Electrik Red: "How to Be a Lady: Volume 1"

[Live Your Life]

This was a short-lived group signed to The-Dream's now defunct RadioKilla Records imprint through Def Jam. All songs were written and composed by Tricky Stewart and The-Dream, except "Friend Lover" and "9 to 5," which The-Dream did with L.O.S. da Mystro. This album is INSANE. It bombed, but it's honestly one of my favorite albums of the 2000s.

AllMusic gave the album 4/5 stars:

A brash and tightly knit female quartet, not a soft drink, with the worst name for an R&B group since MoKenStef or maybe even Po' Broke & Lonely?, Electrik Red danced behind several high-profile acts (Usher, Ciara) prior to recording their debut album. Pointedly titled How to Be a Lady, Vol. 1, they knocked it out within the span of two weeks with sovereign songwriting/production team Terius "The-Dream" Nash and Christopher "Tricky" Stewart, with Carlos McKinney in place of Stewart on two tracks. While How to Be a Lady could almost pass as a Naomi Allen solo album -- she takes the majority of the leads, occasionally sharing them, with a teasing yet frank huskiness not unlike that of Kelis or the offspring of Millie Jackson -- the presence of her partners is almost always felt, and together they make like an all-conquering crew of maneaters who do precisely what they want without taking themselves too seriously. This is most bluntly exemplified on "W.F.Y." (as in "we f*ck you), a sleek thump-and-glide in which a mate is compared to a stray dog, among other things: "You was like Flash in the sheets/So fast I had to finish when you leave." There's also the riotous "Kill Bill," the best female R&B revenge fantasy since Brooke Valentine's "I Want You Dead." But the bottom line is that the album has some of the best pop-R&B songs of 2009, like the sweet and elastic "So Good" (owing a deep sonic debt to Prince's "If I Was Your Girlfriend"), "Devotion" (a less innocent rewrite of Ciara's "Promise"), "Drink in My Cup" (a sleazy crunk anthem), and "Bed Rest" (a slow jam as light as lemon meringue, the closest they get to a "Baby-Baby-Baby"). On the surface, Electrik Red might be to the-Dream what the Mary Jane Girls were to Rick James and what Vanity 6 were to Prince, yet a little exposure indicates that the group would not hesitate to dump their principal lyricist in a trunk for stepping out of line -- just so they could say they did it -- and somehow become more powerful.

I also liked Pitchfork's review of the album. They gave it a 8.2/10:

"I'm not a freak, I'm not a nasty ho... well I'm lying, but I'm classy though," Electrik Red member Binkie extemporizes on "Muah", the opener to the R&B group's debut album, How to Be a Lady, Volume 1. It's not the first evidence that the album's title is very much tongue in cheek. For Electrik Red, class is a nebulous quality, synonymous with an amorphous girl power cobbled together from the last decade of hip-hop and R&B femme fatales (Beyoncé, Lil' Kim, Kelis, Ciara). Accordingly, Electrik Red see no contradiction between slave-driving dominance ("W.F.Y.") and slavish submission ("Bed Rest"), modern female independence ("Friend Lover") and its easy loss ("So Good"), mercantile sexual consumerism ("P Is for Power") and incommensurate sexual generosity ("Devotion").

If that sounds like a criticism, it's not meant to be: Electrik Red understand that we don't know what we want even when we sound like we do; if they seem to conflate love and sex a little too freely, well, life's like that when the going's good. It's not a concept album, but if How to Be a Lady has a central concept, it's that of the fling, the romantic rendezvous that starts off as something fun and ends up much more intense and involved. And the music feels like a fling, too, its easy comforts concealing more mysterious, urgent impulses. Mostly written and produced by R&B singer The-Dream and his in-house production team (C. "Tricky" Stewart, L.O.S. Da Mystro), the album features that same penchant for intoxicatingly lush, swirly slow jams and rococo, information-overload uptempo tracks that characterize The-Dream's own work, not to mention lyrics that alternate between perfect, ridiculous, and perfectly ridiculous ("Tonight's the night, so baby order/ Now I'm biting on your body like an hors doeurve").

Undeniably, Electrik Red are contemporary R&B formula: four harmonizing and occasionally rapping vocalists covering the spectrum from breathy innocence to sly rasp; overripe synthetic productions drunk on 1980s Prince, R Kelly, and Polow Da Don; a near total obliviousness to matters outside of sex and dancing and their attendant concerns. Their confidence is the confidence of an entire genre, detached from the hallmarks of individualism that traditionally attract plaudits, such that it doesn't really matter whether it's Lesley or Naomi who takes time out from "W.F.Y." to compliment you on that thing that you do with your tongue ("Amazing. Stupendous. Marvelous. Exciting.") but then criticize you for wearing skinny jeans.

How to Be a Lady is filled with gratuitous little surprises: the absurd and brilliant cod-operatic backing vocals in the rococo chorus of "Freaky Freaky"; the commanding dance instructions ("Cup, sip, yep... yurrr/ Two step, stop... yurrr") that interrupt the icy club banger "Drink in My Cup"; the sudden shard of inadvertent melancholy that invades the breezy "Friend Lover" as Naomi tells her friend with benefits, "You can't stay past five/ I gotta be at work by nine!" Such moments make Electrik Red's music feel as real and lived-in as dazzling, shiny R&B can hope to, possessing a capacity for rightness that cannot be reduced to lyrical sophistication, performative flair, or production novelty, but is borne of the kind of charisma you can possess when you take success for granted. And because Electrik Red take it for granted, it's tempting to adopt the same stance as listener; but these songs have already outsmarted you. As "So Good" puts it, "I shouldn't have let you hit that/ 'Cause now I can't forget that."

[horchata]

Still hate how they never got a proper follow up. It's a bit ridiculous probably to most, but this really is one of my absolute favorite girl group albums to date. The-Dream can kind of be a hit or a miss with his production work, but with this album he really killed all aspects of the production of it. "Muah" especially is a masterpiece.

[Linnethia Monique]

When it comes to girl group albums this is one of my favorites! Friend Lover is the culmination of every record Prince did for Vanity and Apollonia 6 put together. Kill Bill is simply amazing, Bed Rest is a jam and Devotion is a masterpiece. I thought they could've had some niche because they were the best female group when it came to dancing since they've appeared in so many of our favorite videos. I remembered Sarah, Binkie, and Lesley from the Usher "U Don't Have to Call" music video and Soul Train Awards performance.

Binkie was flubbing during their showcase but they still killed it.

I'm so mad that they didn't work out, even though they are all still friends, because their second album was going to be a banger!


Plus the demos from when they were first with Rodney Jerkins doing a development deal before Tricky, The-Dream, and LOS took over were good too! Blind is EVERYTHING! Keri's demo leaked afterwards and it doesn't hold a candle to theirs.

[Wave.]

Bruh. Freaky Freaky was that shit.

[Deleted]

I loved this album. Played it constantly in my car in 2009.