slo mo from the

Teedra Moses is a sweet potato: a blithe, slight, pretty New Orleans tweeter, so the one song we saw lacked the brass punch it needed to be a real Southern raw diva woofer-banger. It was the Lil’ Jon produced track from her album, “You Better Tell Her,” which wags to a wayward lover, “Daddy, I’m too cute to fight… you betta get that bitch told tonight.” On record, especially with her sunlight voice, it rumbles with the monition of a nasty catfight, as though she’s little but ready to pull some hair; Jon’s beats encroach and pop like a back-up gang gunning for a shakedown. On the bridge the band, Black Moses (no relation to Blood of Abraham or Isaac Hayes), played the melody from Juvenile’s terrible hit “Slow Motion,” and Teedra managed a less-feeble quasi-rap of “Tell that bitch tonight!” She needed the confidence of a jeep and a posse to convince us of the song’s threat, but what she brought were manners.
Her other songs probably fared better with her junior miss Louisiana shine, since they are about love, love, love and love; but in a rare plot twist, the show actually started on time, and we didn’t. Even stranger: it started on time and was hosted by a radio station, whose promise of beer-cozy giveaways and overwrought one-liners meant we bounced before Cee-lo could regale us with his mucky soul machinations. (Although I will point you to someone who liked Is the Soul Machine: one of my top five favorite music critics ever, Mark Anthony Neal, who not only throws up crazy wildstyle, but whose writing speaks with greater import and resonance to society at large. Last week, my friend, a music-critic-turned-fulltime-activist, said to me, “The world is falling apart; I’m just not that concerned with the new Lloyd Banks single.” Mark Anthony Neal’s criticism pulls double-shifts, shows in a deep and true way how music is the answer to a human equation.