The huge sign behind the Nokia Theater stage displayed the name of the radio station — 98.7 KISS-FM — and also its slogan: “The Best Variety of Old School and Today’s R&B.” The occasion was the Kiss Holiday Concert on Friday night, and the star was a doubly appropriate singer.
Angie Stone at the Nokia Theater.
Angie Stone is both an old-school pioneer and a current R&B hit maker, as she explained midway through her witty and unpredictable set. “I’ve been doing this, y’all, since 1979,” she said, reminiscing about her time with the first-wave hip-hop trio the Sequence. Nowadays she’s a champion of “classic soul music,” signed to the revived Stax Records. To hear her tell it, she went through hip-hop and came out the other side. “I ain’t hating on hip-hop, because that’s the humble beginnings,” she said. “But we grow up.”
At the Nokia, Ms. Stone’s voice sounded warm but surprisingly soft; she often shied away from the high notes, and for power she relied on a pair of backup singers. No matter: people already knew the words. Besides, she evidently enjoys having a nimble band to rely on. Judging from Friday night’s show, she also enjoys having a keyboardist who will, after much goading and teasing, improvise new lyrics to “Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’),” by T-Pain.
Two months ago Ms. Stone released her fourth solo album, “The Art of Love & War,” which has spawned a minor hit, “Baby,” a gentle but firm reprimand to an old lover who has moved on. It has a mellow beat, a smooth refrain and an entertaining, wildly overstuffed music video. Major plot points: a vicious mugging, a newspaper headline about a “movie starlet” (played, perhaps wishfully, by an “America’s Next Top Model” winner) and a shocking surveillance tape.
The crowd was full of decidedly (in some cases exceedingly) post-teenage couples on dates, and Ms. Stone knows her way around make-out music. When a band member crooned a suggestive question — “Can I touch you in all the right places, baby?” — the response came swiftly. “Now, wait a minute,” said Ms. Stone, as she came tottering over, feigning not irritation but, on the contrary, impatience. “I’m gon’ show you how much the woman is in control,” she said. And she conducted the band with a series of twitches, slowly coaxing the music along, note by note.
Audience members weren’t exempt from Ms. Stone’s cajoling. During a singalong version of “No More Rain (in This Cloud),” from her impressive 1999 solo debut album, “Black Diamond,” she stopped for a friendly correction. For years she had noticed fans singing, “There’s no more rain in this house”; now she wanted everyone to get it right.
Still, nothing beat “Brotha,” an old fan favorite that gives Ms. Stone a chance to testify on one of her favorite subjects. As the band started playing, she decried “the male-bashing and the female-bashing on the radio,” reminded everyone that “the Bible says the man is the head of the household,” advised financially successful women to avoid causing “dissension” at home and — most important — issued a directive: “Will all the kings rise up, please?”
By which she meant: every man in the building. (Addressing a couple near the front, she clarified: white men too.) As the women cheered, she shouted, “King!” and instructed the men to shout back, “I am!” When the response was less than thunderous, she asked, “What was that?”
But eventually the men got it right, and perhaps some of them savored this marvelously paradoxical scene: one in-control woman, commanding hundreds of men to stand up for themselves.
