Flavor in Your Ear: Add a Little Spice to Life

Salt 'N' Pepa, as befits their name, serve things up with zest. In choosing to title their latest album Brand New, the distaff Dynamic Duo of rap are practicing their most characteristic double-play: making a straight-up bold declaration that is also coyly ironic.

Brand New, you see, is the final version of an album that should have hit stores two years ago, before shake-ups at their label and changes in their management forced a series of delays. The group's visibility, never higher than after 1993's multi-platinum Very Necessary album, was suddenly limited to guerrilla appearances on benefit albums, ill-starred soundtracks (anyone remember Kazaam?) and the inevitable MTV Party to Go.

Salt 'N' Pepa knows that four years is the pop-cultural equivalent of a geologic Age, particularly in the fickle hip-hop world. Then again, Very Necessary, with its two top-five singles in "Shoop" and "Whatta Man", was itself an unexpected success after the group's three-year absence from the spotlight. No rap artists have endured and developed as steadily and brilliantly as Cheryl "Salt" James and Sandy "Pepa" Denton. Just ask Run-DMC and Big Daddy Kane, if you can find them.

Which brings us back to Brand New, an album that both knows its own high stakes and remembers how these girls have kept things running so far. Brand New titillates immediately with its promise of departure and regeneration--it is the first album which Salt and Pepa have sole executive-producing credit--but nonetheless stays carefully within the bounds of fan expectations.

The end result is an album that feels exceedingly...comfortable. There is no "first listening" of Brand New, because chances are that somewhere, sometime, you've heard most of it before. But isn't that true for most music these days? What makes Brand New such buoyant, brassy fun is that Salt 'N' Pepa are savvy enough to market their own dues-paying and past success as an uptown version of street cred: call it Workhorse Chic.

Salt 'N' Pepa are, L.L. Cool J excepted, the only working rappers who were prominent, even crucial, within rap's original rise to prominence. As such, they actually belong to the legacy of grooves, modes, and old-school stylings that upstarts like Puff Daddy are tripping over themselves to sample. If nothing on Brand New is as beguilingly woven or as, well, brand new as the best B.I.G. or the slinkiest Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliot, almost every song is imbued with Salt 'N' Pepa's inimitable and hard-earned funky charisma.

Plus the damn things groove. Artists seeking more control of their music often forget what first made them appealing. Witness Janet Jackson's cringingly self-conscious The Velvet Rope, an album so calculated to seduce that its emotional accessibility is roughly that of your average glacier. The last thing Salt 'N' Pepa would do is forget to have fun.

The mantra of the album is the refrain of its second track, "Good Life," where the women incant in a breezy calypso lilt, "I'm livin' a good life, no more trouble in sight." Beginning with their Calvin Coolidge duds on the CD cover, the ladies propound a hip-hop-capitalist work ethic throughout Brand New. Sure they are "Livin' good, like a Nubian Queen should," but only because, as honorary member Spinderella puts it later in the track, "I busted my ass to get to the cream."

Of course, for all their caviar and fast cars, the girls still want to shoop, and several tracks capture the same roilingly playful sexuality that has been a group trademark since 1987's "Push It." Few of the songs on Brand New work as effectively away from the album as they do within it--there is no "Shoop" or "Expression" here--but the hormones are bouncing as brazenly as ever.

In "Say Ooh," for example, Salt, Pepa and Spin cruise the city in a drop-top convertible cruising for Mr. Irresistible: "I need to make you happy/You just so black and nappy/Come here, and make it snappy." For the sequel to that excursion, skip forward to "Gitty Up," in which the requisite beefy baritone promises to make our girls "sweat till you drench your blouse and your skirt." Our Salt 'N' Pepa do not "perspire."

Never have they shied away from tackling more sober subjects, Brand New remains clear-eyed about both social injustice and sexual imprudence. "Imagine," an anti-racism track with a surprisingly earthy guest vocal from Sheryl Crow, stands too preciously beside its obvious ancestry in the namesake John Lennon tune to register very strongly. More effective is "The Clock Is Ticking," a rallying cry to abused women with an unaffected awareness of How Bad It Can Get: "You got kids, you got bills/You ain't got skills, you wanna take pills."

As producers, Salt 'N' Pepa do not yet have the stylistic daring of longtime helpmate Herby "Luvbug" Azor, often settling for a silky but mostly anonymous layering of vocals and synths. Salt, though, crafts a trio of bracing cuts to close the album. "Silly of You," a fairly tired "I-earn-the-dough" ego track, does boast an insinuating opium-den vibe; "The Clock Is Ticking" incorporates electric guitars and vocal distortions more freshly than any R&B since En Vogue's "Free Your Mind"; and "Hold On," the final track, makes the unlikely choice of Brandy's lightweight hit "Baby" as the sample-basis for one of Kirk Franklin's bebop spiritual revivals.

If Brand New ends even more strongly than it begins, that's one more testament to the resilience of its creators. Their insistence on respect--as women, as artists and as romantic partners--is a welcome change from much of today's black music scene, dishearteningly crowded with all-cried-out martyr-masochists and generic balladeers. Brand New scales few new heights for the self-proclaimed Queens of Queens, but the album leaves no doubt that Salt 'N' Pepa are the real spice girls. Everyone else is a wannabe.