jill scott - celibacy blues

this song is from jill scott's third album "the real thing: words and sounds vol. 3" and for some reason this is the track that seems to linger in my mind. i do really like the album in it's entirity and i'll reiterate this one more time, i don't usually listen to a lot of albums in full for more than one time and this album was played well over five times.

i think the reason i find this one in my conciousness, well reasons as it it's a really nice track, but it was because i had it pegged to be featured in a really long of mix of mine. the plan was this three hour deep house mix with the first fourtyfive minutes being a sombre downtempo build. i wanted to do the mix in one take and i found that the first fourtyfive minutes was the hardest as i kept making mistakes and my plans kept changing.

"celibacy blues" was the first track in the mix and i don't remember how many attempts i did before scrapping the first part and starting out with mellow 116bpm beats from the getgo. henceforth i heard the song a lot of times and eventually i hated it as i kept analyzing the lyrics and thoughts drifted though my mind. that twelvebar blues progression felt more cliché than it ever was and i do believe it took a long time for me to like this song again.

but this also coincides with another theory i have with music and it is this: if i compare two songs that i've discovered and one is straightforward and likeable all-round and the other one one is harder to swallow or annoys me and only has a fragments of likeability, i'm probably going to listen more to the latter. because you only get so far with safe music and this song isn't safe in my mind.

you can guess from it's title that the topic matter is sexual but i don't know jill scott is being ironic over it. scott says so much and so little in four short verses all over the traditional twelve bar blues groove with a lick of the end of it. i want to really go deeper into analysing the lyrics but i still really don't know what angle she is shooting from. is it self-imposed celibacy and if she gets new batteries for her vibrator, why aren't she using it.

there is a river of questions flooding from my head because it's not overt about what wants to say or not want to say. scott ends the song with this "this here celibacy thing / is working on me..." and i want to say "no i don't think it does" but who am i tell miss jiss scott on what she should be doing with her sexuality.

the song is about two minutes long and it leaves me more puzzled than when i just had my mind blown by mr. sun ra or the likes. that's a telltale sign of a really good song.

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