MeShell Ndegeocello’s Grooves Maintain an Opinionated Edge

MeShell Ndegeocello wanted the stage lights turned down at the Conga Room on Sunday. “I’d much rather you feel me and hear me than see me,” she told the capacity crowd at the first of her two sets. “Then I can see you, too.”

This come-closer-so-I-can-get-in-your-face thing is a hallmark of Ndegeocello’s work. Her three albums have offered intimate, pointed, sometimes controversial ruminations on African American social and political issues, religion, sexuality and human nature. Amid selections from previous works, a handful of new songs from an in-progress album continued these themes.

Despite the raw sensuality expressed in her “romantic” songs, the openly bisexual artist viewed love as just another human tragedy--sometimes with bitter humor, as when describing a female lover who only wanted her for sex and took a boyfriend because she couldn’t handle being considered gay.

Her disgust and sorrow over the way self-deception and shallowness mess things up extended to her opinions on racial issues. While sympathetic about such tragedies as how African Americans’ great leaders tend to get shot dead, she decried the passivity of waiting around for another leader to come. She also criticized the romanticizing of Africa and hatred of whites, and insisted blacks must actively work to “redefine what it means to be free.”

On the first of her two nights at the Conga Room, the singer-bassist and her quintet, the Conscientious Objectors, delivered these messages in sprawling, watery grooves. Hints of Hendrix and Gil Scott-Heron bubbled in her trademark soul fusion, blending the improvisatory approach of jazz with R&B;, hip-hop and rock.