Ashanti is ‘trying to be a mogulette’
In my 60 years in celebrity journalism, I’ve met an incredible number of stars but very few as fun and down to earth as singer-songwriter Ashanti. We’re sitting backstage at Brooklyn Bowl Las Vegas in The Linq Promenade on her dressing room couch, and she’s in a showgirl red sequined bra and panties with one false eyelash applied. The other awaits on her makeup table. It’s an hour before her concert with Ja Rule, and she’s as comfortable and at ease as if we were headed out for one of her “Celebrity Food Adventures” episodes.
Ashanti is in total control of her life and career, yet with no sign of the diva devils that emerge from other singers. She has all the credits that would justify that state of mind. Her debut album, which featured the hit “Foolish” in April 2002, sold more than 500,000 copies in its first week of release. One year later, it won her a Grammy for Best Contemporary R&B album, her first. Her second release achieved platinum status. She became the second artist after The Beatles to have the first three chart entries in the Top 10 simultaneously.
More incredible is that she had a song in the Top 10 every week for 11 consecutive months, January through November, in 2002. Ashanti went on to win eight Billboard Awards and two American Music Awards and was crowned royalty as “the princess of hip hop and R&B.” Oprah Winfrey honored her at the Legends Ball as one of the most influential and legendary black women in 20th century entertainment.
These are extraordinary achievements, and it’s not just the singing. Ashanti writes her own hits. She’s a record producer and has her own publishing company and record label, Written Entertainment. Its first album in 2014, “Brave Heart,” went to No. 1 on Billboard’s independent charts. Ashanti can do no wrong!
Ashanti danced with Judith Jamison of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. She made her acting debut alongside Samuel L. Jackson in “Coach Carter” and appeared in “Resident Evil.” She’s focused on television now with our chef Barry S. Dakake from her favorite N9NE Steakhouse at The Palms. They’ve filmed the first episode of “Celebrity Food Adventures” here, and the duo are now about to meet with TV executives for its rollout.
Ashanti and Ja Rule reunited this summer and fall on tour, and he insisted that we take a photograph together even though she hadn’t applied the second false eyelash. Their collaborations go back as far as 2001 with his album “Pain Is Love,” then years later on “Mesmerize” and “Wonderful.”
‘The love, the lights, the cameras’
“It feels amazing to be back in Las Vegas. The love, the lights, the cameras, the action, it’s amazing. I’m so excited for the show. It’s the first time we are both out on the road with my own record company. I’m trying to be a little mogulette! It was awesome we went No. 1 with my first project. I’m very, very grateful.
“This little tour we’re on now is like a continuation of a longer tour. It’s weird because the tour started out for just a week. We had five days and it just kept adding and adding, and it just turned into 20 dates, then started to come back again. Now they want another 10 dates.
“So the actual ‘Natural Born Hitters Tour’ will probably start back up in another month or two if everything goes well. I’d say with Ja Rule, we’re a pretty powerful duo. I changed it from ‘Natural Born Killers’ to ‘Natural Born Hitters’ because of all the things going on politically, and I wanted to be a little sensitive.”
I told Ashanti that I’d looked at their music video and noted that while he had a lot of sexy young women hanging around him, she had no young men around her. She laughed: “You know why? Because they hate me. All the guys, they’re like my big brother, so they block when I’m trying to get my swerve on. They feel like I’m their little sister, and it’s not fair. I say it all the time. It’s like they try to keep me away while they can go play with a plethora of women, and I’m sitting here like, well, alone on the couch!”
I asked Ashanti to explain the magic of Ja Rule: “I see it every night. I think that we have such an organic chemistry like, we genuinely, I don’t know what it is from the moment that we’ve performed together, it was just organic and magnetic, and no matter if we haven’t seen or spoken in months, or years, when we get back onstage, it’s automatic, and it’s a blessing. Our energy is just crazy from the first video we ever shot together.
“We’ve been talking about doing another one since the beginning of the tour. We wanted to go in and do a short EP album of five records of just us together for the tour, but our schedules have been crazy. But we are definitely getting back in the studio, and we’re going to do another smash. I’m probably going to write my part. He’ll write his raps.
“I love writing, but my favorite is performing. Last night in Denver, we had two shows back to back, sold out 9 and 11 p.m. Both crowds were equally insane. I couldn’t even hear, so I had to take my earbud out for a minute. It was that crazy. When it’s those kind of performances, I was a zombie. I needed a whole 5-hour energy drink before the second show. It was crazy.”
An exploding volcano
Onstage, Ashanti fires up as an exploding volcano. Offstage, she’s a quiet, well-spoken, clean-cut young woman. I had to ask: “How do you keep your feet on the ground? You hear so many bad stories about rappers, and you’re this polite young lady. You’re a princess in a very crazy business.”
She told me: “I owe a lot to my mom and my family. I come from a great family, and I think it’s cool that I grew up as a tomboy and I was always around boys, so I know how to handle both ways. I’m the girl, so I tell them what to do! If Ja Rule gets out of line, I tell him. We have that chemistry, and we didn’t even know it. We didn’t plan that!
“When I record a record and I see it translate in the audience and I see people sing and I can just hold the mic out and they sing the verses verbatim, it’s just the most awesome feeling ever. So it’s a combination. When you go into create something, you love it. You’re not sure how the crowd is going to react to it. But when you get that love like they felt every single word that I wrote because they’re singing it and they’re screaming it and I see tears, I get goose bumps. That’s the best feeling in the world.”
I wanted to know how she knew how to touch their emotions. “I write about my real-life experiences,” she told me. “It’s a difference when you’re writing your own records versus someone writing them for you. I know what I felt. It’s sincere, so I know someone else on the planet has had this emotion or had felt like this or this has happened to someone else.
“The message is girls sometimes think more with their heart, and we’re way more forgiving. We’re smarter and we become stronger because we tolerate. My advice is to always be independent and stand up for yourself. If you’re not being treated fairly or with respect or as you feel you deserve, you have to be strong enough to love yourself first and walk away. The better person will come, I promise.
“I have a message for the naughty boys. Get your act together. Eventually, you’re going to have a daughter, and you should really think about your actions now because it’s going to come back. Treat women how you want your mom to be treated or how your sister or your auntie should be treated. We all come from somewhere. I think it’s important for men to be respectful.
“I come from a very strong backbone of women and family, and all the guys in my family, they’re very respectful. The men in my family, they’re very protective of the women, as well. So, I just believe that you have to love yourself first, and you have to demand respect in order for someone to give it.
“That’s my message at the show tonight.”
