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Just like mines

Tweet looks smooth. With her long limbs, long hair, and languid affect, she seems almost she looks almost too smooth and sleek for one of those lovable, popped-up Timbaland projects. And in fact, most of Tweet's debut album, Southern Hummingbird, just out on Missy Elliot Gold Mind label, is not what you'd expect from the producer of "Get Ur Freak On" and "Ugly." Missy describes her girl this way: "anything that you haven't heard." Lyrically and musically, Tweet has her own mind. Her rhymes are more pensive than party-time, her rhythms more sultry than sweet.

All that said, the first single off Southern Hummingbird is vintage Timbaland, packed with irrepressible double-beats. True, it's the track most unlike everything else on the album (say, the edgily mournful "Smoking Cigarettes" or "Motel," in which she catches her lover cheating, or even the duet with Bilal, "Best Friend"), and true, it's also the track most likely to fly. And so it has.

Just how Tweet came to this pretty pass is a long story, turned by label PR into convenient, semi-apocryphal sound bites. Both she and Missy have been called on repeatedly to remember their coming together, and it goes like this: Tweet was feeling low, even suicidal, following years of trying to land a deal with a female trio named Sugah, and worse, after ending an 8-year relationship (which she addresses fairly openly in the track, "Always Will"). And then, "out of the blue," she says -- or, some two years after first meeting Elliot -- Tweet got the phone call, bringing a chance to sing backup for Miss E. From there, the story continues, "someone" in the studio heard Tweet singing one of her own songs, and clued in Missy and Tim. They signed her.

For her part, Miss Mentor respects Tweet's honesty and gutsy introspection. "You can feel that she's been through something... This is the way that she felt when it was the darkest times of her life." In turn, Miss Mentee appreciates her newfound success no end. The Gold Mind machine is working overtime, placing their product all over magazines (Rolling Stone, Trace, Cosmo Girl!, Vibe, etc.), radio, and TV. She's hosted MTV2's "Soul" show, and made the usual pilgrimages to TRL, late night talk, and 106th & Park. For the last, she not only brought along Missy and Tim, but also members of her happy family, including her daughter.

Maintaining her smooth front wherever she goes, Tweet gives shout-outs to her relatives, her friends, and her "angel" Missy, repeatedly. When asked to describe what she thinks she's doing, the artist has a sense of history, citing Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Tina Turner, Prince, Donny Hathaway, and Diana Ross. She tells BET.com, "I used to call it gumbo soul, because it's a mixture of all kinds of music. It's like a day in the life of Tweet, like pages from my journal, so you'll get to know what I went through and then get to see how I came out of it." She sees the album as "therapy," because, Tweet says, "I was able to talk about all those feelings I had bottled up inside. I feel if I talk about it, I can help someone else."

Spreading the gospel of Gold Mind, Tweet just can't say enough good about working with Missy and Timbaland (and hanging with the Super Friends, including Magoo, Ginuwine, and Bubba Sparxxx, among others). "They just allowed me to be me," she beams. That is, a 30-year-old single mom and singer-songwriter-musician (she plays guitar and drums). Tweet was born Charlene Keys, the youngest of five children, and says she doesn't remember how she got her nickname: "I've been Tweet since I was a little girl. It's been a nickname that everybody in my family wants to get credit for," she tells MTV News. And even though she was born in Rochester, New York, most of her family is from the South ("Every summer I go to the South. Everybody thinks I'm Southern because I talk kind of country"), as is Missy, who suggested the title, Southern Hummingbird, in honor of Tweet's sound, background, and current home in Atlanta.

Such background puts her in good stead, of course, as many current powerhouse acts are hailing from the "South," however you might define it. And so what if Tweet resembles the several young black women coming into their major-label-supported own, somewhere along the r&b-soul-folk-hiphop-pop continuum? That only means more creative marketing comes into play. The first angle here is pitching her against Def Jam's new girl-star, Ashanti (also bound to be compared to Aaliyah). Because they dropped these albums (Ashanti's is called Ashanti, and leads with the over-rotating, Biggie-inflected single, "Foolish") on the same day, 2 April 2002, they've been lumped together.

This is too bad, actually, because Tweet's particular smoothness is quite dissimilar from anyone else's. Lithe and ballsy at the same time, Tweet stretches expectations more than she delivers to them.

Nowhere is this effect more apparent than in the video for "Oops." At first listen, the track sounds familiar, a little cute, vaguely like Aaliyah when she was working with Tim. With the oomp-oomp beats and Missy on the hook, it's infectious in that way that Timbaland tracks can be. More innovatively, it's a refreshingly plainspoken song about self-love. Everyone involved had to know what he or she was getting into with this track. The chorus couldn't be much clearer: "Oops, there goes my shirt up over my head, / Oh my, Oops, there goes my skirt droppin' to my feet, / Oh my. / Ooh, some kinda touch caressing my legs, / Oh my. / Ooh I'm turning red, / Who could this be?"

But apparently, the "who" has given some folks pause. Or at least, some moment of pleasure. Its release in several versions has led to much discussion -- on radio, on the net, among friends -- about Tweet's business, her self-interest, and in some cases, her sexual preference (this is particularly available for multi-readings in the video, where she performs with Missy... more on that below). Tweet tells a BBC interviewer that the song has made some think she's "gay! Because of the 'Oops' song, people are questioning my sexuality."

Perhaps toward the end of dispelling such questions, the song is circulating in various remix versions, and one, featuring Fabolous, is determined to make the case for straight sex. In it, he raps, "Each night I'm freakin', / And ma, you ain't gonna talk me to death, / 'Cause you got free nights and weekends, / Ghetto Fab's all over the place, / Oops, oh my there go my kit all over ya face, / Oh my." (Friends of mine have heard this on the radio -- that is, the radio "edit," with all terms intact: how this got by the lyrics police is hard to say).

And then there's the album's hidden track, "Sexual Healing, Oops (Oh My), Part 2," featuring Ms. Jade, who makes very clear where her head is at: "I keep on stallin', never did this before, / I'm a grown-ass lady, so what am I drawing for. / Give what I can give basically that's what it is, / Lights off, flipping the sheets, handle my biz, uh." Tweet adds in the chorus, "Oooh, what is this feeling? / It's more than sexual healing. / Oooh, tellin' me to go for self, / And knowin' me, I gotta trust myself."

Trusting yourself is key. Tweet's own interpretation of "Oops" is both more mundane and deeper than all the hubbub might suggest, and it is all about this trust of self. She says it came to her one night when she came home late, looked in the mirror, and realized that she was beautiful and lovable. For her, it's a self-empowerment song, about "lovin' myself... If you don't love yourself, no one else is gonna love you."

It is that. It is also, quite obviously, a pro-masturbation song (and a pretty racy one at that; Jocelyn Elders was fired for using less provocative language on the same subject). When Tweet performed the song for MTV's Spring Break 2002, the heat was manifest. In this performance, with backup dancers in short-shorts and white tank tops, Tweet's boots highlight her legs-for-days. Missy enters in white as Tweet utters her cue: "I looked over to my left," and then, mid-hook, Missy drops off the stage to land amidst the bikinied and betrunked crowd. Whoo-hoo, the kids are elated. Tweet continues her boogie on stage, her big ol' cap flopping sexily, her hips swaying provocatively. She knows how to work her audience into what might be described as an amiable lather -- no "Thong Song" gymnastics, no rowdy body-slamming, just smooth insinuation.

The video for "Oops" is equally smooth, but on its surface, the setting is opposite -- not the beach but a hotel made of literal ice. Or more accurately, digital ice. The video opens on an exterior long shot to set the location, wind blowing, chilly. Cut to two doors opening -- wide -- as Tweet checks in. "Tell you what I did last night, / I came home, say, around a quarter to three, / Still so high, hypnotized, / In a trance." The clerk, obsequious and nondescript, hands off the key in close-up, the bellboy follows her to her room, luggage cart in tow. She sets her palm pilot on the night table, and looks into that mirror that inspired the song. Or maybe she's looking at the camera, or both. She's quite righteously stunned by her own body. "From the start it," she sings, perched on her bed and gazing into the camera, "So butter and brown and tantalizing. / You woulda thought I needed help from this feeling that I felt, / So shook I had to catch my breath."

It's easy to see what has caught her off guard, as the video goes on to show not only Tweet alone, but Tweet's hard-bodied backup dancers, first two, then four, multiplying as the song picks up pace; they gyrate with muscular grace (as girl dancers tend to do in Missy's videos), their underwear not lacy but boyish. "Oops," there goes the chorus. The faucet turns on, the steam rises, the icy walls and floors begin to melt. Tweet appears in silhouette behind a screen, slinking, then in red kimono robe, on the edge of the tub, ready.

Relaxed and also pleasantly surprised, Tweet extols the seductive power of her own body. "I tried and I tried to avoid, / But this thing was happening. / Swallow my pride, / Let it ride and party. / But this body felt just like mines. / I got worried, / I looked over to the left, / A reflection of myself. / That's why I couldn't catch my breath."

The video stages this looking "over to the left" as looking over to several images of Missy, who appears in a monitor stack. Cut to Tweet (looking over to the left again), cut back to Missy, on an ice throne that immediately dissolves into watery rapture. The video keeps all bodies in play, cutting from the dancers to tweet to Missy and back. The "self" here is multiple and shifting, abstractly and tangibly fluid. However Tweet reads herself, and however you read those rumors that have long floated around Missy herself, the video allows you to read sexuality and desire as a process, in motion, unfixed, and potentially infinite. All that good stuff that sex is supposed to be but hardly ever is.

No doubt, as Tweet informs that BBC interviewer, the song is about "self-love and appreciation." And no doubt, as she recalls, there's a personal framework for it: "There was a time in my life where I was real insecure with myself and my color and different things. I wrote the song saying I came home one day and looked at myself in the mirror while getting undressed and noticed that I was beautiful regardless of what I was tripping on, and to just stroke your ego." You -- whether you presume she's addressing you or not -- can grant her that much: the song is not necessarily sexual, and it conspicuously combines race and gender politics in its declaration of man-free sexual independence and fulfillment. And so what that it includes a shot of the poor bellboy mopping his irrelevant brow in the face of all this steamy female suggestiveness? The video doesn't hold you responsible for his inabilities to cope, but instead, lets you ride on past him.

That is to say, your personal framework counts too. It counts more than most artists' intentions, as anyone who's ever read against the grain of a text can attest. Deftly and maybe a little surprisingly, "Oops" not only opens up possibilities for readers, but embraces them, the possibilities and the readers: "A reflection of myself. / That's why I couldn't catch my breath."