Jennifer Hudson f/ Ludacris - "Pocketbook" (mp3 link removed by Blogger)

Jennifer Hudson didn't quite wait as long to capitalize on her Oscar moment with an album release as Three 6 Mafia, but for a while there it felt like she was getting there. In fact it's kind of ridiculous how long it took her self-titled debut to see release, over a year and a half after Dreamgirls and her subsequent award win. There was some talk about her label disliking the album or thinking it wasn't contemporary enough and sending her back in the studio, but it seems to me like releasing what ever album was done at the time right after Dreamgirls would've probably sold better than a more commercially savvy album released on the heels of getting 6th billing on the "Sex And The City" movie. if she had released an album, any album, in the same calender year as her Oscar win, she probably could've glided to multi-platinum status regardless of the quality, just like Jamie Foxx did with his mediocre album and moderately successful singles. this graph says it all, really. "And I'm Telling You," of course is tacked onto the end of the album, as is a song to represent her gospel background (they might as well have tacked on "I Have Nothing" for her Idol fans while they were at it), so she's still hitting all her demographic sweet spots, but the label clearly had a lot of other ideas for her and the album.

So, since Jennifer Hudson as it exists now is the album Arista kept retooling and throwing big names at for a year, was it worth the extra time? They could've just given the whole album budget over to Stargate and Darkchild to make adult contempo radio R&B, which I half expected based on the great single "Spotlight." And while that's true of about half the album, generally with weaker results than "Spotlight," there's also a whole smattering of much clubbier material from of-the-minute producers that you might sooner expect to see on the new Ciara album. And the way the album is sequenced makes this approach seem much messier than it really needs to be; one of the mellowest songs, "Giving Myself," is awkwardly shuffled in the middle of a block of songs produced by Timbaland, T-Pain and Polow Da Don. Of those songs, the Timbo track "Pocketbook" is the clear winner, which I was kinda surprised by given how little I've liked his Danja-less productions in recent years. But the song is a completely winning, sassy, goofy banger, with possibly my favorite Luda verse of the year so far. And it's kind of a shame that, considering how Hudson and her album have been marketed so far, they probably won't ever release it as a single, even after they spent all that money to get guys like Tim and Luda on the album.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 24, 2008 at 10:24 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.