If Meshell Ndegeocello’s career was a t-shirt it would be a black shirt with reflective silver letters spelling “Love is Political”. But luckily for all of us, Ndegeocello’s career is not a t-shirt. So far, Ndegeocello’s career consists of seven profoundly experimental, passionate and articulate musical albums. “Seven wonders” according to her promoters at Universal Records. And I agree. Ndegeocello consistently makes music that reveals the world and its people as worthy of awe, re-baptized in unknowing.

So I wasn’t surprised to learn that Ndegeocello would be releasing her 7^th full-length album The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams during the Islamic Holy month of Ramadan. Since her debut album, Ndegeocello has been transforming mystical, otherworldly sounds and statements into explicit confrontations with major organized religions, creating a cosmology that makes another world possible while offering a consistent critique of this one.

By releasing this album as a limited edition project during Ramadan, Ndegeocello almost ensures that this work will be purchased and consumed during the Islamic month of rigorous and intentional fasting and reflection (at least by those of us unwilling to buy it for a hundred dollars on e-bay this winter). In case we had somehow missed the message of her timing, Ndegeocello makes it audible. The first track Haditha, opens with a looped bell sequence that deepens into a repetitive guitar feedback behind the raised voice of Hamza Yusuf, American-born converted Islamic scholar and advisor to the Bush administration, on echo explaining that many of the signs that the prophet Mohammed said would mark the end of the world (such as public sex, air travel, alcohol abuse and the portability of music) have clearly come to pass already. The subject matter of the album itself is prophecy fulfilled. Later, in the song Michelle Johnson (track-9 bearing Ndegeocello’s birthname) the artist will admit “Sometimes I drink too much. Sometimes I smoke too much. Sometimes I love too much.” Additionally she ends the album with “Relief: A Stripper Classic” an engagement with public sexuality in which the artist insists “Here in the dark/Only God can see/Everything we do,” asking the beloved dancer “When I feel like God has forsaken me, will you comfort me?” Sexual desire at it’s most commercialized is a spiritual engagement that Ndegeocello addresses with a politics of love.

But Ndegeocello has more immediate and urgent plans for the religiously inflected end of the world on this album. Remember, Haditha is the name of the most important generative site for electricity in Iraq. Haditha is a city along the legendary Euphrates. To name Haditha is to name a scene of energy, to name the origin of humanity. And so the beginning of this album invokes a more cosmic beginning. But to name Haditha is also to name a brutal ending. Remember? On November 19^th 2005 Haditha was the site of one of the most brutal and publicized instances of the bloody U.S. occupation of Iraq so far (remember the attack on Iraq was also initiated during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan). On November 19^th a United States Marine Corp unit killed 24 people, all of whom may have been noncombatant civilians, one of whom was a 76-year old grandfather, 7 of whom were children under the age of 10...24 people. And then the officials at the Marine base lied about it. But Eman Waleed, age 9 remembers seeing them shoot both of her grandparents. “It was hard to see their faces,” Eman said. And then, though international law clearly defines the intentional killing of civilians as war crime, the charges were dropped. Remember. One of the marines took pictures with his cellphone. The charges against the commanding officers were dropped. In the photos on the internet the red of the bedsheets matches the red splattering the walls. The marines did what they were trained to do, which was to kill a one year old girl, a four year old boy, a ten year old girl, a five year old girl, a three year old girl, grandparents, fathers, mothers, students and 2 month old Aisa narrowly escaped. Haditha is a city of energy. A place of beginnings. The first track on this CD, released during the holy month of Ramadan is called Haditha. A statement of prophecy. About the end of times. This is something to remember.

The guitar feedback that makes the final words of Yusuf reverberate with doom dives into the drum sequence that opens the second track “The Sloganeer: Paradise”, which could be called the breakthrough track of this album in every sense of the word. The most listened to track by visitors to Ndegeocello official myspace page, “Sloganeer” is both the biggest stretch for long-time Ndegeocello listeners and her most explicitly controversial piece to date. Heavily rock influenced, with a faster tempo than any song previously released by this artist (while continuing to incorporate her signature bass melodies and electronic outerspace ventures), this track puts it all on the table, invoking the figure of the suicide bomber with the pseudo-commercial slogan “Get a Bang Out of Life” and asking “If you’re the chosen, why don’t you just kill yourself now?” and she repeats “kill yourself now, kill yourself now.” She goes on to call “democracy” a “monkey sensation”. Even the act of listening to this song on repeat made me search the sky for helicopters and hope that the Patriot Act sponsored invasions of my privacy hadn’t extended to live audio in my living room...yet.

Ndegeocello suicide dare, by far the most radical statement on an album that also suggests that queer love is divinely commanded (Elliptical-track 6) and argues that evolution is over and the end of the world is approaching (Evolution-track 3), could be interpreted in a number of ways. The first time I listened to this song I interpreted it as an anti-capitalist critique. Ndegeocello was embodying the capitalist impulse that decreases the value of life by offering everything...even death at a buy now low sale price. Or it could be a critique of the rhetoric of extremists who recruit suicide bombers by convincing young people to sell their lives cheaply, offering a direct ticket to an imagined paradise made all the more attractive against a background of poverty, displacement and oppression. But ultimately I read this dare as a critique of Israeli and US occupying forces in Palestine and Iraq, arguing that if in each case some sort of religiously mandated superiority (chosen-ness) justifies their forceful occupation of spaces in the middle east, they may as well extend the logic of this militaristic enforcement of a way of life, and occupy heaven...immediately. My sense is that all of these critiques and more emerge in this song. This is a song after Haditha, an answer to Yusuf released in the United States and Japan during the holy month of Ramadan. Politically and musically this is a badass, brave, brazen and bold move for Ndegeocello.

“Sloganeer” emphasizes the major lesson of this album which encourages listeners to move to the limits of what they have known by inhabiting the present with a radical desire for something else. Ndegeocello exemplifies this practice not only in the content of songs like Sloganeer and Headline (track -10) which offer explicit politico-spiritual critiques, but also in the body of the album during which Ndegeocello revisits the tendencies of previous albums as familiar homes, but not as limits. Self-styled long-distance Ndegeocello apprentice Shirlette Ammonds of Mosadi Music has called this album a “catalog” for the way that it revisits and adds to Ndegeocello’s best historical practices. For example, in “Relief: A Stripper Classic” (track-12) she invokes her own classic track “Mary Magdelene” from her album “Peace Beyond Passion” humbly questioning the limits between love, consumption and objectification by asking a sex-worker for a love that is more than pleasure or ownership. And in “Solomon” (track-11) dedicated to her son, she combines the use of spoken voice that characterizes her (2002) release Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape with the neo-reggae electronic groove sounds that she used on the (2003) album Comfort Woman, achieving an intimacy and social relevance that moves beyond either previous work. The lesson of this album is that love is embattled, but necessary. Love is the only way to engage the planet, but at the same time love transforms us (and the planet) beyond recognition. To love is a political risk. But the strategy of this album is its seduction. Listening teaches us that love is worthwhile. It is worthwhile to risk everything.

Lovely Lovely (track 5) is aptly titled, a soulful track with gently breathy vocals with a bass line open, deep and light enough to elicit an audible and un-contextualized “yes” from the listener (this listener). Simply put this may be one the sexiest tracks that this artist has ever released (and coming from this listener that’s a major statement). The secondary refrain “I know that you love me,” follows the thematic of prophecy fulfilled on this album. Love is actually produced in the soft pauses of this track. Followed up with Elliptical (track-6) which re-contextualizes God’s old testament spiritualized “rainbow sign” as the unpredictable possibility of love recognized “when you look into my eyes”, Ndegeocello reminds us that love is miraculous and possible before further reminding us that love can also go very wrong.

Shirk (track-7) and Article 3 (track-8) present flipside portraits of the aftermath of love. Nosy listeners who have taken it upon themselves to chart the dynamics of Ndegeocello’s former romantic relationship with Rebecca Walker (facilitated by Ndegeocello’s own jugular “Rebecca” tattoo and the juice of the young Walker’s second memoir) will probably imagine that Walker is the intended audience for these songs of love gone wrong. But I am not a gossip columnist, and I choose to focus on the role these two songs play in the political definition of love that Ndegeocello continues to develop through this album.

As Ndegeocello recently mentioned during a visit to NYU, the consequences of not being true to oneself, musically, politically and romantically are linked. Shirk, populated by alternating low melodies and almost falsetto leaps demonstrates a feeling of comparative debasement. While the second-person addressee believes they “did nothing wrong to lead us down this road” having an effect that “shattered my bones”, the speaker can only admit “I miss you. I’m sorry I lied,” but forgiveness is impossible on both sides. This moment of the album leads the listener to ask how a politics of love is sustainable when love can fail. This lament slides into Article 3 which epitomizes the limits of this album by starting with what sounds like incoherent angry punk rock shouting by about 6 angry riot girls in suffocating boots. Article 3 revises the apologetic tone of Shirk asking in a more confrontational second person demand “’Cause I lied, you think you’re better than me?”. But in half a breath this intensely personal and potentially adolescent challenge flips into a political analysis: “We’re all patriots of a lying scheming machine.” In one gasp the energy of love lost is transferred into a political critique of the limits of justice. The next challenge is for a set of policy enforced social norms that outlaw queer love and Islamic piety in the same move. Invoking the “scheming” of the PATRIOT act she repeats, “You want to lock me away...lock me away.” Ndegeocello is arguing that the political repression that criminalizes sexuality and praise in the post 9/11 rise of Christian fundamentalism is a fundamental failure to practice love.

The love that Ndegeocello ultimately offers as a corrective to the comprehensive social critique she has launched emerges in Solomon (track-11), which portrays her love for her son, which is her love for creation, which is an ethical relationship to life itself. She frames her tribute with the spoken words of Jack Bean which suggest that it is the child that produces the father as a father through the love that the child inspires. Ndegeocello contextualizes love as more than a gift that she bestows on her son, but rather a way of participation in the reciprocal process a creation that works both ways. Whispering “shine” into a bright neo-reggae background and flute edge melody, wishing for “a kind and gentle imagination” for her son, herself and the listeners and repeatedly invoking “All Creation”, Ndegeocello finally generates love as a solar powered practice, electrically central and original as Haditha, an energetic context for life.