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India Arie: Cry no more

After the tearful disappointment of last year's Grammys, India Arie is back. Andy Gill finds her wiser, stronger and reaping the rewards she deserves with her new single

Friday 11 April 2003 00:00 BST
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Though her achievements were somewhat overlooked in the media hubbub surrounding Norah Jones's dominance of this year's Grammy awards, it must have provided a source of quiet satisfaction – and, yes, a kind of closure – for India Arie when she won Grammys for best R&B album (Voyage to India) and best urban/ alternative performance ("Little Things"). As usual, it was the right artist at the wrong time: she deserved to win something at the previous year's ceremony for her million-selling debut album, Acoustic Soul, and its uplifting real-woman anthem "Video"; though nominated in an impressive seven categories, she eventually went home empty-handed and tearful, her hopes capsized in the wake of Alicia Keys' success.

All the more fitting, then, that Arie should receive an award this year for her new single, "Little Things", in which she reaffirms the think-local principles underlying her work, after the hurt and confusion she experienced after being so publicly snubbed the previous year. "Running round in circles, lost my focus, lost sight of my goals," she sings. "I do this for the love of music, not for the glitter and gold." In other words: she won't be fooled again.

"More than anything, it helped me to formulate my own idea of success," she says of being publicly humiliated as a seven-time loser. "It's not about awards. It's different for someone to pay honour to you, that's different; but the whole competitive vibe, I'm not into that, that's not me at all."

It's perhaps characteristic of Arie's implacable spirit that she's even been able to find something positive in defeat.

"It's been good, not winning Grammys, because that's something I needed to learn," she says, with plausible conviction. "And it's given my music a spotlight, because everybody was like, 'Why's everybody so mad? Let me listen to this album and see why people are so mad!', and they listened to the music, which is what I want. I don't care if they like me or not, or think I'm great, or care about my new haircut, I just want them to hear the music, and the Grammys helped them do that. It's done a little bit of the other stuff too, but not too much."

Surprisingly, some might feel, after last year's experience, Arie was even gracious enough to attend the ceremony again this year, an indication of the essentially stable, philosophical temperament that led no less an authority than Stevie Wonder to describe her in such glowing terms. "A gentle genius lives in the mind, voice and hands of this woman," he gushed, following up this compliment by selecting Arie when he was asked to nominate a modern songwriter of equivalent potential to Bob Dylan.

"That was an honour!" she whispers, flattered but embarrassed, then smiles broadly as she recalls her encounters with Wonder. "He's funny! He's very playful, and very wise – he purposely imparts wisdom to young people, he's always there to help, that's him: 'If you need anything, just call my answering machine and say it's an emergency, I'll call you back!' He's more silly than you would think, though – he and my mom are ridiculous together! I'm, like, 'Stop playin'!' "

Her mother has clearly been a huge influence on her outlook and career, bringing Arie and her brother up on her own after the failure of her marriage, and encouraging them to develop in their individual ways. Following the example of his father, a basketball player, Arie's brother gravitated towards sports, whilst she herself was more inspired by her mother's artistic side.

"We had a lot of information, and conversations, and music and art," she explains, "and a lot of different, interesting people that were my parents' friends, who I would see and hear talking. And books – books on yoga, lots of stuff, and that's reflected in my music."

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Even as a child, Arie knew she wanted to be a musician, but her ambition stalled in her teens, when she dropped out of school. It wasn't until she went to college to study jewellery and metalwork that her creative juices started flowing again.

"I got bored and thought, I don't want to do that any more; then when I got to college, I figured out how to do it another way, which was to write my own songs and teach myself how to play guitar, with no teacher, no sheet music, I just wanted to learn how on my own. I started out as a solo artist, 'cos I have a different voice, a different tone and range, and I wanted to just make songs for myself. I don't like loud music, so I wanted to make something that was all my taste: simple and quiet and beautiful."

Her self-belief and idiosyncratic style set Arie firmly apart from her contemporaries. She preferred braids and flowing African robes to the usual soul-diva uniform of big hair and microskirt, and in concert, she was happier sitting cross-legged with her guitar than strutting her stuff across the stage. Her material, meanwhile, as it appeared on Arie's strikingly mature debut album, Acoustic Soul, is a world away from the current African-American mainstream, closer in tone, sound and attitude to Seventies singer-songwriters such as Carole King, James Taylor, Donny Hathaway and her mentor Stevie Wonder than the soul divas, female rappers and R&B women she is invariably filed alongside.

Built on light, airy grooves driven by acoustic guitar, her songs are a far cry from the brutal, pornographic nihilism of so many of her contemporaries. Arie's attitude was clearly set out in "Video", her irresistible debut single: "I'm not the average girl from your video/ My worth is not determined by the price of my clothes/ And I ain't built like a supermodel/ But I learnt to love myself unconditionally/ Because I am a queen." It promotes a notion of respect completely different from that prevalent in hip-hop culture, where the term has become twisted to mean respect not for people or for their achievements but for power, guns and money.

"I think you should respect a person because they're your brother or your sister," she says. "Not only is it good for them; it's good for you – everything you put out comes back. The media is bombarding us with disrespectful images of women; I can't help but talk about respecting women, and feminine energy, period, respecting all art forms, all those things that are feminine."

It's an attitude perfectly encapsulated in a few lines from "Talk to Her", another song from Voyage to India, which asks men to treat all women as if they were their mother: "She could be the Queen of Sheba/ She could be a school teacher/ Home-maker or a lawyer." The idea of an equality of disparate careers, all equally deserving of respect, goes against the grain of a hip-hop culture that can espouse degrading views of women. Arie's voice rises as she confronts what is clearly a bête noire for her. "The way that people treat themselves, because they think that's the way it's supposed to be? That makes me so mad!" she says.

But how did things get that way? Not all that long ago, the African-American music scene, with names such as Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Gil Scott-Heron, was the most powerful political consciousness-raising force in the western world. How did their efforts and achievements come to be abandoned?

"It's just, time changes things, I guess," reflects Arie. "When they aren't part of an actual movement, like all the stuff that was going on in the late Sixties, it's easy for people of my generation to be far removed from it, because their parents might not even have been a part of it; so when they start making music, they don't have that mentality at all, y'know? They don't even know that they don't have the mentality, so they don't think in spiritual ideals – it's not even an option to put a spiritual thought into a song. The option is to just do what everyone else does. I don't suppose people actually think, 'I'm gonna make something that's really negative'; they just think, 'I wanna make music, so I'll make it in the same way everybody else is making it.' You can't really knock anybody for that, because sometimes, if a person doesn't know, they just don't know. I think a lot of people of my generation are just far removed from spirituality. A lot of people have religion, but that's not it."

Arie refuses to concede, however, that this situation is irreversible, and takes heart from the recent upsurge in anti-war feeling. Just two days before we met, the park across from her Park Lane hotel room was filled with the largest mass protest ever experienced in this country, mirrored by similar pacifist demonstrations across the globe. The pendulum, perhaps, is starting to swing back Arie's way.

"I have a theory," she proposes. "I think that [socially conscious, spiritual] kind of music is always prevalent when there's political upheaval in the world. And now there's a great political upheaval happening, people have to open their eyes. Sometimes I think that's why things like that happen, to change the consciousness of humanity. Like, everybody's acting crazy, everybody's asleep, we're not paying attention. Pay attention! How did George Bush win? Why wasn't there a big protest when he won? Everybody knew that the numbers were wrong, everybody knew they were lying, but there weren't a million people demonstrating in the park then. But sometimes, those unseen forces that God allows do things to wake us up. I think it will be reflected in the music."

India Arie's single 'Little Things' is out now on Motown Records

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