Folasade Adu

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Alyssa kicks the ballistics:

Sade is someone I like, even though I would say I have trouble listening to her sometime.  I think it's a combination of pacing, vocal style, and lyrics.  I tend to feel a bit like I'm sinking under the song, and the lyrics come along just often enough to pull me back enough into the narrative and images.  That said, periodically I find myself with "Lovers Rock" on repeat for days at a time.

She definitely has some hits, but I've always felt slightly guilty about like Sade. I think it goes back to being twelve and my Moms going on a rant about how Sade couldn't sing. There was a lot of music in my house, mostly courtesy of my mother--Robert Johnson, Joan Armatrading, John Lee Hooker. I didn't like everything, but I grew to respect it as "good music." Anyway, my Moms basically hated Sade.

Still, by the time I was fourteen and cooking up slow-jam tapes for the honeys, going without some Sade meant no play, never. How does a high school senior brimming with sexual frustration spell "sensitive?" Like this...Or some such...


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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. More

Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore -- not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid-'90s. Emerged with a purpose, if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

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