There may be no trade more rife with grifters than the world of self-help. There are countless quacks selling the better, brighter you — ways to attract and be a better partner, to find joy or inner peace, to achieve your greatest potential. To paraphrase Jessica Lamb-Shapiro, author of Promise Land: My Journey Through America's Self-Help Culture: You could always be richer, hotter, smarter, happier, more popular or more successful. The endless pursuit of enhancement has become a grind, where the surest outcome is someone else profiting from our latent insecurities.
Somewhere far beyond this sea of charlatans, basking on a shore in the glow of radical acceptance, resides Jill Scott. Self-improvement has been the keystone of her career, from her transformative Words and Sounds trilogy — which opened with the most existential of questions, Who is Jill Scott? — to 2015's Woman, an album she referred to as the study of a human being, exploring the accountability of adulthood, finding and following one's inner voice. Probing the ideals of self-care by way of down-to-earth soul and holistic beat poetry, Scott presents her songs as a gateway for the seekers in her flock. The entire creative ethos for the Jill Scott experience is right there in her 2004 single "Golden": "I'm taking my own freedom, putting it in my song / Singing loud and strong, grooving all day long," she sings, evoking a validating process that only begets more freedom.
To Whom This May Concern (Feb. 13), her first album in over a decade, is the most explicit self-help manifesto of her career. She has repeatedly referred to it as a "personal revolution," geared toward spurring those on the necessary frequency toward self-actualization. "I want it to feel like there's a void when it's over, where the silence is too loud and either you're going to get up and do something or you're going to start the record over," she told artist Bisa Butler in a conversation for T magazine. "You're going to really think about where you are and if it's what you actually want."
So much of Scott's message for 25 years has been reliant on a certainty of self, a willingness to let muscle memory kick in. A neo-soul matriarch whose early spoken-word work was smuggled onto rhythmic airplay through collabs with The Roots, she outright announced R&B, jazz and hip-hop as commensurate inspirations in the opening moments of her 2000 debut. While she has enjoyed success and acclaim — a platinum album, two gold, Grammy wins — she was never a crossover star, instead building a cult following by staying true to her creative identity. To Whom This May Concern bears the fruits of this approach: She doesn't need new fans because she has her fans, those dedicated to the refreshing sound world she has opened up to them.
An LP of Boho affirmations, To Whom This May Concern is exactly what you might expect from Jill Scott, and yet it also toys with those expectations. The music is both locked-in and freewheeling, full of well-furnished, top-of-the-line musicianship but noncommittal about nearly everything else — genre, song structure, rhythm and melody. Lyrically it is uninhibited, as much about the journey traveled as everything left to achieve. For every "Be Great," an affirmational jam that feels like the flipside of 2007's "Hate on Me," there is something like "The Math," which tries to trace the triggers for our collective dissatisfaction back to their source.
Scott is clearly in communion with her tribe here, outside world be damned. "Our love is rhythm and charm / It resonates in every space," she sings on "Beautiful People." The experience isn't all about positivity, though. "Pay U on Tuesday" tries to whoosah its way through the day-to-day irritants that chip away at optimism, and the strutting "BPOTY" (biggest pimp of the year) takes aim at the leeches sucking the life out of her community, with a winking guest spot for Too $hort. Even her most personal musings on passion, devotion, sex, beauty standards, faith and connection possess an empathic quality: "In me is you, in you is me," she sings on the electro cut "Right Here Right Now."
The underlying principle is that no one just falls out of a coconut tree: Existing in the context of all that came before you is the impetus of any personal revolution. "Offdaback" expresses this literally, its ancestral roll call of artists and activists manifesting a self-sustaining creative continuum: "They did it for themselves, but ultimately, they did it for us," she says, carrying the torch. "Me 4" demonstrates it sonically, taking the "What Happened to That Boy" drums and making them the heartbeat for a cautionary tale about not trusting your intuition. An ode to Nikki Giovanni, who inspired Scott to start writing, bridges the poetic and rhythmic divide between spoken word and rap alongside third-eye lyricist Ab-Soul; "Norf Side," with Tierra Whack, goes a step further and makes it a Philly thing. In Scott's capable hands, detours don't have to be a departure from her creative base. Riffing on personal and artistic history is a catalyst for advancement within and without.
Listening to the spirit quests of To Whom This May Concern, it's hard not to think about the conflicting growth curve of another prominent R&B album released the same day: ICON, by the Maryland crooner Brent Faiyaz. In the 2020s, Faiyaz has earned a reputation as an R&B manipulator for the swipe generation, with blunt, dismissive lyrics performed through shrugs. "They just wanna f*** with you / 'Cause they know I f*** with you," he sang on the Jake One co-produced "Been Away." On the 2022 album Wasteland and the 2023 mixtape Larger Than Life, Faiyaz was a pickup artist posing as a reluctant swain, stuntin' and gaslighting across moody songs that mined the retrofuturistic grooves of turn-of-the-millennium hip-hop soul: "B*** where you gon' go after you been with me?" he asked on "ROLE MODEL." His idea of romance, on songs like "ALL MINE" and "Forever Yours," was half-hearted and noncommittal, as if he couldn't really lie to himself, only ever doing his real pining after the situationship had been torpedoed by his negligence.
ICON is a dramatic break from his hallmarks of rap-inflected swagger and blasé energy. Enlisting Raphael Saadiq as the executive producer, and sprinting away from the "toxic" label that has stuck to his music, signpost a desire from Faiyaz to clean up his act and become the R&B lover boy of the pop imagination. "There's nothing you can't have from me / And the world is yours / I'll write your name on evеry shore," he whines over the twinkling synths of "world is yours." There's nothing wrong with reinvention, and it's probably for the best that our most disillusioned R&B singers are longing for true romance again. (I wrote, only months ago, I couldn't imagine Faiyaz baring his heart on his sleeve, and yet here he is.) Yet the new music, while competent and streamlined in spots — better vocals, less filler, bearing a distinctly vintage sheen — is such a stark break from the stylized and personality-driven songs that were his trademark as to be jarring, not so much an evolution as a makeover. Where To Whom This May Concern leans specifically into its creator's established purview, ICON feels like an attempted repositioning in the market, angling for the broader appeal of centrality.
Scott has had plenty to say about putting energy out in the universe so that it might reach those it is meant for, but she has also delivered practical advice for navigating a sustainable career. "You work hard in your 20s. You work smart in your 30s. You work how you want in your 40s. You work when you want to in your 50s. And you work if you want in your 60s," she said in an interview with Angie Martinez. "That's the way that I'm planning my life." Faiyaz, who recently turned 30, told Rolling Stone last July that everything he'd been working on lately was about displaying a "range of concepts, principles, emotions, and experiences. Innocence versus Indecency. Vulnerability versus guardedness." But apparently he wasn't satisfied with the result, and by October it was revealed that he had scrapped a finished album in favor of a new direction, introduced by the throwback single "have to.," which channeled the spirit of Guy and New Edition ballads. Soon after, he cut his afro and debuted a tight fade. "This is probably the most disciplined I've ever been in my life, personally and creatively," he told Flaunt magazine.
Discipline seems to define his new ethic, and he is adamant about the work put into his adult contemporary rebrand — longer studio sessions, rewriting lyrics, checking and rechecking mixes — but that increased refinement and attention to detail may be coming at the expense of his core aesthetic. Songs like "other side." and "pure fantasy." sound as if they are rooting for a reboot of quiet storm radio, treating Michael Jackson, Keith Sweat, Billy Ocean and Al B. Sure! like a constellation guiding him to an anachronistic pop-R&B promised land. ICON's push toward these archetypes sacrifices what felt like the essentials of his on-record persona: its ease and nonchalance, the flaws in his voice aligning with the aura of the figure he was cutting. A charitable interpretation might be that Brent Faiyaz really is in his lover boy era, the culmination of whatever love may have inspired him — that he's outgrown the playboy life, and his art is merely a reflection of his new lived reality. Another reading is that he is aware of the broader perception of his music, has come to see its judgment as a prison and yearns to make the cleanest possible break. But nothing in either scenario requires the music to become more platitudinous. The dramatic about-face toward an '80s template on this album ultimately masks a regression in the songwriting, from a signature POV to historical cosplay.
Jill Scott's parallel moves this year are proof that relatability needn't strip an artist of their individuality. This is most clear in the distance between ICON's go-for-broke pastiche and To Whom This May Concern songs like "A Universe" and "Liftin' Me Up," which are as romantic as they are expressive. "I am the best I can, joyful woman, but life ain't always sweet / I gotta keep acknowledging myself, check in on how I'm doing, I gotta keep loving on me," she says in the latter's intro, before presenting the support of a loving partner as a complementary component of that sustained self-maintenance. Becoming the better, brighter you shouldn't mean immolating the person you were before: With time and care, an artist can hunker so deep into their niche that they begin to broaden its spectrum.
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