You listen to Unpredictable and glumly wonder if you'll ever feel like having it off again. It's not just unsexy, it emits a weird kind of anti-eroticism. The lyrics are uniformly about sex and uniformly horrible: "'Regular' ain't in my vocabulary, when it comes to makin' love, neither's 'missionary'." On VIP, he announces "the night of ecstasy is on me", like some terrible priapic Milky Bar Kid.
Aside from With You, a peppy attempt to replicate the Neptunes' sparse sound, Unpredictable crawls along like molasses on the march. The end result sounds like a 70-minute experiment to discover how slow music can get without stopping.
#JAMIE FOXX ALBUM UNPREDICTABLE PLUS#
Lots of big names seem willing to help him, among them producer Timbaland, singer Mary J Blige, plus rappers Snoop Dogg, Ludacris and the Game, the latter's halting, adenoidal delivery once more bringing to mind a black Bernard Bresslaw. As evidenced by his performance in Ray, Foxx can sing, but he turns out to be less R&B's saviour than the slow jam Taliban, determined to drag the genre away from the modernity of Amerie's 1 Thing or Destiny's Child's Lose My Breath and back into some terrible dark age, when its primary reason for existence was to soundtrack the suburban leg-over. For four-and-a-half gruelling minutes, this metaphor is stretched until finally it snaps: "There'll be puddles in the bed!" he warns, which leaves you wondering if his amorata might need a gynaecologist more than she needs a night of passion.īut if the lyrics map out startling new territories, the music does not. Such is his adeptness in the boudoir, said fluids inevitably resemble a rainstorm. Being all cre-ay-yay-tive, Foxx doesn't need to mention vaginal mucus by name, but instead relies on the miracle of the metaphor. It deals with a topic hitherto overlooked even in the lubricious lexis of the urban loverman: vaginal mucus. You certainly will, not least when you hear a song called Storm (Forecass). "What I got over a lotta fellas is that I'm all cre-ay-yay-tive," he wails. In Unpredictable, other R&B is dismissed as "mundane" and "the same old thing".
Anyone who read the 38-year-old describe himself as "R&B's saviour" in the Guardian on Monday should note that this was one of his more unassuming pronouncements. Sorry: including hiring a fairground barker, who interrupts proceedings with a cry of: "All aboard the spontaneous express! Next stop the g-spot!" By the time he arrives, his services are virtually superfluous, such is the degree of self-aggrandisement emanating from Foxx. On the opening title track he does everything to draw attention to his alleged musical genius short of hiring a fairground barker. This advice doesn't seem to have reached Foxx, a man who, according to the sleevenotes of second album Unpredictable, counts Helen Mirren among his "Ride Or Die Homies". You would be well advised to keep things restrained and discreet, thus enabling you to make a quiet and dignified exit should everything go wrong. After all, you don't want to join those would-be polymaths who suffered ignominious failure in the charts - there were few takers for Minnie Driver's singer-songwritery album Everything I've Got in My Pocket, Russell Crowe's pub-rock band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts or, indeed, Foxx's debut album, 1994's Peep This. Lesser men might have attempted a low-key transition from Oscar-winning actor to R&B vocalist. Y ou could never accuse Jamie Foxx of hiding his light under a bushel.