Heaux Tales

Fine enough, but neaux bangers

Her voice is quite nice, but unfortunatly the lyrics match the cover, and the cover is something very far from what i would like to listen to

Got really fed up with this one, same concept for every song. We get it, you like fucking. It's not great when guys sing about it incessantly either. 2/5

What a banger. Love the tales, particularly Donna’s. Feel like I’ve been living under a rock for missing this one.

Loved it! Big voice and she knows when to use it. There was one moment in Pick Up Your Feelings that actually made me shiver. Good mix of soul and R&B. I'm also a big fan of albums by women where they let it all fly and tell it raw and this one had a great balance of fun and real that I could easily connect with even though I'm a completely different demographic (I know shocking that a white man is doing this project. Hello, nice to meet you stranger)

I like an album that tells a story. This reminded me of Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, but better. But it just made me want to go listen to Doechii instead

Soulful voice and short album, that’s about all the positive I can say. Lyrics are sad and trash.

Her voice is fine but the lyrics & spoken word interludes are not great. Sad & empty

I wasn't a fan of this but not in the manner of the rabid haters

Gotta respect a woman who speaks her truth and sings songs about, "I wanna sit on it". 3.7

i didn't get to listen to this album as closely as i would have liked - but i do want to give it a 3. i would love to go back and listen, because i think the skits in between each songs are pretty powerful, and want to make sure i give it the time of day

The track layout was a nice touch and framed the songs really well, and added some complexity to a very short album. Wouldn’t seek it out on its own but I can see why it’s influential based on the themes of the album.

The album cover and its genre classification put me off right away. Still, I listened to parts of it. It wasn't as terrible as I'd expected. Jazmine Sullivan's voice is pretty nice, but not exceptional. I've heard similar voices many times before. Overall, the music is somewhat boring pop. I'm not really in the mood for that. 3/5

Sexually expressive, confessional R&B. Definitely not bad and an interesting listen from a psychosocial point of view, but not really remarkable musically compared to other examples from the genre.

for an album of this genre, i didn’t mind it

Hodown.

Oväntat bra för att vara R&B som jag normalt inte är så förtjust i. Dock gillar jag inte böset i mellanspåren.

The rest of the world handed out Grammys. I respect the contrarianism.. the note tracks, honestly. Spins: 1 Playlist Additions - Pick Up Your Feelings - On It

Not a bad album. Some interesting songs on here, but overall not really exciting or standout for me personally.

😎💋🍆💳🛍️

Period.

It is not a "must-listen", but I liked it. Some of the songs have the spirit of WAP, but relaxed.

day 17 of not rolling Aja by Steely Dan I wanted to like this more than I did. I think I was just happily surprised at first because it’s been a while since we’ve gotten something like this. Ultimately though, aside from a couple tracks, this is just good (but not great).

One of the nurses heard this

Jazmine is wonderful, I became obsessed with her for a bit after she was featured on Frank Ocean's 'Endless' and ran a few of the songs on this album up for a while ("Pick Up Your Feelings" and "Price Tags" still bang). Every couple months I think about Ari Lennox's interlude on this album and I just wonder... who was she talking about? Was it J. Cole...? There's no way, right?? It's very surreal seeing an album that came out a few years ago on this list. With SZA's 'Ctrl,' I feel like it is easy to justify its inclusion in that it exemplified an instance of where a genre is heading, but, while I love this album, I'm not sure that it needs to be here. I don't find it to be more groundbreaking than Beyoncé's 'Lemonade,' which did not make it. I think that while it brings in wonderful conversations about sexuality and gender and feminism, the actual sounds are not as revolutionary as other albums that influenced this one (such as 'Lemonade' and 'Ctrl'). I think maybe the creators of this list see Lauryn Hill's influence and maybe got a little nostalgic. I dunno.

This ruled but I could do without the introductory interludes.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Both short, but too long at the same!

Well fair play for some positive messaging, but this couldn’t be further from a musical style I enjoy. Next….

“THAT DICK SPOKE INTO ME” NAAAAH DIOBOIA TENETEVELE PER VOI STE CANZONI DA APERITIVO GOSSIP CON LE AMICHE. MI SONO INCAZZATO. 1/5

The skit parts in these rap/hip-hop albums always annoy me. Her pussy is wet, she wants dick, she wants a man, but doesn’t need one. That it?

Struggling to connect with this album when it feels like a facsimile of The Miseducstion of Lauryn Hill. It's an honestly subpar listen, and filler tracks on an already short album are frustrating. Appreciate the message of sex-positivity, but there's not much else going on here

Pick Up Your Feelings stood out. I've never heard of her or this album. I liked this more than I thought. I went in with pretty low expectations. 3/5

Album #300 Jazmine Sullivan: Heaux Tales Well, what an utterly disappointing way to cap off 300 albums. All I can really say about “Heaux Tales” is that it’s no surprise her career seemingly went nowhere after this. Sure, singing about loving dick and wanting a rich man is affirming in some way to women, but I find that it is often the most insufferable women that listen to stuff like this. Pick up Blue, or Miseducation, or Horses, or any other number of empowering albums made by women; just please don’t pick up Heaux Tales. For the relatively small number of albums released post-2010 on this list, I am continually baffled by which albums made the cut from those years. Best Song: Lost One Worst Song: The Other Side Score out of 10: 2

I'm not the target audience of this, and that's okay.

Jazmine's got a great voice and I'd have to award some points for having her heart in the right place with the concepts here... And that's really the only positive thing I have to say about this.

Completely unremarkable.

The fact that this album was included in the list means that another good album had to be excluded. That makes me a little sad.

Im surprised to see an album as recent as 5 years ago here but im also surprised to have never heard of Jazmine Sullivan before. Well I dont see anything special here. Its also not a style of music I like a lot. Theirs also too much random interludes, completely breaking the album pacing. Atleast its very short so you wont to suffer too long. But yeah their are many recent album that deserve a spot on the book. Not this one for sure. No Tyler the Creator but this???/5

Interesting concept album. Not my usual style of listening or personally relatable, but fine with the exposure all the same.

So into this album. Captivating lyrical storytelling propelled even further by the raw, unfiltered vignettes scattered between each track. Lost One is an easy favorite. Also all the people rating this 1 star are racist misogynists.

Garbage, trying to be profound but just really clingy. Beats and production are ok but pretty uninspiring. Mumble rap sections as with the whole genre are just a signpost for a lack of any talent

Odd. Vocals got on my nerves after a while.

Highlights: Bodies, Pick Up Your Feelings, On It, Price Tags I relatively liked the sound but found the contents to be too on the nose. And shit's just not worthy to be 1001, this has to be some forced in bullshit. It's not criminal, but there have to be better empowering modern female hip hop/RnB records than this. But if it wasn't so on the nose and obscene, at least to my mind, it would be a pretty slick but standard record for the genre. The track I found the most perplexing is the shallow "The Other Side" which is then immediately contrasted in the following "tale". Like wtf are we talking about? What's the message? Objectify yourself for success or dissing that? I agree with the point of "Girl Like Me", but god damn they even fucked that one up by making it so blunt that I can't help but cringe. Remove the interludes ("tales") that are practically virtue signaling and a few of the more obscene tracks and you actually have yourself a decent package.

Cool, I've never heard of Sullivan before. She doesn't add anything particularly new to the genre musically speaking (though the sampling and bass additions are nice). The vocal harmonies are lush and experimental. She has a really nice voice that ranges from soulful to sultry to aggressive, much like Lauryn Hill, one of her biggest inspirations—though she said that Cardi B and Lizzo were the biggest influences on this album. I like her message, which is really direct and urgent when it comes to confronting issues related to gender equality and the patriarchy. She strikes a pretty good balance between being conversational and confrontational. It doesn't surprise me that many users on this site (mostly male, white, and older, I presume) aren't digging this. You all need to get the shit cleaned out of your ears and listen to something new. 4 solid stars.

Better than Coldplay

vocals were really good, and liked some of the harmonies, but didn't really like the concept album

R&B isn’t normally my jam but this one sets itself apart from a lot of the others. Jazmine can sing and the whole album has this cohesiveness to it even if the styles vary across the individual tracks. “Put it Down” and “Lost One” are the real standouts here but I don’t think there’s a bad track on the album.

R&B is not really my style of music and I feel like this topic gets explored a lot. However this album was really well done and the little vignettes really took it over the edge with a sense of reality and vulnerability. I enjoyed myself and it was good.

These low ass ratings... y'all genuinely just hate fun huh? This was a very solid r&b/hiphop album and I enjoyed my time thoroughly. I already had one of the songs liked, but listening to the whole thing was just great. I will be revisiting this.

Never heard of Jasmine before, so was hoping for a soulful voice, and some hip hop flavour, and R&B vibes- and wow she delivered- loved the album

A cool concept. I found myself really kinda thinking about the characters in each song and how I felt I understood or didn’t understand their thoughts and decisions. The production is SOOO pandemic sounding. Lyrically and sound wise it was fine but I wasn’t that impressed. The concept is the strongest part.

I feel underequipped to review this album, in all honesty. But I'll try. We're here in this list to shore up some classics as well as push our boundaries, and this is certainly one that does so. The 1001 is already pretty barren of socially-forward female voices and it's good to have a modern woman running through the shades of her life so earnestly, considering it's such a different dimension of life than most listeners here are likely to have experienced. Credit where credit's due: unlike Swift's twee 'English teacher' sophomore faux-poeticism of her recent run, Heaux Tales is a truly unapologetically feminist album. It grabs the crass, honest fuck-y'all empowerment that black voices have long had in hiphop/rap/R&B and transforms it into an album of modern transgressiveness just like its forebearers. It's an interesting continued experiment in the ongoing female-led rap tradition of leaning into the sexuality and owning it as a way of claiming it. And it's a very sensuous album - it's named so. Maybe talking about female-led music and focusing on its femininity is a bit of a garden path of critique? It's somewhat of a hammy avenue of analysis to look at every album written by a woman through a purely feminist lens just by virtue of having a woman writing it. Doubly so by being written by a black woman. We rarely ever examine the reverse. It reminds me of something RBG once famously said: “When I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court] and I say, 'When there are nine,' people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that.” But Heaux Tales is definitely deeply deserving of that sort of look, though. It's definitely trying to be that - it's doing that without subtlety, particularly in the monologues and the skits (could always do without the skits on these albums, though). its shameless vulgarity is the converse extension of the sort of self-activism that black women have been candidly broadcasting since Soujourner Truth's *Ain't I A Woman* and beyond. What does 'Amanda' mean when she says: "Sex has become my superpower... it's like sex is where I'm finding my worth... in one way it's empowering in another way it's sad... I feel moments of sadness knowing that, you know, just me alone and who I am is not enough"? I don't know much about it, but it's refreshing to hear somebody speaking about it amongst a throng of a million middle-class American white boys singing about underage groupies. But it's not all rainbows, because production-wise it's a little uninspired. It's clearly drawing from the more minimalist soundscapes of modern post-trap hiphop but outside of a few wider tracks (see The Other Side') it leaves too much white-box empty space. It doesn't have to do the big-band Monae thing but it probably could have tried more. Fav tracks: The Other Side

I liked it but I didn’t love it. A few boos though!

Girls rule, but this does not...

Good

Today's listen is Heaux Tales by Jazmine Sullivan. You would think I would remember a 2021 release, especially one good enough to make a list like this, but I had no idea who Jazmine Sullivan was and had never heard of this album before today. On reflection, I think I was probably better off not knowing about it. There are some nice moments, particularly “Lost One,” and I can understand why the album was socially relevant and resonated with people at the time. Its themes of relationships, sexuality and female empowerment are clear, and there are moments where the humour works well. Unfortunately, it just isn't my genre of music. A lot of it felt quite naff to me, and I found the album a real struggle to get through. I can appreciate what Sullivan is trying to do without particularly enjoying listening to it. Favourite track: “Lost One” – easily the highlight for me. Least favourite track: Rather than a particular song, the spoken interludes. I found them really irritating and didn't feel they added anything to the album. Removing them would make the record shorter and, for me, much more enjoyable. I could definitely have done without the “tales” in Heaux Tales. Album artwork: Fairly standard. Nothing particularly memorable.

If only this was limited to songs

Novo poglavlje loše odabranih novijih albuma... Ovo jedva da je muzika, više je nabrajanje neprijatnih privatnih stvari koje ne želim da znam, nisam dala pristanak da čujem sve što ova žena razmišlja.

Decent listen.

“I know that there are a lot of us who stay in bad relationships because we have convinced ourselves that being disrespected is better than being alone.” Girls Trip (2017)

Really liked some songs and others very much less. There is a disparity of genre that I don't hate, but generally prefer some go me of direction in an album.

Good album

My first listen I really did not care for this at all. But since that time, I've gotten more into RnB music, and now I realise that this is really fucking good. The tales are a nice way of contextualizing songs. My only real complaint is sometimes the production crackling effect is really annoying. Maybe "The Other Side" is kind of a dud, but whatever

rym 3.30 Contemporary R&B/Neo-Soul 好新的专辑，比起典型的r&b曲目，我更喜欢那首娓娓道来的吟唱。 pick:Lost One, Girl Like Me

Not outstanding. But I do appreciate its existence

Its raw, and the line "this is my truth" pretty much sums up the album.

Considering it is 14 tracks it is mercifully short. Nothing redeeming on here for me. Even the music sounds like they are using default presets.

I wish my wife wrote songs about riding my D like Jazmine.

Good flow. Entertaining and clear lyrics. At first I found skits annoying, but overall went with album and kind of cool explanation of song that was about to play

It's good. I like the concept, the tales, and a lot of the guest spots.

Naw.

Pretty interesting. Incredibly, incredibly embarrassing to listen to during school hours, because the entire thing is about sex, but anyway it’s a pretty nice album. I see why people have some hesitation toward it, it’s certainly not a masterpiece or tour de force, and I don’t love the way Sullivan interprets the different stories throughout the EP, and I don’t love that the authors put an EP on the list anyway. But as a work itself it’s fine. I enjoy “Pick Up Your Feelings” for what it is. Production, singing, pretty good. Writing is fine, though not up to par, a problem across this whole work. That being said, the longing in the EP feels very beautiful and genuine. “The Other Side” as just okay as some of the lines are, feels very real in its yearning. It takes obvious influence from Frank Ocean, and various other rnb artists. That’s nice, but it kind of hinders the work a bit. Whatever though. It’s alright. 6.2/10 DOES IT BELONG ON THE LIST: SURE REASON: Impact and relevance

Bof? Rien qui n'a pas déjà été fait par Missy Eliott ou Lauryn Hill au niveau des thèmes... Peut-être plus smooth/r&b musicalement. Le cover, on dirait une pub de h&m. Sinon, ses congénères hip-hop devraient s'inspirer d'elle pour la durée de leur LP. 32 minutes c'est parfait.

Je me souvient en 2021 je trouvais ça excellent. Un bel exemple de la force du R&B au féminin des 15 dernières années, avec aussi Jamila Woods, Teyana Taylor, kelela, Jorja Smith. Bien féministe et assumé.

I found this ok. It had to my taste way too many non-song tracks. The songs are decent and I like the concept too, but I don't find this very satisfying.

not for me

Trash

Cool for what it is but not real cool for me. Just couldn't connect to it or really appreciate it.

You know, the other day i was listening to the top one billion albums and i heard this one and thought to myself, woww, this is a must-listen album. -said no one ever Pretty sure when Jazmine herself was making this album, even she wasnt thinking this would make that thousand album list. maybe they had to include an r&b album from 2021, but even then i might have chosen differently. Its mostly about sex, at times contradictory, or as she would probably say contradicktory. maybe im missing something some of the skits were ok

I am so close to throwing in the towel and not doing the last 400 albums, it's been 70/30 on what I've disliked vs what I've liked. Who the fuck is Jazmine Sullivan, I mean really. Apparently she was up for 7 Grammy's, wtf, I have never heard her name mentioned between her 2008 debut and today. Hated every single minute and then you add in a dozen skits, this album Blllllloooooowwwwwsss! Why is Annie Lennox slumming on "On It"? I couldn't even make out her voice. I just don't get it, missed the mark altogether. It sure isn't a Must Listen Before I Die album, in fact just the opposite.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for feminism and a messaging that promote it. I think it’s done best when it shown and not told, though I guess in the 2020’s we need to say it directly to be shown. Music was good, but when Jill Scott played on the autoqueue afterward, it made this album plant its place as being just “good”.

Yeah... nah, good on her for making a women's empowerment album, but that doesn't mean the result will be any good. If the book hadn't come out in 2021, there is no chance that this album would have made the list. The lyricism isn't great, and I'm not a fan of her vocal delivery.

I actually quite liked this, played it in the car and it didn't annoy me like it thought it might. But will I listen to it again? Only time will tell.

If I wanted some okay r&b intertwined with women yelling at me I would go out to the club

++: Bodies (Intro), Put It Down, Donna's Tale, Price Tags, Rashida's Tale +: Pick Up Your Feelings, Lost One, Precious' Tale +-: Ari's Tale, On It, Amanda's Tale, Girl Like Me -: Antoinette's Tale, The Other Side 6,3/10

Respect the concept, but a tedious listen.

Failed to make an impression on me.

Not my usual go-to music but I enjoyed it. The production is cool and varied, and it's the first album to feature sexual slam poetry so why not.

This was actually a really solid album that I surprisingly liked more than I expected I would.

4.55. Really liked and was pleasantly surprised considering I had no idea who his was.

Jazmine you might be a serious contestant in the game "Who can create the most rap trap crap album of the year". Guess that all the youth of today digs this, I don't get it.

One of the worst gimmicks on any album is the usage of preachy skits. 6 of the 14 tracks on this one are just that. Kills the vibe and makes repeat listens like nails on a chalkboard. Too bad, some of the tracks had a solid groove going.

Empowering for women, losses and gains through sex and love are evident and its a fun one overall. Not my favorite, but a decent listen.

My first reaction to this was a slightly frustrated liking. That feels odd because I do like Sullivan in general, and I can see why this record has received so much critical love. There's clearly a thoughtful idea behind it: the spoken interludes and songs build a kind of collective testimony about sex, relationships, money, insecurity and self-worth. I like that they're allowed to contradict; Sullivan allows those perspectives to be in dialogue with one another and with the songs rather than forcing them into a conveniently tidy empowerment narrative. I appreciate that. Lots of credit for ambition. I just don't find the individual songs particularly compelling as pieces of writing. A lot of them feel familiar rather than revealing, and the lyricism strikes me as similarly conventional; the framing gives the material a sense of importance that the writing itself doesn't always sustain. The record is conceptually more interesting to me (and it is interesting!) than it is musically or lyrically, which isn't quite enough to overcome how little of it actually sticks with me. Pick Up Your Feelings is good, though, and I wanted more of the album to live up to it. Sit on It was, frankly, trite. I noticed on Genius that Sullivan described Heaux Tales as an EP rather than an album, and I'd probably agree with that. It feels like a really interesting concept that I wanted to see developed a little further. It's a 3 I really wanted to be a 4.

Heb natuurlijk al albums van d'Angelo en Isaac Hayes gehad, maar jezus Jazmine bewijst wel even dat vrouwen ook gewoon een sexy album kunnen schrijven. Pure glijplaat dit zeg, schaamteloos over sex zingen Jazmine doet het hier even. Een .Paak feature is voor mij altijd een no brainer, hier ook weer lekkere feature hoor. De productie is modern en cleaaaan, zo fijn als dat gewoon goed werkt. Jazmine zelf klinkt goed, ik ben niet de grootste fan van haar stem maar vibe het voor nu meer dan genoeg. Staat natuurlijk laag op de lijst, want ja; geen rock en/of oude witte man. En het gaat over S E X!??! Zitten wel ff te veel skits en interludes en dergelijke tussen als je het mij vraagt. Haalt net ff te veel tempo uit het album. Ja, prima album, ff te veel skits enzo wat de vaart er uit haalt, ook voelt het album daardoor langer dan dat het is. Maar alles bij elkaar, best wel lekker om dit te luisteren en echt prima dat dit op de lijst staat. Denk dat het grootste deel daarvan is omdat het nog steeds zo'n controversieel album is, zeker qua onderwerp. FAVO: Put it down, On it, Price tags, Girl Like Me

Oddly enough I've listened to this one before - pulled it from a "best of the year" type of list. I'd marked it as a 4/10 last time. Returning a year later, I'd still put it there or lower. A lot of it's just that I'm very, very much not the target audience for this. But even if you could somehow boil the themes off the songs - convert them to Weird Al parodies or something - I still don't think I'd really be excited by anything here. And then there are the interludes - some real downers. I especially dislike the one ("Rashida's Tale") where she describes the fallout from cheating on her fiancée. We'll say 4/10 means a weak 2 on the 5-star scale.

genérico + vapid e raso

From the Vault #39 (March 4, 2026) Wooooooo!!!! The final hip-hop album ever. I'll never have to listen to another one of these things again. Well, I didn't finish writing my review of Paul's Boutique and I completely forgot to listen to Ill Communication, but other than that, this is my last hip-hop album ever forever. It's been a long fucking ride. I'm so glad that it's (very nearly) over. I kind of dig this album cover. The colour palette is nice, I like the typography and the logos at the bottom are pretty sweet. The jury is out on what it could be, however. I'm getting Cardi B vibes from this photo of Jazmine, so I'm expecting this album to have a buzzing electronic sound with aggressive vocals. Here goes I was kind of wrong, but I was also kind of right, surprisingly. I mean, I don't want to politisperg too hard, but this album is perfectly aligned with the politics of the book. A "feminist" album from a Black woman about hedonism and excess under the guise of female empowerment. Very semitic, though more importantly it's kind of surreal to return to this lame, gay period of the lockdowns. You don't really see the left defending sex work and promiscuity to the extent that they were during this period. Here's to that runtime, aye? These hip-hop albums have been too long for too fuuuuucking long. It is so unbelievably perfect to close out the current hip-hop line-up with something that is actually short and concise. This music is okay. The instrumentals are generally listenable and there's a decent, warm sound to many of these tracks. I especially like the misty, echoing acoustic guitars that appear across many of these songs - they have a good sound and create a nice atmosphere. The more conventional, electronic hip-hop production on the remaining tracks is less inspired and I dislike the trap beats, but there isn't anything in here that bothers me too much. The vocals are a different story, however. Jazmine's vocals are mastered in an annoying way, and the guest vocalists are even worse. They're all too loud and uncharismatic for this style of music. Overall, I dislike the subject matters and performances on this album, though there wasn't too much in here that chafed. I don't have a scan of the 2021 1001 Albums book, so right to Wikipedia I go :( Has a few collaborators and many producers, is a concept album about feminism and shiett, won two awards for album of the year in addition to receiving similar accolades from the music press, is her most successful release in the US, but didn't have much chart success elsewhere. No idealism. No standards. I'm letting this album through because we need more short albums on the list. It's also a decent representation of the time period that it released in and I have a deficit of albums to replace this with, therefore I cosign this inclusion.

Pick Up Your Feelings