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 Articles · Photos · Promotional · Reviews · Tour · Miscellaneous 1998: Trace 
[TITLE UNKNOWN AT THIS TIME] Link to Larger Version of Photo Supremely southern, Joi is right there on the edge of soul, an alternative artist with the shine of a diva(read: she is not afraid to show her thang or do her thang). Before Joi started playing packed nightclubs, before she started strutting high-fashion catwalks or cutting albums, she gave private concerts. As a five year-old, she performed for her grandmother's social club, the Beautiful Lilles in Nashville. "I can vividly remember singing 'You Light Up My Life' at the Pokeno Club meetings when I was five. I can I can remember the feeling of being in front of the little ol'ladies, knowing. It wasn't like a big revelation: being up there was a comfortable place for me." Perhaps a window to understanding her tenacity, this was the same grandmother that was diagnosed with cancer when Joi was in the second grade. She was given six months to live but instead thrived for nine years, until Joi's junior year of high school. After battling yet another year, she passed the summer before Joi's senior year. As Joi puts it, "She wasn't ready to go until God was ready, honey. She's Like my guardian angel now. I can feel her looking down, you know, it's beautiful." While working on her demo in Nashville, Joi met Dallas Austin. That evening they sat in the studio. "I was like wow, he's young, we might even be the same age, you know. He said, 'So what do you do? Brian tells me you sing.' I said, 'Yeah I sing a little bit. I write music." I thought it would give me more validity if I said I was a songwriter. So we ended up exchanging numbers and he was like, 'If you're ever in Atlanta, look me up.' I thought he was blowin' smoke, so I wasn't studyin' it." Joi arrived in Atlanta not long after that meeting. "I come from the South. I'm real seroius about that. Like my whole southern thang, I'm rreeaall serious about that!" She rolls out her r's and l's to emphasise the point, tapping her inch long ebony brown acrylics on the marble top of the table. "I feel good about being a part of a growing industry. I feel like I got here when all the babies were blowing up. You know, the only thing that was fo' sure around here when I got here was Bobby Brown and LaFace, and that was it!" Joi firmly testifies to her involvement and commitment to such Atlanta icon's as Rowdy, SoSoDef, and Organized Noize. Upon arrival Joi was embraced by ATL's underground scene, where she met the collaborators for the forthcoming Heroine project ("It's about sistas who are not afraid to speak on what they've gone through and how it's empowered them.") There are a couple of things that will strike any virgin onlooker at a Joi gig. Seeing her, you cannot doubt that this is what she is meant to do, and has been doin' since her early "bookings" at the Beautiful Lillies club. She gives a helluva show. Let's recall, say, her first show after the birth of Keypsiia. True to her form and flava, Joi performed to a hyped up audience, breasts swollen with milk, with silver covering the tips of her nipples. Keypsiia brings us crashing back to the present as she scales the lonesome high chair which has been empty for the bulk of the interview. I decided that it was probably an opportune moment to broach the 'how's motherhood?' question. It was one of those golden moments when you see a person really drop the mask. "I used to be fearless," Joi answered, almost as if exhaling the words. "Almost to the point of thinking maybe I was a little invincible. Like couldn't nuthin' happen to me, but motherhood and childbirth has definitely brought that whole mentality to a screeching halt." After massaging her temples at the thought of the "worry fest" she shares, she admits, "It's cool. I'ts definitely taken my relationship with God into another dimension. Now I'm accountable. Now I know. It's like before I was ignorant and childbirth has has made me see shit I didn't even want to see. It's almost like my relationship with Him has evolved into adulthood." Joi and Gip met, odddly enough, in New York, not Atlanta. Joi was in the City shooting some layouts and Gip was flying up for a party to celebrate the success of Players Ball, which had been on the charts for six weeks. "I was actually supposed to have left the day of the party, but I decided to stay an extra day because they were coming up. I met him but I didn't think nuthin' about it." She smiles coyly, sighs. "Then came back to the crib and started seein' him a couple of places. Jus' kinda like, hmm, he's cute. Did not look like anybody I had ever seen in my life, not no face like that, not no demeanour like that." Joi pauses to stir her mochaccino. "After a couple of weeks of a cat-n-mouse thing, we exchanged phone numbers." She pauses again to sip her coffee and smiles. "So he called me. He came over. We stayed up the whole night, talking. He just kinda never left and here we are several years later." Joi's 1997 has been filled with business changes and sudden turns. Shortly before the scheduled release date for her second album THE AMOEBA CLEANSING SYNDROME, Joi's label EMI dissolved. Joi is philosophical about the experience. "The growth that I've experienced from the first record to this record has been exactly what I needed it to be. I'ts about fearlessness and evolving against the odds, contrary to what is popular." To fill the void, Rowdy has now linked with Volcano Records to form Freeworld. The ACS is set for release in January-with the video for "Ghetto Superstar" airing in November-so maybe Joi will get another chance to reaffirm her faith in Truth after all. Original Text: Gina May |
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