WARNING : EXPLICIT LANGUAGE
All credit goes to VIBE Magazine.
""Silk? Shai? UNV?" DeVante chuckles. "Put that in there. That I laughed. They're just jokes. There are only two powers: us and Boyz II Men."
One night, at like 3, 4 in the morning, me, JoJo, and K-Ci was sittin' in this old station wagon we used to call Cleetus. Dalvin would be around, but not really down-he and K-Ci was still beefin'. "Think if we did R&B music...what would it be like?" We started imagining it and coming up with names-I never wanted anything like the Thises or the Thats; I wanted to put myself in the name. So we was, like, "Why don't we do Jo for JoJo, De for DeVante, and Ci for K-Ci?" DeVante, still nursing his vino, has just declared K-Ci and JoJo the best singers in the world. " 'So you're having my baby'-do you know what that was, when K-Ci sang that?" he asks, gesticulating wildly. "If you can't make people feel you when you're just singing a line, you ain't got it!" His rangy frame buckles back into the chair. "We just all doing our thing. I don't think of Jodeci as no boy group or no harmonizing group," he says. "I think of us as a black rock 'n' roll band.
"We're not the cutest niggas in the world," he continues, playing down his and Dalvin's lustrous good looks, as well as K-Ci's and JoJo's sensual, if less obvious, appeal. "But we're special. A song could be mediocre, but by what we do to it, we add what it needs. No polish, no routines. We ain't tryin' to be hard; we just don't give a fuck. I can flip tracks and make a Babyface-type song, but we're not trying to make pop songs. It's not about harmony, it's about us doing our thing. And our thing is, "Can you feel us? Can you feel us?"
The answer is yes. "Freak'n You," the first single from the new album, is vintage Jodeci: K-Ci in prime, achy-churchy form; JoJo melting in and out; DeVante's erotic words spoken over his own pulsing rhythms. But the rest of The Show, The After Party, The Hotel sounds completely new. The Dalvin-produced "Get on Up" (cowritten by JoJo, K-Ci, and Dalvin) is the first upbeat single Jodeci have ever created worth listening to. "I didn't like it at first," DeVante says. "It was too happy for me. Now I love it, 'cause you can't help but be glad to it."
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