It began with the lead single “Love Rain.” The first verse documents the courtship rituals of two regular young people from Scott’s hometown of Philadelphia: long walks, long talks, and a lot of sex, all of which accompanies the rapid demise of summer love. 1 in 2000, there were still too few chronicles of what love and sex were like for the “average” woman. But in this environment, who could be sure how average people did it? When Jill Scott released her debut album, Who is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. Normal was variety and divergence it was something other than the bleached blondes, video vixens, six-packs, brooding faces that filled our screens. It was fat people loving skinny people, and vice versa. It had ties to people and places and ideas, instead of decamping for New York or L.A. Regular was the quiet that filled the room after turning off a blaring celebrity entertainment show. It was a healthy body image and enthusiastic consent it was the freedom to be wholesome instead of pitching moralistically between abstinence and nastiness.
To be regular, average, normal was in defiance of that era’s celebrity maximalism. This was the era that gave us Akinyele’s “ Put It in Your Mouth” and Khia’s “ My Neck, My Back,” released about six years apart, with the Nas and Bravehearts’ “ Oochie Wally” surfacing in between. From boy bands, who socialized young girls to puritanically fixate on love and relationships, to hip-hop, which was the domain of hedonists. Film and television reinforced this message (“The Bachelor” and “Extreme Makeover” took it to the extreme), but so did music.
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