NENEH CHERRY

When I get Neneh Cherry on the phone at her home in Sweden, she has just finished vacuuming. “How glamorous,” she chuckles in a full-bodied laugh—which quickly morphs into a hacking coughing fit. She’s been feeling under the weather, and I suggest that maybe vacuuming up dust is maybe not the best thing she could be doing right now. “You know, you’re right,” she says, mock-indignant. “I need to tell the other people in my family that I shouldn’t be doing this shit.”
This is the Neneh Cherry we’ve come to expect—brimming with electric charisma and always ready to chuck the conventions of femininity out the window. When the stepdaughter of jazz legend Don Cherry was just 16, she joined a late incarnation of feminist punk pioneers the Slits; a decade later she famously performed her global hit “Buffalo Stance” on “Top of the Pops” eight months pregnant, which in spirit (and general badassery) now seems to have foreshadowed of M.I.A.’s unforgettable 2009 Grammy performance.In attitude and style (“Buffalo Stance” was an homage to forward-thinking stylist Ray Petri, whose aesthetic is as Tumblr-chic as something designed this afternoon), Cherry’s become an icon of confident cool and an inspiration to a certain stripe of independent-minded pop artists. One example: In fellow Swede Robyn’s recent video for “U Should Know Better”, she decorated her young, androgynous protagonist’s bedroom wall with—what else?—a vintage Neneh Cherry poster.
Though Cherry had international success with subsequent solo albums Homebrew and Man in the 1990s, “Buffalo Stance” marked her only mainstream crossover moment in the U.S. As she suggests during our conversation, she found the American music industry stiflingly attached to labels and genre identities. “We went over [to America] with our funny little posse from London,” she says, “And in the black department, [“Buffalo Stance”] wasn’t black enough, and in the white department it was too black. So it was this weird middle satellite, floating around.”
Cherry’s spent the past few years making music with other hard-to-box-in artists. Last summer she released The Cherry Thing, a thrillingly unruly collaboration with free jazz trio the Thing that had her covering the likes of the Stooges, Madvillain, and Suicide. And on February 24—nearly 18 years after her last solo album—she’ll release Blank Project, which features contributions from Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, who produced all ten tracks, along with Robyn and London electronic duo RocketNumberNine. The menacing, minimal title track finds Cherry sounding more brooding and pensive than usual, but she’s still dishing out that same brand of tough love that she was in her “Buffalo Stance” days: “Too many times you come crawling, say sorry too late/ Paper cup regrets will not stick/ Better change.”
Don’t call it a retread, though. “I have this sense of feeling quite calm and settled in what I’m doing right now, but also a sense of urgency,” Cherry says. “I think [Blank Project] is very much about being here and now rather than being trapped or trying to recreate some kind of nostalgia.” As ever, it’s anyone’s guess where that urgency will drive her in the future. When I ask her what’s up next, she shrugs and says something that succinctly sums up her entire career: “I’m allergic to doing the obvious thing.”