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Teena Marie (born Mary Christine Brockert on March 5, 1956 in Santa
Monica, California, USA) is an American Grammy award-nominated singer/songwriter/producer. Marie, nicknamed "Lady T", is a
protegé of late funk legend Rick James, and is notable as one
of the few successful Caucasian R&B performers, currently the reputed
queen of blue-eyed
soul. She sings R&B with big, robust vocals. She has a daughter Alia Rose [1], [2].
Marie grew up in west Los Angeles in a neighborhood that was nicknamed
"Venice Harlem" because of its heavy black population. The
singer/songwriter/producer was in her early twenties when, around 1977, she
landed a job at Motown Records. It was at Motown that she met her mentor and
paramour-to-be, Rick James,
who ended up doing all of the writing and producing for her debut album of 1979,
Wild and
Peaceful. That LP, which boasted her hit duet with James, "I'm
Just a Sucker for Your Love," didn't show Marie's picture -- so many
programmers at black radio just assumed she was black. When her second album,
Lady T, came out, much of the R&B world was shocked to see how fair-skinned
she was. But to many of the black R&B fans who were eating her music up, it
really didn't matter -- the bottom line was she was a first-rate soul singer
whose love of black culture ran deep.
After It Must Be Magic (which included the major hit "Square Biz") she
left Motown Records,
and a nasty legal battle began. Marie got out of her contract with Motown, and
the case ended up with the courts passing what is known as "The Teena Marie
Law"(formally called Brockert Initiative) -- which states that a label cannot
keep an artist under contract without putting out an album by him or her.
After signing with Motown Records in 1976 as a backup singer, Smokey Robinson devotee Teena hooked up with James for her first album titled
Wild and Peaceful, released in 1979.
Legend has had it that thanks to James' refusal to work with Diana Ross (because
he wasn't allowed to pursue her entire album) that he began working with Teena.
Teena Marie found her first successes with the songs "I'm A Sucker For Your
Love" and "Deja Vu (I've Been Here Before)."
After James' initial guidance, Teena Marie opened the 1980s by producing two
hit albums. The gold-certified Lady T, co-produced by Richard Rudolph (Minnie Riperton's
husband and creative partner), featured the hit R&B single "Behind the
Groove" and "Too Many Colors," which featured Rudolph and Riperton's 7-year-old
daughter, Maya Rudolph.
Its follow-up, Irons in the Fire, contained her first pop hit, "I Need
Your Lovin'" and "Young Love," a Smokey Robinson-styled ballad that Marie later
sampled on "Ooh-Wee". In 1981, she released
her best-selling album on Motown, the platinum It Must
Be Magic. It yielded the hit songs, "Square Biz" written by Teena Marie and Allen
McGrier, "Portuguese
Love", a song in tribute to her Portuguese ancestry, and the title track.
That same year, she also appeared on James' hugely successful album, Street
Songs, where they scored a huge hit with their duet, "Fire And
Desire."
Success, however, did not mean Teena Marie was satisfied professionally or
was stable financially. Upon discovering she had been underpaid royalties for
the four albums she recorded for Motown, Teena Marie decided to leave the label and later
sued it for having restricted her artistic control. A law was passed as a
result, The Brockert Initiative, popularly known as "The Teena Marie
Law", which set a precedent for artists seeking control of their careers by
limiting the length of recording contracts.
After leaving in 1982, she signed with Epic Records in 1983 and released the concept album Robbery, which featured the hit "Fix
It" (#21 R&B), as well as "Shadow Boxing" and "Casanova Brown." The latter
was allegedly about her real-life romance with mentor Rick James. In 1984, Teena Marie released
her biggest-selling album, Starchild. It yielded the
singles "Lovergirl" and "Out On A Limb". "Lovergirl" became Teena Marie's
highest peaking single to date on pop charts, peaking at #4, while peaking at #9 on the
R&B charts. "Out
On A Limb" was not as successful as "Lovergirl" on the R&B Charts, peaking
only at #56. Also in 1985 '14k' (R&B #87) was featured on the soundtrack of
the film 'Goonies'.
In 1986, Teena Marie
released a rock and roll
concept album titled
Emerald City. It
wasn't as successful as her predecessors and in 1988
she returned to her R&B and funk
roots releasing the critically-acclaimed album, Naked
to the World. That album contained the hit "Ooo La La La", which reached the top of Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles
& Tracks chart, and remains her only #1 single on that chart to
date.
Teena Marie released "Ivory" in the fall of 1990. Despite the success of the
first two singles, "Here's Looking at You" (#11 R&B) and "If I Were a Bell"
(#8 R&B), Epic Records was not totally pleased with sales of the album. So
Teena and Epic Records mutually agreed to go their separate ways. In the fall of
1994, Teena released "Passion Play", on her own independent label, and
subsequently devoted most of her time to her daughter, Alia Rose[1].
During the 1990s, Marie's classic R&B, soul and funk records were either sampled by hip-hop artists or covered
by R&B divas.
Teena Marie herself is seen as something of a pioneer in helping to bring
hip-hop to the mainstream by becoming one of the first and only artists of her
time to rap on one of her singles--the aforementioned "Square Biz". In the rap portion of that song, she
mentions some of her inspirations: William Shakespeare, Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni, "just to
name a few," as she says. In 1996, The Fugees paid tribute to her by sampling the
chorus of her 1988 hit "Ooo La La La" for their own hit, "Fu-Gee-La."
After a 14-year sabbatical from the national spotlight, Teena Marie returned
to her musical career by signing with the "Classics" imprint of the successful
hip-hop label Cash
Money Records. She released her comeback album, La Dona,
in 2004. It became a
gold success (and the highest charting album of her career, peaking at #6 on the
Billboard 200 chart) on
the basis of the Al Green-sampled
"Still In Love" (#23 R&B, #70 Pop) and a duet with the late Gerald Levert, "A Rose By
Any Other Name". Teena Marie was nominated for a 2005 Grammy Award for Best R&B Female Vocal
Performance for "Still In Love". Teena quickly followed this success with
the release of Sapphire in
2006. While sales weren't as great this time around (the album peaked at #24 on
the Pop Chart), the release did give Teena Marie yet another R&B Top 40 hit,
"Ooh Wee" (#32); it also reunited her (on "God Has Created" and "Cruise
Control") with Robinson, the early Motown mentor whose style she had emulated on
early hits such as "Young Love."
Teena has recently decided to part ways with Cash Money records, and has a
new album coming out in 2008 which she describes as "personal and spiritual".
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