I could not have known then that Sade would speak for and to me in every decade of my life. Some of us believed it would save everyone. What can I make? What can I sell? How best to act? I turned my Sade up because a religious belief in music kept me sane. My attitude was, I can't trust a social safety net. We considered as givens not just the grimy details of our hard knock lives, but also 'the AIDS' we didn't understand, the lack of Black faces at local universities and the low-key PTSD of living in our city's ' bloodiest years.' To paraphrase my fellow native Too Short, in the '80s, our beloved Oakland was the right damn town in which to get killed. It's that my friends are all working plans - collecting diplomas or selling dope or both - while performing nonchalance. It's that the news keeps saying 'Reaganomics' and I can't afford the good college I got myself into. Or a partner who will call because he likes to and because he said he would. It's that I don't know if I'll ever have a job that pays more than survival coin. It's not just the boy with his long lashes and fast car and ability to compartmentalize. Even the album's title feels coded: It would be beautiful to shine bright, but I want to feel indestructible.īecause things are falling apart. Haven't I told you before, she sings: We're hungry for a life we can't afford. This is 1986, and though Sade's second album, Promise, is everywhere, I crave the multiple entendres of Diamond's 'Cherry Pie.' There's grit - 'Sally,' 'Frankie's First Affair' - in the way Sade names names. The twirling cassette, from a girl named Sade, is called Diamond Life.

I am abandoned and loudness is a weighted blanket. My head is between a landline and my booming system. I am jealous of his freedom yet refuse to leave my neatly made secondhand mattress. The boy who had just as much sex with me as I with him has no decision in his belly, and he hasn't called. There is no clue as to what next Tuesday will bring, let alone the rest of this one, when the Challenger explodes every minute on the mute TV. When I am near 21, and poor, and pregnant. I've tried to say how it was, in those boombox times. The artist released her fifth album, Lovers Rock, in November 2000. Sade performs live at New Jersey's PNC Bank Arts Center in 2001.

What key is sade by your side in