How Joss Stone got her groove back

You're going to want to put on your tin foil hats for this one, but here's something that occurred to me the other day: What if this story about Joss Stone fucking Raphael Saadiq for tracks is nothing but a ruse by the TIs to make us all really, really jealous of Raphael Saadiq - not so much to boost the former D'Angelo producer's career, but to make us all run out and cop this god-awful new Joss Stone album?

(If the thought alone doesn't excite you, then check out this picture. Your denial is beneath you.)

If you're not familiar with the story, another R&B producer, Dallas Austin, whom you'll recall spent some time in a motherfucking Dubai prison for trying to smuggle blow into the United Arab Emirates, which is just plain batshit, did an interview in which he suggested that both Joss Stone and Christina Aguilera fuck producers for tracks. In fact, I believe his exact words were, "All these bitches be fuckin' for tracks."

Roffle.

To his credit, it's not like anyone from either the Joss Stone or the Raphael Saadiq camps has come out and said for a fact that she didn't offer services in exchange for, um, services. And there is that picture of her straddling his old ass and staring into the camera as if to say, "Yeah, I fucked Raphael Saadiq for some tracks and you know what? It was everything I expected it would be. Well, not so much the tracks themselves as the mythical sensation of having a black man's schlong inside me."

Uggh... nullus!

After the comments became a minor scandal, which just so happened to coincide with the release of Joss' new Introducing Joss Stone (hmm...), Dallas Austin issued an apology in which he didn't actually deny that anything he said was true, but admitted that putting it out there like that probably wasn't a very good idea business-wise. So yeah, whatever. Either way, I'm definitely considering a career as a R&B producer, if this blogging and working at the BGM thing doesn't work out.

And here's two things that occurred to me that I've yet to see discussed in any other media outlets.

a) As long as there's been hip-hop-inflected R&B music, I've never heard of anyone complaining that female singers were fucking producers for tracks until just now. For example, you never hear Diddy bragging about the time he bagged Mary J. Blige during the My Life sessions. Should we take this to mean that the concept of fucking a producer for a track is specific to white R&B singers?

b) If we know for a fact that Christina Aguilera fucks for tracks and that her last album was produced in part by DJ Premier, does that mean DJ Premier fucked Christina Aguilera? I know he hasn't been nearly as productive in the past couple of years, but I took that to mean that maybe he either ran out of ideas or something was wrong with his sampler. But maybe he's just really satisfied in a way that the rest of us will never know.