I totally looked forward to doing my alter-ego band sessions after Daydream each night. Tommy was off in Italy a lot at the time, so I had a little space and air to do this bizarre, fun thing that was just for me. The band loved it, and we ended up with an album’s worth of songs, which we mixed and everything. My jokey “anger release” project ended up being a weirdly good satirical, underground, alternative rock thing. When Tommy and some of the other label folks heard it, they couldn’t believe we had done all that while recording Daydream. I even got the art department at the label to design a cover I had conceptualized. I wrote the title with pink lipstick over a Polaroid picture Tommy had taken of a giant dead cockroach in Italy. I told them to add a smashed-up eye shadow makeup palette. They laid it out, and it was perfectly grungy and cheeky. I got a lot of personal satisfaction out of making that “alternative” album. I made the sarcastic hardcore head-banging record no one was ever going to allow me to make. My assistant and I used to blast it in the car riding up the back streets of Westchester, singing at the top of our lungs, giving me a brief moment to be outwardly angry, irreverent, and free.
There was a song on the album called “Crave” (that I eventually renamed “Demented”). Tommy knew I had a talent for recognizing talent, so he created a boutique record label for me that I named Crave, inspired by the song.
The first act on the Crave label was a hip-hop group called the Negro League (they have cameos in “The Roof” video). They named themselves after famed Black baseball players like Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell, who’d had to form their own league because of segregation. They were young, fun, and all of them were fine. I just loved rolling into a party with them—they would chant “NEGROES! NEGROES!” Nothing ambiguous about that, dahling.
Later, when it became clear to Tommy that the marriage was not going to make it, Crave quickly became defunct, and the alt album conveniently disappeared. There was one small, sweet residual benefit from Crave and the Negro League. I cast one of my friends from the group as my shirtless, motorcycle-riding, lip-licking love interest in Jermaine’s “Sweetheart” video. I called him “Flask” (which was close to his name) because he was so nervous on the flight over to Bilbao, Spain, that he drank and got smashed. But his hangover played well on film, emphasizing his already dreamy eyes. He was my sweetheart for a very short time right after a very tough breakup, which I’ll get to soon enough. He was fun, fine, and just the thing to lick my wounds.
ONE SUMMER NIGHT, WE RAN AWAY FOR A WHILE …
In the wake of the success of the “Fantasy” remix featuring Ol’ Dirty Bastard I now had some ammunition that made it slightly easier for me to work with people outside of Tommy’s jurisdiction. I was starting to reach out to what I thought were the right collaborators, with whom I could achieve the sound I’d been hearing for a while, which included infusing hip-hop and working with a diversity of rappers. However, the old guard of A&R and music executives at the major labels didn’t know how to control or contain hip-hop and looked at me sideways for my suggestions.
Rap was making a lot of money really fast, so the smart execs raced to try to get a piece of it. And Tommy was no exception. He was smart. Though he’d always had a more traditional pop/ adult contemporary style in mind for me, he couldn’t deny that the industry and the audience were shifting. It was well established that Tommy didn’t particularly like rap or rappers, but he was a shrewd businessman, and despite his initial resistance, he understood that I had my finger on the cultural pulse. I was determined for my next single to sound more like the music I was hearing in my head all day, the music I’d been dreaming of. So began my work on Butterfly.
I had gotten to a place where I was trusted to choose people I was inspired by, not the predicable players. One of the most talented was a suave and scrappy producer out of Atlanta with a brilliant ear and instinct, Jermaine Dupri. Like me, Jermaine got in the game early. He was fiercely ambitious and super talented; by the time he was nineteen years old he’d discovered, developed, written, and produced multiplatinum hits for Kris Kross and secured a joint-venture deal for a record label, SoSo Def Recordings, with Sony and Columbia.
I was really inspired by the work he did on “Just Kickin’ It” with the fresh girl group also out of Atlanta—Xscape. It was intentionally “underproduced”; his track choices were sonically raw—just what I was looking for. Once I heard that song, I knew we should work together. Jermaine—aka JD, aka Jermash (as I call him)—and I instantly creatively clicked. As producers, we both had a fierce discipline in the studio, but we could also approach the music with abandon, unafraid to try new things. We could focus and flow together. It was a rare relationship, and we knew it.
Our first
