Keyshia Cole- "You've Changed"

[The Rebirth Of ffej]

I LOVE this track from Keysh "Da Beast's" debbut album (Check mt sig. for prices!! Go cop it!) I don't know why it's notghing very special but it just got under my skin JAM!!!!!!!

[real2reel]

I think alot of females who buy her album would like it because they can relate to her situations. I love the sample, the song is nice. You've Changed should be the 3rd single instead of Love.

[Tyler46]

real2reel said:

You've Changed should be the 3rd single instead of Love.

If she even gets one

[The Rebirth Of ffej]

She will cus her albums gonna have an amazing first week

[strong4PMB!]

"You got some money and you changed!" or whatever. JAM! This was one of the stand outs from my Keysh "Da Beast" album listening party last night.

[Tyler46]

adatu7 said:

She will cus her albums gonna have an amazing first week

What makes you so sure?

[strong4PMB!]

On track to sell 100k+, Top 10! Get it, chick!

[Me. I Am Justin...]

This is definitely a stand out for me. Like DC says, "I'm lovin' it, I'm lovin' it!!".

[FADE AWAY]

This is my favorite song on the album.

[Deleted]

whachugondo85 said:

This is my favorite song on the album.

It's my third favorite after "I Changed My Mind" and "I Just Want It To Be Over".

[Bob]

I already liked this song a lot but, turns out the album version is even better and also has a new bridge. This song was the clear single all along, whoever is making those choices for her is messing up. This has the best chance to do something, it's got a STRONG hook and a good flow.

[FADE AWAY]

Call and response



THERE ARE SONGS , and then there are answer songs. Just because the former outnumber the latter by a ratio of a million to one doesn't mean answer songs are inherently more special – in fact, they're often doomed to obscurity, usually deemed throwaway inferiors to the popular hits (at worst) and classics (at best) that serve as their inspiration. One of my all-time favorite singers, bolt-throwing Esther Phillips, recorded an answer to Percy Faith's "When a Man Loves a Woman" called (of course) "When a Woman Loves a Man," but – Nora Ephron and Michael Bolton be damned – I'll take Faith's tune over Phillips's any day of the week.

"Perpetratin' with the hos, broken promises, please / It ain't about the hype that you're givin' me," Keyshia Cole sighs with a mixture of sweet melodicism and sour resignation at the end of "You've Changed," a track on her new album, The Way It Is (A&M). One more harmony woven into a composition that already spills over with sing-along potential, the moment elevates "You've Changed" from a strong album track on a noteworthy debut to one of the best R&B songs of the year. There's a rare beauty to the way Cole's own striving, straining-but-pure voice gracefully dances and dives in and around the track's sampled soul cries, taken from Bobby Glenn's "Sounds Like a Love Song."

If those soul cries sound familiar, that's because they also lace a different like-a-love-song breakup tale: "Song Cry," by Jay-Z. On The Blueprint and his MTV Unplugged album (both Roc-a-Fella), "Song Cry" gives Jay-Z the opportunity to have his heartache and fake it too. "Can't see 'em comin' down my eyes / So I gotta make the song cry," Hova gruffly repeats in the chorus, insinuating that he's too manly to show the emotions he really feels. It's a tough sell, and not necessarily worth buying – the rest of the track includes a fair share of confession and apology, yet there's something maddening about its boastfulness in the face of a ruined relationship, not to mention the usual double standards: Jay-Z can hook up with all the groupies he wants, but all it takes is one man for him to consider his ex a "good girl gone bad."

On "You've Changed," Oakland native Cole answers Jay-Z's accusations and assertions, line by line, running through her own gallery of memories – from skeptical love at first sight to disbelief in the face of losing her man (who, in a sense, has lost himself) to moneyed fame. Her song has a layered musicality that Jay-Z's track lacks, melancholy building as her muscular voice reaches higher and higher. Her lyrics might not be as detailed, but she's working within R&B's tighter constraints rather than rap's word-driven impulses. On her album's "Love, I Thought You Had My Back," Cole demonstrates a belting power and hook-crafting ability that's equal to the classic soul material that forms the bedrock of "Song Cry"; on "You've Changed," she rejects Jay-Z's viewpoint and embraces the music he used as his soundtrack.

Jay-Z's probably heard the track (his chief late-era producer, Kanye West, contributes to Cole's album), but who knows what he thinks of it. The dialogue between "Song Cry" and "You've Changed" is the most rewarding song-and-answer one-two punch in recent hip-hop and R&B history, but it's just one of many recent examples proving that those genres have the decades-old answer-song phenomenon on lock. Some recent tracks have been radio- and download-only affairs, such as Lil' Mo's "21 Answers" to 50 Cent's questions (more successful than her weak romantic-advice take on Biggie's "10 Crack Commandments"), while others qualify more as an artist's thematically different approach to the hottest sound of the moment, such as Mary J. Blige's "Hooked," which outdid Beyoncé at remaking 50 Cent's "In da Club."

Answer songs have long lent themselves to dialogues, if not outright wars, between the sexes, a trait tailor-made for the gender-flexing in hip-hop and R&B genuflections. When Khia unleashed "My Neck, My Back," in 2001, E-40 – disgruntled at the spectacle of females high-fiving each other at the club – tried to strike back with "My Dick, My Sac." The queen of the answer song just might be Roxanne Shanté, the sass-toned, motormouth teenage rapper who burst onto the early-'80s hip-hop scene with "Roxanne's Revenge" – just one of many responses to UTFO's "Roxanne, Roxanne," but undoubtedly the rudest and funniest. (In comparison, the Real Roxanne sounded fake.) Over a brief but brilliant span of time, the artistically superior but commercially challenged Shanté reigned most supreme when talking back to someone, whether she was mocking L'Trimm ("Wack It"), telling KRS-One that his name sounded "like a wack radio station," or taking down every other female rapper in the peerlessly hilarious "Big Mama."

Still, Shanté ultimately specialized in the dis track, not the same creature as an answer song, which – like Cole's "You've Changed" – shares roughly the same sound and song structure of the original. The '90s brought "No Pigeons," Sporty Thieves' crude but funny ("Yo' pussy ain't worth the Ramada") reply to TLC's "No Scrubs," and perhaps because the producer once known as Puffy never met a sample he didn't want to run into the ground, one can read all sorts of complicated behind-the-songs drama in the methods of Faith Evans's Faithfully (Bad Boy); it obliquely answered some of Biggie's most notorious moments, from "Who Shot Ya?," whose tense, flute-punctuated strut Evans twists into a glimpse at a grieving widow's anguish, to "Juicy," which – with an implicit subtlety Lil' Kim has always lacked – she remakes into an anthem of faithfulness to (among other things) her late husband's memory.

Once upon a time not long ago, the get-that-cash unity of East Coast hip-hop meant Foxy Brown might testify her loyalty to the Firm over the same haunting piano melody that Blige had already used to defeatedly affirm her love. Repaying the favor, Firm leader Jay-Z let Blige rework a vampy keyboard track from his Reasonable Doubt (Priority) on Share My World (MCA). This share-alike mentality reached a new stage this year, when the Game remade his latest single "Dreams" into a tribute to Blige called "MVP", and the pair performed the track at the BET Awards. Maybe it's more a remix than an answer song, but the Game and Blige's collabo adds respectful life to the solemn original, which pays homage to Aaliyah and Left Eye and is dedicated to Venus and Serena Williams's late older sister. Still, it doesn't quite resonate with the same depth as Cole's "You've Changed," a song born from the desire to tell a different side of an already-told story. Cole reconnects with the impulses behind the first R&B answer songs and, in the process, crafts one of the genre's 2005 highlights.

[hidizzyguy]

^^^ can someone give me a synopsis for this?... i do not have the time to read it all

[Ling-Ling]

This needs to be the next singles after "Love."

[real2reel]

What is this hype around Love? I think that song is beyond boring. Keyshia Cole can sang but she can record a much more quality ballad vocally and musically then Love. Right now she need something suitable for radio not something her fans want, they have the album. Kayne West tried that once and the outcome was ugly.

[Caviar]

I hope this will be the next single after Love.

[jond7699]

They are going to release a 5th single ?