FEATURE:
Trynna Finda Way
Nelly Furtado’s Woah, Nelly! at Twenty-Five
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MY association with…
IN THIS PHOTO: Nelly Furtado wears hoop earrings and a tank top backstage at a recording of a CD:UK at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London in 2001/PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Tonge/Getty Images
and memories of this album are so vivid. Released on 24th October, 2000, we celebrate twenty-five years of Nelly Furtado’s Whoa, Nelly! When the album came out, I was seventeen and in sixth-form college. I remember taking a trip to Amsterdam in 2001 with a couple of friends. This album, strangely, soundtracked that trip. I remember hearing songs like I’m Like a Bird and Turn Off the Light and really bonding with them. The whole album is brilliant. In terms of an introduction, the sequencing is perfect. The first six songs give us multiple sides to Furtado and her songwriting. Rare for an artist on their debut to have such a hand in the songwriting and put their stamp on an album. That sounds insulting, though so many artists today collaborate with others. Woah, Nelly! Is very much the artist putting her ideas and personality into the music. The Canadian legend released her seventh studio album, 7, last year. It is one of her most acclaimed. Whilst fans might think 2006’s Loose is her best album and one where she is at her most confident, expressive and physical, I love the sound of Woah, Nelly! It is such a beautifully eclectic and personal album for me. I know some of the criticism around her debut concerned the vocals and how Furtado had this unique style. In terms of stretching words and intonations. Tics and mannerisms that they were perhaps not attuned to. The way Nelly Furtado projects and delivers her lines if one of the standout aspects of Woah, Nelly! I am going to get some words about the album. However, as it is twenty-five on 24th October, I wanted to share my feelings about the album. I think it is one of the most underrated debuts ever. Hey, Man!, Shit on the Radio (Remember the Days), Baby Girl, Legend, I’m Like a Bird and Turn Off the Light is this perfect run! Opening the album and taking us to the halfway point without losing a step. So many different sounds and layers but this singular identity.
A number two success in Canada and the U.K., the strength of I’m Like a Bird (released on 25th September) no doubt helped sales. Perhaps its standout song, that track was played on the radio so much. It is still a favourite today. I heard the song today, in fact! Before getting to some reviews of the album, there is an interview from 2001 that I wanted to start with. There are not that many print interviews available from the debut album time. Whoa, Nelly! perhaps took a lot of people by surprise. Not used to a talent like Nelly Furtado. The Guardian spoke with Nelly Furtado and we find out so much about her background and path into music. This was an artist inspiring, passionate and committed from the start:
“To her manager, Nelly Furtado is "the new Madonna", to her record label "the female Beck", while her languid singing style has been likened to to that of fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell, and her Latino looks (inherited from Portuguese parents) to Jennifer Lopez. So much hype, so little time - it has been less than a year since 22-year-old Furtado came out of Toronto with the hippy-dippy hit I'm Like a Bird, quickly attracting praise that would embarrass a less confident soul. Just how confident is she?
When she signed her record deal, aged 20, she mused that she aspired to be Gandhi, Mother Teresa and Mona Lisa "all at the same time, to inspire people, but not in a cheap way".
Even allowing for the fact that Next Big Things often turn out not to be, the music business has reason to welcome Furtado. A year of diminishing returns has seen the industry fall out of love with Britney Spears and her many clones. Furtado (who shares her birthday, December 2, with Spears, though she pretends to be unaware of it) represents a fresh start, a female pop singer who is not just photogenic but who - crucially - writes, performs and produces her own material. This is so unusual in 2001 that it deserves to be repeated: Furtado does it herself. Her Toronto friends Gerald Eaton and Brian West co-produced and co-wrote part of her debut album, Whoa, Nelly! But in American biz-speak, Furtado is the very much the "vision".
Fifteen years ago, it wouldn't have been so remarkable for a chart artist to have artistic control, but the making of pop records has become a division of labour, with the components (the song, producer and "talent") purchased separately and brought together in a studio. To find it all in one package, especially a female one (more kudos for the label in question) is rare enough for veteran executive David Geffen, president of DreamWorks records, to have personally pursued her signature.
"One magazine said he let me stay in his mansion," she says with amusement. "Nooo. I just went over there one day. Well, you want to see what it's like." Evidently, the pad passed muster - she signed with DreamWorks after turning down a £3m offer elsewhere.
Following the lead of her friend Missy Elliott, with whom she rapped on a remix of Elliott's big hit Get Ur Freak On, Furtado has mastered the post-Britney recipe for chart success. What one needs to do, it seems, is to whisk up three-minute tunes from a variety of cross-cultural influences (Furtado uses African, Brazilian and Asian sounds as easily as she does the more familiar ones), then go out and sell them with north American can-do initiative. Given the right breaks, such as MTV and key radio support, can-do becomes has-done.
Today, she has already appeared on GMTV, and faces an afternoon of hobnobbing with the suits at her UK company, Polydor, where she must cut an idiosyncratic figure alongside the likes of Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Hear'Say. Our interview cuts into her lunch break, but she behaves as if nothing would give her more pleasure than to spend the next hour sharing her thoughts in a Kensington hotel room.
She begins chirpily and stays that way, answering even facetious questions with a desire to provide whatever's required. "So you're like a bird? What kind?" I inquire. "A seagull," she says seriously. "I was really inspired by a great book called Jonathan Livingston Seagull [the drippy new age classic by Richard Bach]."
When Furtado talks, it's not a case of gradually drawing her out until she hits her stride. She seems to have hit it as a teenage over-achiever in Victoria, British Columbia ("I joined lots of clubs and was always winning leadership awards"), and hasn't looked back. Her positivity is correlated by a sense of entitlement one frequently encounters in north Americans - she expected success, it duly came and she hasn't wasted energy agonising over whether she "deserves" it. Not that she has been indulging herself in the fruits of her labour, though. In the middle of an earnest rap about the need for women to defer gratification until they break through the glass ceiling, she laces her fingers together and says: "I'll quote Einstein here. 'Intelligence is sacrificing immediate pleasure for long-term gain.' That's the story of my life."
Furtado - whose immigrant parents named her Nelly Kim because "they didn't want to give me a Portuguese name in case I got made fun of at school" - astutely remarks that it has become commonplace. When America's urban radio stations heard her rapping on Get Ur Freak On (which she will perform with Elliott at a Michael Jackson tribute concert in New York next month), some assumed she was Jamaican. She was delighted.
"I want to empower people who don't know much about their culture. I've grown up not seeing my ethnicity reflected in Hollywood, so I was glad when Jennifer Lopez came out. I'm a flag-waver and I don't care because it's so much of what I am. I went to Portuguese language school from the age of four and I'm passionate about my heritage."
Her parents, Maria and Antonio, emigrated from the Azores, a chain of Portuguese islands that accounts for around 80% of Canada's 400,000-strong Portuguese population. Her closest friends at school were children of African, Indian and Latin American immigrants. She did well academically, receiving straight As and handing in 50-page extra projects for fun. "Over-achiever is the word," she says cheerfully. "I've always been the conscientious one in my family. I was the one who'd remember birthdays and would buy cards. My older sister was a rebel and I'd worry if she went out at night. But I was almost like an only child. I worked with my mom as a housekeeper in the motel where she worked, but I loved being by myself and spent hours alone in the park listening to music."
Her form of rebellion was, briefly, a girl gang called the Portuguese Mafia (which disbanded because Nelly couldn't throw rocks at school buses with enough petulance) and music. Through her parents she had a grounding in Latin sounds, which she adores enough to have plans for an eventual Brazilian CD. Her friends introduced her to Asian and dance music, and her brother to Oasis. She admits sending a fan letter to Liam Gallagher under the misapprehension that it was he rather than Noel who wrote the songs. By 18, she had moved to Toronto, formed a trip-hop band called Nelstar and begun making contacts on the music scene. It all happened quickly after that, just as she undoubtedly expected it to.
Whoa, Nelly! sold 300,000 copies in the UK, and the salsa-tinged Turn Off the Light has just become her second British top five single. She even has a coterie of male devotees, known as "Fur-verts". Things have fallen into place so neatly that her intention of being the Gandhi of the MTV generation must seem to her quite reasonable. "Oh, no, the Gandhi quote! I was 19 when I said that! I was just saying I like aspects of their characters. From individuality come great and wonderful things”.
I am not sure if Nelly Furtado will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of her debut or has anything to say about it. I hope that she shares a post, as it is one of the most extraordinary debut albums of the 2000s. In the first year of this century, we got an album of pure joy, invention and class. SLANT provided their verdict on Woah, Nelly! The sheer range and breadth of the material is one of the reasons why the album is so engaging. At a time when Pop music was perhaps more commercial and samey, Furtado delivered a debut album that was so much more fascinating and distinct than what her peers were offering:
“Flash forward a year or so later and Furtado’s sugar-pop “I’m Like a Bird” is in heavy rotation on College Television. MTV hadn’t quite latched onto the video yet, but I quickly realized that the fresh-faced Portuguese-Canadian singing was the same young woman who delivered the darker, edgier “Party.” Surely some major label suit had gotten a hold of Furtado and coaxed a Top 40 hit out of her.
A few weeks later a promotional copy of Furtado’s debut Whoa, Nelly! floated around the office of the record label where I worked at the time. I quickly discovered that, while “I’m Like a Bird” was the poppiest thing on the entire album, it was anything but a fluke. She directly confronts the issue on “Shit on the Radio (Remember the Days)” via a friend or lover who thinks she’s sold out: “It’s so much easier to stay down there guaranteeing you’re cool/Than to sit up here exposing myself trying to break through.”
Chockfull of instantly memorable hooks and lyrics beyond Furtado’s 20 years, Whoa, Nelly! was a delightful and refreshing antidote to the army of pop princesses and rap-metal bands that had taken over popular music at the turn of the millennium. Two years later, the album still sounds as fresh, opening with the sampled Kronos Quartet loop of “Hey, Man!” and cascading track by track into the trip-hop of “My Love Grows Deeper Part 1,” the trip-pop of the hit single “Turn Off the Light,” and the torchy swing of “Scared of You,” while maintaining a rare consistency.
“I’m changing my inflection and how I say the words/Maybe it will sound like something they’ve never heard,” she declares on “Party.” Furtado’s free-verse poetry flows meticulously over a Prince-esque riff on “Trynna Finda Way,” flawlessly summing up her post-rave generation ambivalence (“To see past my lethargy is hard I feign/The beauty of my youth is gone but the chemicals remain”), and her observations are like nothing you’ll hear from her pop-tart contemporaries (“Looks like I only love God when the sun shines my way,” she admits on the cartoonish “Well, Well”).
Furtado’s voice is certainly an acquired taste, but there’s no shortchanging her ability to ad lib along to a trumpet solo (“Baby Girl”) or spit rhymes like a caffeinated MC (“Legend,” “I Will Make U Cry,” in which she snidely taunts an unresponsive love interest by mawkishly weeping, “I will make you cry…boo-hoo!”). The impeccable pop-crackle production—clattering electronic percussion, turntable scratches, hip-hop beats, acoustic guitars, and string arrangements courtesy of Track & Field—never diminishes the resonance of Furtado’s voice, but you may need to read the lyric book to fully appreciate the breadth of her world”.
I am going to end with a feature that argues why Woah, Nelly! is more radical than you might think. Woah, Nelly! is a feminist and empowering status, as Furtado’s fame was so low-key. She did not follow the Pop crowd and redefined what the genre could be. Subversive and inspiring, it is not as celebrated as it should be. In 2018, FLOOD MAGAZINE heralded an album that was ahead of its time. It definitely signalled a change. I hope there is new evaluation on its twenty-fifth anniversary on 24th October:
“Contrastingly, the love for Whoa, Nelly!, recorded when Furtado was only twenty-one years old, is hard to come across on its eighteenth anniversary, even with our pervasive cultural nostalgia. That lack of admiration can’t be divorced from the fact that the Furtado we first met was hard to label. She was a pop star, but not a Christina or Britney analogue. Her debut was eclectic, drawing on her roots—her quavering, emotive voice evoking the pathos of traditional Portuguese fado music—among other pop, rock, and hip-hop influences collected from studying music and growing up in Victoria, British Columbia.
But Furtado wasn’t in the same sultry, exotic world Shakira exemplified with her 2001 English-language breakthrough single “Whenever, Wherever.” Furtado was too pop to be an indie music darling (she didn’t play guitar on stage), too eclectic and intriguing to be a pop starlet (she didn’t dance), both talented and unique, but not enough so to be remembered alongside ingenues like M.I.A. or Amy Winehouse. She’s not a Personality, having never been one for tabloids or reality shows, boasting an Instagram account with 126,000 followers and 0 pictures, whereas Shakira is a Guiness record-holder for her massive Facebook following. Her low-key style of fame is, by design, a feminist statement that can be traced directly back to the self she exposed on Whoa, Nelly!: an artist who stands firm in the belief that no person should be reduced to a one-dimensional front.
Listening to the album when I was still in grade school, its view of love, relationships, and individuality seemed to come from another world I was only just beginning to understand, far beyond the simplified schoolyard version of romance that flowed from the mouths of other Top 40 artists. “I’m Like a Bird” is a certified bop about fear of commitment and the threat of losing one’s self to loving another person. “Shit on the Radio” tells of dealing with a partner or friend too insecure to handle Furtado’s career success. “Turn Off the Light” covers the fallout after a breakup, the kind of self-questioning that happens after you lose someone you never even fully opened up to.
The album is a takeoff of the girl-power ethos that started with riot grrl and was co-opted by another group of idols from my youth—the Spice Girls. As Furtado explored specific interpersonal intricacies, she also marked a new era of empowering music by women that was as emotionally unguarded as it was danceable. There was something inherently political in the narratives Furtado weaved across the album, too. The line “I don’t want to be your baby girl” on the track “Baby Girl” was as much a statement to the music promotion machine as it was, within the song, directed at a patriarchal lover.
Eighteen years later, Whoa, Nelly!’s subversiveness is easier to parse. Its influence has come into clearer focus, as female artists, queer artists, and genre-defying iconoclasts pummel expectations of how a popular artist should look and sound. Unlike Furtado, they have a safety net in the Wild West of the Internet that did not exist back when labels still dictated who became famous or didn’t. With her 2017 independent album The Ride, Furtado continues to be every bit as ungraspable as she was in 2000, veering away from the artist we knew on Loose, and embracing sounds as disparate as stripped-down indie rock and industrial-tinged dance music. Critics praised the effort, with Billboard going so far as to call it “the most slept-on release of 2017.” But that ability to experiment was truly honed at the turn of the century with her debut. Whoa, Nelly! may never be celebrated as the work of feminist rebellion that it is—but as Furtado expresses on the album, she wasn’t vying for our approval anyway”.
I think a lot of people who have written about Woah, Nelly! are my sort of age. In college/university when it came out, we were at that stage of life when we were looking to discover something different. A new century, this was a time of personal transformation and growth for me. Woah, Nelly! was this bolt from the blue. An exceptional debut album from such a wonderful artist! Whilst some artists feel honed in or directed by a label and commercial expectations on their debut album, Woah, Nelly! sees the incredible Ms. Furtado…
FREE as a bird.