Celebrating Underrated Soul Songstress Nikka Costa
You know that thing that TV stations do, when they turn up the volume on the commercials so they can still try to sell you stuff you don’t want when you’ve gotten up to check the clothes in the dryer? I usually resent that, but this time I didn’t. Before I’d taken “three steps toward the door” as Lynyrd Skynyrd used to wheedle, I was seriously grooving. A funky bass line played on the keyboards had me choreographing Soul Train moves all the way to the laundry room. (Trigger alert: This ad was filmed in pre-Covid days and shows mask-less people in close physical proximity. Ah, sweet memories.)
Is that a Sly and the Family Stone song, I wondered. It had that groove, it had a horn section, and it had a lighthearted, uptempo attitude associated with the Sly/Rufus/P-Funk era. The harmonies were a bit simple for Jazz-infused Rufus, and the group was a bit too small, not to mention Bootsy-free for “it takes a village” Parliament Funkadelic, so it had to be Sly. Or so I thought. But how did a piece this hot escape me all these years?
Time to don my musicology cape and put those research superpowers to work. I went through the catalog of Sly’s lesser known tracks one by one, making new friends but keeping the old. No luck. That’s when I remembered the methodology I’d used for the iPhone and the car commercials. Google.
My Google search showed a Chase Bank commercial (Who knew Wall Street could shake its groove thang?). The artist was identified as Nikka Costa.
Who?
Turns out, the globe kept spinning and stuff was actually happening out in the world when I was trying to get tenure. Who knew?
Nikka Costa (b. 1972), an American of Italian heritage, occasionally breaks into Italian but, allora, that’s not the only story of her background. She had a career as a child star popular throughout Europe, singing with international luminaries and releasing an album with her father, a professional guitarist, among other achievements. As an adult, however, her career trajectory stalled a bit.
Everybody Got Their Something, her U.S. debut album, was released in 2001, but NPR was only recognizing it in 2017. What happened? They spent an entire article praising her even though they didn’t put this album on their list of “150 Best Albums by Women.” According to their belated tribute,
[s]he has the pedigree: The daughter of music producer and arranger Don Costa and the goddaughter of Frank Sinatra, she even sang with The Chairman at nine years old. She has the stage swagger, groomed from years of performing abroad — including a stadium gig opening for thunder-rock kings AC/DC. Attractive and exuberant, sporting red, Medusa-like curls, Costa radiates a sexual confidence that is more Woodstock than video vixen; a heartfelt songwriter blessed with a voice that splices Aretha’s sanctified power with a few molecules of Janis’ weathered rasp.
Not only this, she plays multiple instruments, writes her own songs, and sings. The album was produced by Mark Ronson of Bruno Mars “Uptown Funk” fame and featured Questlove and Billy Preston. It’s a great album. Every track. It is great, but here’s where capitalism comes in. It didn’t sell. While I can’t go all the way with NPR, passing Aretha’s scepter to Nikka as the next generation, she does retain some of those Soul genes and there are indeed a “few molecules” of Janis Joplin. And since I time travel throughout musical times and genres, I cast my mind back to the days of Johann Sebastian Bach. What musicologist wouldn’t. Bach’s music was just as great then as it is now, but it didn’t sell. And Wolfgang Mozart’s music was just as good then as we know it to be now, but it barely sold.
So I looked on the Billboard charts to see what was going on in 2001. What could have held her back? It might have been the Hip Hop craze that fostered hits like “Where the Party At” by Jagged Edge, featuring Nelly and “Get Ur Freak On” by Missy Elliot with or without Nelly Furtado. It might have been the ballads like “I Hope You Dance” by Lee Ann Womack or “Fallin” by Alicia Keys. Women were on a roll.
Could it have been the bouncy bits like Blu Cantrell’s “Hit ’Em Up Style”? Or perhaps the anthems, like “Survivor” by Destiny’s Child. Despite all these power players, it seems like there should have been a spot for my girl Nikka. ’Cause she can SING. For real.
Like Francesco Yates, the Canadian blue-eyed Soul wunderkind I wrote about, her pitch is tight. It is so unerringly accurate that she has room to play around, spicing the lowdown Texas blues notes in “Love 2 Love U Less” with a dash of cayenne pepper and a splash of “Jack in the black”— straight up. Unlike another big-voiced singer, Adele, Nikka can also work dynamics and play with her timbre, going from glimmering satin to hungover denim.
One of my favorites among her oeuvre is a love song for the ages — “Just Because.” On her YouTube channel “Nikka’s Box,” she calls this a “song with a million chords” because it modulates all over the place, as her voice soars and dives, throbbing with fragile poignancy. James Taylor and Mary J. Blige. Aretha Franklin and Lionel Ritchie. There are tastes of all of them, but her sound is all her own. This song deeply expresses the pain, joy, and confusion of belated love, or even the memories of lost love, or the wonderful uncertainties of love right here and now. Her ownership of this gorgeous song is so singular, you can’t even imagine anyone else singing it.
And how did the truly rockin’ “Nylons in a Rip” not become a hit? She’s trashing W Bush for lying to us all about the Iraq War. (Oh, sorry. Forgot about what happened to then-named Dixie Chicks). Yet and still, I really appreciate the clever lyrics Nikka tosses out here:
Cat got your tongue,
The jungle’s won,
Enemy lines trippin’ your mama’s son,
But you say
You’re keepin’ us safe.In the hands
Of a god-fearin’ man,
We turn our backs;
He shakes the devil’s hand.
I believe
We been deceived.Now you got my nylons in a rip
Running round trying to make sense of it,
Trying to grow flowers in your bullshit;
You’d put out the sun if you got hold of it.
Can’t say fairer than that.
As for the title song of her U.S. debut album, the Tiny Desk people at NPR called this song a “get-down anthem of egalitarian empowerment.” Lawd, yes. Let everybody say, “Amen.”
And as for my initial thought? Turns out, I wasn’t so far off with the Sly and the Family Stone reference. Like my sense of it, Slant magazine’s Jonathan Keefe noticed that some of her music “could pass for a record that’s just been unearthed from the Stax vaults.”
One of Sly’s most affecting songs in my youth was “Everybody is a Star.” Coming at a time soon after desegregation in Tennessee, when a white choir director said a black girl couldn’t play the lead in the high school musical because the audience “wouldn’t be comfortable with [that],” I treasured the self-affirmation of that Sly song. In Nikka’s song, one line particularly connects to Sly: “And somehow I know/There’s a time for every star to shine,” going on to urge that each of us
Seek and you shall find
Everything in my own sweet time;
I’ll take my chances
With what I believe is only mine…
I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. It’s true that she doesn’t put on a megashow like Madonna (“Don’t Tell Me”) or Janet Jackson (“All For You”). And it’s true she can’t dance (in a contest, she’d be tied with Joe Cocker), but neither can Robin Thicke. It might be her international career as a child star, performing with stars like Don Ho and Frank Sinatra. But there’s real grown folks’ talent here, not just singing, but keyboards, guitar, and songwriting. Like Teena Marie, but with a wider palette of skills. All strong, all solid. No one-hit-wonder vibe here.
But even she seemed to know something was not quite right with her career. “I am a woman with a mission and a past to outdo” and “I’m a 100-lb fighter with a heavyweight past” may come from “So Have I for You” and “Like a Feather,” respectively, but they have a larger role in describing her career. Only Slant regularly took a hand in covering her work, with the appropriately Italian-monikered Sal Cinquemani (“five hands”) reviewing both her American debut album and the next album, can’tneverdidnothin’, that came four years later. Slant’s Keefe reviewed Pebble to a Pearl, three years after that. Both Slant and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reviewed her last album of original music, Pro *Whoa, with the Seattle PI accurately proposing that fans of a variety of styles should appreciate her “harder-to-define music.”
In that NPR article, “Shocking Omissions,” Faith Pennick suggests Costa didn’t take off because of that very “harder-to-define” quality. That could be it. After all, Teena Marie, the nearest competitor for Queen of Blue-eyed Funk, who worked with Rick James, is a household name among funk aficionados. But, then, she worked in a far more consistent style.
Nikka refers to herself as a “funky white bitch,” writing the music she wants, refusing to be “pigeonholed,” instead remaining a veritable treasure trove of American music influences: Country Blues, R&B, Soft Rock, Hard Rock, Funk, Punk, and even Pop songs with Jazz stylings. So, she was punished. So, I remember Sebastian and Wolfie and I remember that for many many years Debbie Boone had a Grammy but Led Zeppelin* didn’t. No shade on DB, but damn, Led Zeppelin?
Don’t get me wrong, Costa has had some notice, winning international awards and touring with the likes of Britney Spears and Lenny Kravitz. Some of her songs and performances were featured in movies starring such A-listers as Johnny Depp and Sandra Bullock, and on hit TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy. And probably the most impressive bit was a live R&B performance she did with Prince, where he backed her up on one of her songs. Given his notorious preference to control nearly all the material he did, this is really something, something.
Yet, somehow, this just doesn’t seem enough for me, considering the strength and depth of her skills, both technically and musically.
Seems to me there are a few main possibilities: She spent much of her adult career settled in her husband’s home country, Australia. The fact that she signed with major labels like Stax and Virgin, though, suggests somebody here knew she had her something. One of the first in the US to recognize that something was Tommy Hilfiger’s people, who used the sexy funky “Like a Feather” for one of their ads.
Former New York Times music critic, Ben Ratliff, who wrote a brief piece about Pebble to a Pearl, suspects another reason might be a bit of an East Coast/West Coast beef with this California girl. The critical consensus about her was clearly positive, but somehow, nobody was willing to say out loud how good she was, instead comparing her with Amy Winehouse, a talent he alludes to as a “self-absorbed trouble magnet.” Maybe just having scary-great skills and being otherwise normal and unassuming isn’t dramatic enough, isn’t “mean streets” enough.
But here’s the other thing. Sometimes the time and the talent just don’t sync up. Although much of her music hearkens to the Sixties and Seventies, and even earlier like the Etta James era, she’s also flavored with tastes of Hip Hop and Jazz. In other words, she goes where her musical voice takes her, ahead of, with, and behind the times in a time when such artistic fusions were much less common.
Big shots in the industry could decide that a talented woman was not amenable enough to the vagaries of style. Yet it says something that her music speaks so vividly now, even when she’s taken years off, raising her two children. During a brief US tour in 2018, the Boston Globe described her return to more frequent performing as “getting her groove back.” I’m glad. I’m glad she’s getting a well-deserved scent of the flowers she’s planted while she is living, as her voice shimmers in the altitude.
Albums (with one favorite song each)
Nikka & Strings: Underneath and in Between (2017, all orchestrated covers): “Nothing Compares to U”
Pro *Whoa (2011): “Nylons in a Rip”
Pebble to a Pearl (2008): “Love to Love You Less”
can’tneverdidnothin’(2005): “I Gotta Know”
Everybody’s Got Their Something (2001): title track and “Just Because”
Butterfly Rocket (1996): “Like a Feather”
*Led Zeppelin eventually got a lifetime achievement Grammy. I’m still mad, though, just like comedian Amber Ruffin is still mad that Angela Bassett didn’t get an Oscar for her portrayal of Tina Turner in 1993. Some things just ain’t right.
