"It's Master P meets Bitches' Brew," says Meshell Ndegeocello when I
ask her to describe her new record. This comes out smoothly,
definitively, like 15 other music journalists this week alone have
posed the same question, and she's had time to polish up her answer.
I gotta give it to her: it's not a bad thumbnail description of
Cookie: The Anthropological Mix Tape, out June 4 on Maverick Records,
though I personally would have drawn parallels to D'Angelo's low-
simmer grooves or to the production of Sign Of the Times-era Prince
instead. But her response pretty much nails the album's sound.

Still, having said this, she seems unsatisfied. Over the course of
our conversation I discover that Ndegeocello is not a woman who likes
easy answers, and this likening of her music to the work of two other
artists seems to strike her as overly facile. It doesn't, the
singer/songwriter/bassist points out, capture how much of herself
she's put into these tracks. Cookie is "musical anthropology," she
explains, in the sense that "it's just me diggin' up my ideas about
my life, and how I fit in the world." It's also an ambitious attempt
to redirect the current of black music. "I really feel like when I'm
50," she says, "and I look back to the late '90s, and 2001, I'm not
sure that's what I'll want to have as the canon of where black music
was. I just want to add something into that."

Ndegeocello made a splash in 1993 with the killer singles "If That's
Your Boyfriend (He Wasn't Last Night)," and the Grammy-nominated duet
with John Mellencamp, "Wild Night." Her solo career since has been
marked by ups and downs, even as session gigs have seen her recording
with everyone from the Rolling Stones to Alanis Morissette. I ask if
the latter work is a drag, just something to pay the bills, but her
tone of voice makes it clear she means it when she says
that "collaboration is, probably, the only reason I play music. I get
to masturbate on my own music all day. It's nice to do other stuff,
and I'm always excited when anyone calls." She speaks of Morissette
with warmth and admiration – that's Ndegeocello holding the line on
two of Under Rug Swept's best tracks – but, notwithstanding her
insistence that "I'd rather bring someone else's vision to
life, 'cause it's a lot more fun," you can tell her passion is for
her own records.

This is true perhaps most particularly when she's speaking unhappily
about their reception. Her last album, released in 1999, was a break
from the standard R&B sound, and though critics praised it, it was
met rather coldly by the public. "I did the album Bitter," she
recounts, "and it was more acoustic, more open, and some of the
response I got from it, from, like, people of color, was that it
wasn't funky, or [they said] `you forgot the black community.' It's
hard, you know, when you have your white label saying they're not
able to market this to people of color, and then you have stations
that won't play it – probably because I'm not white – and then it was
just, like, I was tryin' to figure out where I fit." This impulse
toward self-exploration was the genesis for the tracks that
eventually became Cookie.

"When I, you know, turn on the TV," she says, "I really feel like I'm
experiencing a whole co-opted idea of blackness, with someone telling
me what that is, forcing me to fit in a certain genre. But I felt,
like, let me look at where I come from. Because when I wake up every
morning, I'm black, and my experiences are just, you know, as a
person, and I thought I'd share some of them." Since she found it
frustrating that the black community wasn't more receptive to the
sounds she'd explored on Bitter, her new tracks would try to
incorporate that kind of music, and others, into a jazzy rhythm and
blues groove. "When did people of color stop associating themselves
with different types of music?" she asks in a tone of bemusement. If
the new album has a "statement" to make, she says it's that "as an
African-American musician, all this music is mine. All of it. Every
bit of it. You can mix and match it, do whatever, but to have people
tell me it's not black music, or `you're alienating a black
audience,' that's absolutely absurd."

The result probably won't be an easy sell. Though it plays like a
party record – some tracks are made for a party of hundreds, while
others are best spun at a party of two – Cookie is a challenging
listen, and we live in a world where our radio stations aren't really
deserving of it. But this doesn't seem to bother Ndegeocello much.
She seems pretty happy with where her career is. When I bring up the
current crop of soul divas – India.Arie and that other one, Alicia
what's-her-name – who have found a level of success that has thus far
eluded Ndegeocello, she responds "Yeah, I envy their freedom," but
she doesn't quite sound like she means it. Charmingly, she
articulates the classic musician's it's-just-a-job credo with unusual
sincerity: "I want to be the first artist to say `keep all the money
you make off my record, and give me a salary so I can make enough
money and retire like a normal human being and, you know, have health
care.'"

And she makes it clear that there are more important things than
commercial success: "Herbie Hancock said this, he said `knowledge
corresponds to the past.' Everyone in the universe is becoming
knowledgeable, but basically what they're learning is the past, the
past constructed by whomever they've decided to make the canon out
of. So I'm trying to deal with the truth, which I feel is the future.
That's what Herbie says, that `knowledge corresponds to the past, the
truth corresponds to the future.' And I feel Cookie is just my bit of
truth." And did she mention it's pretty funky?