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Ashanti won a Grammy award for "Best Contemporary R&B Album" this year.
Ashanti in town
The self-styled "princess of hip-hop and R&B" is on a roll -- and she's rolling to Hawaii next week.
Ashanti
Where: Blaisdell Arena
When 7 p.m. Thursday
Tickets: $39.50
Call: 591-2211
It's been less than two years since the 22-year-old Ashanti first surfaced as a "hook girl," a vocalist with a bit part on another artist's single. She was in the vocal mix with rapper Ja Rule on his hit "Always on Time." By the end of 2002, she had topped the charts herself with her first solo single, "Foolish," and returned to the Billboard Hot 100 five more times with an assortment of projects that included solo hits, a reunion with Ja Rule and as a member of the Inc., a one-off by Irv Gotti, president of Murder Inc. Records and executive producer of her two hit albums, "Ashanti" and "Chapter II."
Her self-titled album sold more than 500,000 copies its first week out, the best debut ever by a female artist. By the end of 2002, the album was triple platinum, with sales in excess of 3 million copies.
The album also won Ashanti a Grammy award for "Best Contemporary R&B Album" this year.
After that, it wasn't unexpected that she would come under more critical scrutiny with the release of "Chapter II" this past July.
Rolling Stone awarded it a measly two stars out of a possible five for content it said "wears thin long before its halfway mark" and lyrics dominated by "dullard schoolgirl insights into love and heartache." And Entertainment Weekly found it "too mired in tired R&B conventions to achieve true magnificence." Even some of the nominally favorable reviews consisted of backhanded praise.
On the other hand, reviewers weren't generally among her fans the first time around, and "Chapter II" was a well-crafted continuation of the sound that had successfully launched her.
By the end of August, Ashanti's sophomore album was a certified platinum seller.
She experienced much the same response when "Foolish/Unfoolish: Reflections on Life," a collection of her high school poetry, was published last November by Hyperion Press. The fans, of course, loved it -- several online reviews expressed fans' feelings that Ashanti was speaking with honesty and candor about experiences shared by almost all American girls these days. The critics -- conveniently defined as "haters" by her record label and her fans -- said that her writing didn't even come close to that of Maya Angelou or Alice Walker and also fell short when compared with published works of Tupac Shakur and Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins, of TLC.
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But in the meantime it seems Ashanti has established herself as something more than a record producer's creation. Ashanti, who names Mary J. Blige, Ella Fitzgerald and '70s soul group Blue Magic as influences, writes her own material and often draws on her own experiences for inspiration, even though some are painful. She told Rolling Stone in 2002 that "Foolish" came out of a failed relationship with a guy who did a lot of "crazy' things and that "Over," another failed-relationship vignette, was also very personal.
Relationship issues aside, Ashanti's greatest public test to date came just over a year ago, when it was announced that she would receive the 2002 Soul Train Lady of Soul Aretha Franklin Entertainer of the Year Award. It precipitated a backlash campaign led by a 15-year-old soul music fan who suggested that Faith Evans, Alicia Keys, India.Irie and Aaliyah were more deserving of the honor. About 28,000 people joined in on an online petition campaign supporting that position, while others -- most notably "Soul Train" founder Don Cornelius -- rallied to Ashanti's defense.
But you can be sure that the young woman will be receiving a lot of love come Thursday night -- and her fans are sure to scoop up her next album, "Ashanti's Christmas," due next month.
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