No More Drama Review

Family Affair is the reason this album is remembered and it deserves to be. Dr. Dre gives her a rubbery, low slung funk track that has nothing to do with anything she had recorded before, and she rides it with a lightness nobody knew she had, coining vocabulary that outlived the song. The title track is the opposite pole, a huge cathartic ballad built over the theme from a daytime drama, and the audacity of that choice pays off because she sings it like a woman kicking a door down.

What sits between the two is patchier. Several ballads follow the same blueprint of restraint then release, the guest producers pull in different directions, and the sequencing does not build. There is also a real tension in the writing, since the album insists on the healing while several songs are clearly not there yet. That tension is honest and it is not always shaped into a song. Two classics and a serviceable record.