In 2017, as ever, it was wise to neither cross nor discredit
Kimberly Michelle Pate. Early into wide-ranging fourth album
Kimberly: The People I Used to Know, she authoritatively raps "Salute me, lil' bitch, I'm the general." Shortly after that, in the knocking/booming "Kim K" -- one of the 11 songs she co-wrote -- she notes "I date a black man named Idris/You say I'm ghetto, 'He trippin'," before sending off her detractors with "I let God handle you hoes." On "Fuck Your Man," termed an interlude despite its proper song length, she fronts an acoustic jazz trio -- of course -- to taunt a woman with a mix of vulgarity and grace, and saves the coldest lines for the end.
Pate also has numbers like "Rounds" and "Birthday" that crush all the similarly woozy and sinuous slow jams on commercial radio. Atlantic might not allow her to record a wholly contemporary country album, but now there's a sturdy EP's worth of countrified material that can be drawn from her output. She asks "how to do it like
James Brown," references
Gil Scott-Heron, and raises her middle finger in "God, Love, Sex, and Drugs," yet the proud, low-key anthem is almost as
Alan Jackson as it is
Millie Jackson.
Pate has another album remaining on her major-label contract, not that it prevents her from addressing a lack of compensation in another interlude: "For this industry, I no longer want to live/By the time you hear this, I'm already dead." She has too much on her mind -- and has such an imaginative and proficient way of getting it all out -- to truly bail. ~ Andy Kellman