1651 Neneh Cherry
Fresh, sexy, empowering. Neneh Cherry's debut 'Raw like Sushi' stands the test of times.

However brilliant her new record Broken Politics is, Neneh Cherry will never sound as fresh, sexy, empowering, and streetwise as she did on her thirty-year-old debut Raw Like Sushi.

“No moneyman can win my love / It’s sweetness that I’m thinking of”: when Neneh Cherry came into heavy MTV rotation in the winter of 1988 with “Buffalo Stance”, yours truly was immediately hooked, and along with that spotty sixteen-year-old, there was a whole generation that couldn’t get enough of it.

When the album Raw Like Sushi was released shortly after, we had never eaten raw Japanese fish in the Kempen village of our youth, but we were all convinced that it must be great. Yes, we had already imbibed Salt-N-Pepa, but besides the numerous, often interchangeable Stock, Aitken & Waterman productions, it was a breath of fresh air to hear this strong, mixed-race woman blend pop with hip hop as though she had spent her whole life doing nothing else.

We soon learned that she was actually from Sweden and that her real name was Neneh Mariann Karlsson, and that she was actually a model who had moved to London when she was fourteen. She had been a member of several punk bands there. Her father turned out to be a percussionist from Sierra Leone and her Swedish mother was a painter, but it was her American stepfather who really rang a bell: jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, who honed his craft with Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. His daughter also surrounded herself with the best on Raw Like Sushi. Tim “Bomb the Bass, rock this place!”

"In a cocky, almost brazen way, I felt like nothing could stop me"

Neneh Cherry

Simenon came up with the barrage of samples for the innovative pop/rap crossover of “Buffalo Stance”. For the second single, the soulful “Manchild”, the singer collaborated with Robert Del Naja, who had just founded the trip-hop collective Massive Attack. Along with Cherry, Cameron McVey, who produced and cowrote the album, was a member of the London fashion designer Ray Petri’s Buffalo Posse, and he married her in 1990.

In music videos and performances, Cherry’s “don’t mess with me” attitude was particularly striking. “In a cocky, almost brazen way, I felt like nothing could stop me, and that is probably the impression I gave,” she told us about that early period a few years ago. When she sang “Buffalo Stance” on Top of the Pops with a very visible baby bump, it was a statement. Two more albums followed: Homebrew (1992) and Man (1996). “7 Seconds”, her global hit with the Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, was released in between. But then she didn’t release any more records for eighteen years.

“I wanted to be able to move around freely, but often felt as though I was being put in a box. I’d had enough. I’ve never been good at pretending.” So for a long time, she only collaborated with other artists, until she started releasing her own work again four years ago. In the wake of Blank Project, we saw her sing a rearranged live version of “Buffalo Stance”. The more introspective album Broken Politics, produced by Four Tet, is bringing her and her thirty-year-old hits back to Brussels.

> Neneh Cherry
2/3, 20u, Ancienne Belgique

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Read more about: Brussel, Muziek, neneh cherry, raw like sushi

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