Jazmine Sullivan at Coca-Cola Roxy

CL Critic Matthew Warhol Recommends: We have all acted like a hoe before. Maybe you’ve had an extended period of time acting in a promiscuous manner, aka a hoe phase. If you haven’t, I cannot recommend it more. It can be a time of great self-discovery, and you’re bound to get at least one good story out of it. Last year, R&B icon Jazmine Sullivan distilled this experience into the perfectly-titled EP, Heaux Tales. The 32-minute project topped many a year’s end list, and for good reason. It tells tales of situationships, body-shaming, dating apps, feminism, casual sex, and the inevitable unravelling of micro-romances in quintessential R&B and soul fashion, with Sullivan’s impressive voice front-and-center. The songs are juxtaposed by short spoken word passages of introducing these concepts, elaborated in the following songs. The project is not only a masterwork in love and everything that revolves around it, but one in the possibilities of music to speak truth to these ideas, or should I say, “Tales.” And any album containing a song with the opening line, “I want to sit on it,” is almost always guaranteed to stimulate the mind along with the body. Hell, it’s stimulating everything that can be stimulated. — MW