4. Destiny’s ChildThe Writing’s On The Wall
My God, what an album. I always assumed it was Timabaland who produced it, but it was actually Missy Elliot. And it was one of my other tapes that I had that I would make up dance moves too. It’s just inherently funny, kids singing about grown-up things. I performed this album a lot. In retrospect, we’ve learned a lot about that theme in the last few years, with the Michael Jackson revelations and such. But it’s interesting as my daughter’s favourite music is Japanese and the lyrics are nothing to do with love or anything like that. She likes [Japanese singer] Kary Pamyu Pamyu and I looked up the lyrics and it’s all really wholesome, like ‘I’m grown up now, I miss my old teachers’. I was singing ‘Babycakes’ the other day to Mike and he was saying that’s fine. But I just exclaimed, ‘Mike, it’s about being licked out!’ I was singing this to Reenie our dog, calling her ‘Babycakes!’ as I dropped my phone in shit in the woods earlier this week, actually…
But back to the album, I love how it was about girl power but in a very genuine way, which in the age of the Spice Girls doing it in a contrived way, was quite something. ‘Sweet Sixteen’ is a good example of that. Plus there’s so many sweet jams on there, I mean ‘Temptation’, come on? It was an all-rounder of an album that smoothly changed the setting without losing its integrity. To have an album with so many hits on it that still sounds like it has an integrated storyline is no mean feat, then or now for that matter.
