Happy 20th Anniversary to Melanie B’s debut solo album Hot, originally released October 9, 2000.
After taking in various dates throughout mainland Europe and the United States, the Spice Girls brought their triumphant Spiceworld Tour back to the United Kingdom for a final set of four shows in September of 1998. The dates were split between Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield and Wembley Stadium in London; on September 26th—one week after the Spice Girls dazzled audiences at their last Wembley gig—one-fourth of the group sailed into the top of the U.K. Official Charts on her own. Scary Spice—born Melanie Janine Brown—had come a long way from her days as a Leeds local and the futuristic, electro-funk of “I Want You Back” was confirmation of that transformation.
“I Want You Back” featured handsomely on the Why Do Fools Fall in Love (1998) soundtrack, a tie-in to the period piece drama of the same name based loosely on the tragic story of doo-wop heartthrob Frankie Lymon. The long player was issued as a joint label venture between Elektra, EastWest and Gold Mine Records with hip-hop powerhouse Missy Elliott executive producing the project. Months earlier, Elliott had contacted Melanie B to gauge interest in a pairing—both women were fans of each other.
With the blessing of her fellow Spice sisters, Melanie B cut the track with Elliott who wrote and smithed it. While the film and its companion album were primarily a stateside attraction, Virgin Records licensed the song as a commercial single release in Britain. It was a slight risk on Virgin’s part because while the Spice Girls had more than proven their worth to the label as a collective entity, one could not be sure how viable they were as solo acts. The success of “I Want You Back” evinced that their gamble had become a sure bet. The single ended up as a portent to a wave of additional “solo Spice” efforts to emerge from all five Spice Girls over the next four years.
However, the sessions for Melanie B’s expectant record did not commence immediately. By 1999, construction had begun on the Spice Girls’ third album Forever (2000) and there was growing tumult in Melanie B’s marriage to her first husband, Jimmy Gulzar—balancing these opposing challenges meant that work on Hot (as the record was to be succinctly titled) was intermittent and protracted. Despite the stop-start scheduling around Hot, Melanie B was eager to demonstrate that she could make a statement all her own.
The network of writer-producers Melanie B recruited for Hot was equally impressive and telling. On one side, she rounded up Rodney Jerkins, Fred Jerkins III, the late LaShawn Daniels, Teddy Riley, Mark “Sisqó” Andrews, James Harris III (Jimmy Jam) and Terry Lewis. These names weren’t unfamiliar to anyone who had been tuned into any American R&B from the 1990s. Only Harris and Lewis had a longer tenure as soul statesmen due to their status as members of the Minneapolis, Minnesota headquartered funk troupe The Time prior to splitting from them in 1983 to form their production imprint.
Opposite that crop of “big guns,” Melanie B left room for an old Spice Girls related compeer—Richard Stannard—and some new creative acquaintances in Julian Gallagher, Richard Norris and Max Beesley (to name some). Beesley—both a musician and an actor—had become romantically linked to Melanie B just as her troubled marriage to Gulzar inevitably concluded in divorce at the top of 2000.
These two factions evinced that Melanie B was attempting to straddle an aesthetic divide which made Hot an engaging, if frustrating compromise between her urban and pop tastes. From glossy, millennial R&B uptempos like “Tell Me” and “Hotter” on over to the pop-soul confections of “Lullaby” and “I Believe,” Melanie B proved that unification between these supposedly “disparate” sonic choices was possible. But, it wasn’t necessarily the production on Hot that was an issue—it was Melanie B’s lack of writing involvement.
Entries such as “Hell No,” “ABC 123” and “Pack Your Shit” couldn’t move past their respective coeval rhythm and blues surfaces. Effectively, anyone could have sung these songs and Melanie B’s personality was just too big for them. Not even corresponding guest spots from the rapper Screwface (on “ABC 123”) or BLACKstreet vocalist Eric Williams (on “Pack Your Shit”) were able to elevate the tracks.
But for the songwriters that did script to the dimensions of the most outrageous Spice Girl, the results were spectacular. The Missy Elliot penned “I Want You Back” was an example of this method and was included on Hot two years after its chart busting run. Beesley used the same approach and tendered the psychedelic set-piece “Step Inside,” a divine showcase for the smoky, sensual grain of Melanie B’s voice.
Out of the eleven songs to comprise the record, Melanie B co-wrote only four: “Feels So Good,” “Tell Me,” “Lullaby” and “Feel Me Now.” It is unsurprising that this quartet holds some of the most compelling pieces stationed on Hot. Specifically, with “Feels So Good” and “Feel Me Now”—bookends of the LP and paeans to romantic and carnal love—Melanie B explores retro-modern black pop on the former song and electro-R&B erotica on the latter selection thrillingly. “Tell Me” and “Lullaby” were sketched directly from Melanie B’s life; one was an account of her troubled union with Gulzar and the other was an affable tribute to their infant daughter, Phoenix Chi.
Although the finished product is slightly uneven, Hot is still a compellingly rendered collection. Unfortunately, the road ahead for Melanie B was to be fraught with obstacles that prevented Hot from finding a proper audience to receive it. Prior to “Tell Me” going out as the formal first single from Hot on September 25th, 2000, Melanie B had had two singles in the biennium ahead of the LP.
There was the aforementioned smash of “I Want You Back” in 1998 and its follow-up, the Timbaland produced cover of Cameo’s 1986 chestnut “Word Up!” in 1999 that reached the U.K. Top 20. It was one of three singles earmarked for release from the Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) soundtrack and later tacked onto the Japanese iteration of Hot. That prolonged gap did Melanie B no favors in maintaining general audience interest in her individual endeavor.
Additionally—going back to “I Want You Back”—Virgin had not done their due diligence to build inroads at urban and pop outlets to ensure a cross section of support for Melanie B. In England, part of the trajectory of that single was owed to a singular pooling of the Spice Girls buying base with a broader, curious record buying public—both primarily white. And so, when Melanie B came forward with the first of its kind in the Spice oeuvre—a contemporary R&B outing—via Hot, it had no black base to court nor did white audiences understand much of its black cultural particulars. While the Spice Girls as a larger entity—and some of the others in their own solo material up to that point—had more than dabbled in urban aesthetics, it was through a pop channel.
On the back of all this came “Tell Me,” the incendiary rebuke of Melanie B’s former husband that wasn’t far afield from the R&B genre being used as a platform to address drama—real or imagined. Because Melanie B and Gulzar’s split had played out in the British tabloid press, many potential buyers were put off with the (erroneous) assumption that Melanie B was trying to shamelessly tap her split for promotional fuel versus her engaging in a time honored R&B tradition to express herself.
This went back to the crux of the previous argument that certain cultural particulars were lost in translation.
Hot debuted on October 9th, 2000 to mixed notices and sluggish sales; at the time, it posted the lowest figures of any Spice Girls related project (group or solo). While the long player went on to achieve an eventual silver certification and yield two further singles in “Feels So Good” and “Lullaby” in February and June of 2001, by and large, Hot’s underperformance initiated a parting of ways between her and Virgin not long behind the release of “Lullaby.”
In the aftermath of Hot, Melanie B issued Catch a Fire in 2002—her first of two best-selling autobiographies—where she candidly reflected on the album, “In hindsight I wish I’d been clear from the start exactly how I wanted the album to sound. Then, I think, the songs might have had more of a sense of continuity, instead of being a bit here, there, and everywhere. There was no real thread to hold the tracks together. I did get the best out of every song, but when you listen to them one after the other, it doesn’t sound like somebody’s album, it sounds like a hotch-potch compilation. I’ll definitely do things differently when I come to write again. I’ll have more concrete ideas and won’t be swayed. Having said that, I don’t regret making the album. I’m really glad I made it.”
Melanie B’s second (and to date last) album L.A. State of Mind emerged in 2005; the independently issued affair was a charmingly lo-fi volte-face from the lustrous Hot that saw her make good on her declaration to be present as a songwriter on that record.
Given the flurry of personal and professional activity swirling around Melanie B at the time of Hot’s development, it’s understandable that she might have lost the grip on sussing out its specificities; there were also other circumstances out of Melanie B’s control that put a damper on her chances to connect substantially with listeners in regard to her first long player.
As it is, Hot is far and away from a bad album, just one with a few minor flaws. In its best moments, Hot captures Melanie B putting across her abiding affection for mainstream R&B (with some pop touches) on her terms and that has made the record an enduring historical piece from the height of the Spice Girls saga.
Quentin Harrison is the author of Record Redux: Spice Girls, the first written overview of the Spice Girls’ collective and individual canon which was originally published in 2016. He is currently working on an overhauled volume of the book to be made available for purchase in Summer 2021; the first edition has been discontinued in lieu of the forthcoming issuance of the revamped book. Harrison has published four other books in his 'Record Redux Series' on Carly Simon, Donna Summer, Madonna and Kylie Minogue that are currently available physically and digitally.
Note: As an Amazon affiliate partner, Albumism may earn commissions from purchases of vinyl records, CDs and digital music featured on our site.
LISTEN: