London to work with Jazzie B of Soul II Soul fame, then enjoying major success on both sides of the Atlantic,” friend and soul music biographer David Nathan explained. “Teena was not happy. She felt she had turned in a great album and after years of self-production was less than joyful at the prospect of working in the studio with someone she didn’t know.”
Since 1980’s Irons In The Fire, the rule was: no one produced a Teena Marie project unless their name was Teena or Marie. That may be why Jazzie B ceded, “working with her was difficult.” It wasn’t known until 2010 that their union of sounds was a shotgun marriage. In hindsight, the conflict is painfully audible on third single “Since Day One.”
Jazzie B’s seductive island soul backing wasn’t the problem; neither was Marie’s enticing pre-chorus and hook (“You are the answer / Baby, you’re the deal / You are the driver / The smoke and the spoke in the wheel”). But she surrounded it with an impassable swamp of meandering, overlong verses as if she wanted the song to lose. Unless you were a determined fan, the juice was hardly worth the squeeze. Radio agreed. “Since Day One” could only limp to #69 in the UK. Stateside, Billboard didn’t even notice it had entered the room.
Marie wasn’t always so closed to input, such as when Reese pitched “Just Us Two” as a duet. “She heard it, liked it, and then decided to write her own lyrics,” the studio hitman explains during our recent phone conversation. Her rescript nodded to Joni Mitchell (“Tender lover, warm my heart / ‘Cause you’ve got to court me to spark”). Not unlike Janet Jackson’s “Love Will Never Do (Without You),” the planned duet evolved to a solo piece, then became Ivory’s final single.
The single search overlooked “The Sugar Shack” though. This sweet, creamy uptempo brought Marie’s love for the juke joints of yesteryear into the ‘90s with a pugilistic new jack swing beat (“I know a place down by the tracks / Where they got a little jazz band / Such a sexy situation”). Unlike “Day One,” “Sugar Shack” proved she could write in a commercial format.
Just when you think it’s played all its cards, frequent collaborator and fellow girlboss Bernadette Cooper (of Klymaxx fame) jumps out of a cake slinging her jocular sex appeal everywhere. Cooper’s touch-yourself diva dialogue is the cherry on top of the best confection Ivory has to offer. Curiously, its stellar extended remix remained unreleased for years.
The album has some flaws though. All the songs run a bit too long, and its CD bonus cuts sound extraneous. The almost too-smooth “Snap Your Fingers” is lovely, but its strict-quantized programming sounds dated. It might have been more at home on 1986’s Emerald City. And Ivory could have done without the bloat of “The Red Zone.” It’s a reggae-tinged “What’s Going On,” but she already made one of those on 1983’s Robbery (“Stop The World”).
Trying to create music for public consumption is like playing Jenga during an earthquake; tastes constantly shift. Ivory was a primo R&B project with only one music video financed for it, which hampered awareness. Radio loved “If I Were A Bell,” but its #8 became the highest chart peak her career would ever see again. Epic tried to force a commercial sound with “Since Day One,” but ignored the “Sugar Shack” beneath their noses. Marie called Ivory one of her favorite albums, but it would also be the soundtrack to the end of her five-album tenure with Epic.
Despite friction, Marie insisted the split was cordial. She wouldn’t release another major label effort for 14 years, but she did give birth to her beautiful daughter Alia Rose Noelle on December 25, 1991. The label may have failed Ivory, but when it came to motherhood, at least she could assure that something she released that year would get the push it deserved.
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