THE ID

Macy Gray
(Sony)

RATING: four

There’s something oddly comforting about Macy Gray. It’s a feeling that’s the exact opposite of the uneasiness that I get when I pop in a Fiona Apple CD. Not that I don’t like Fiona Apple, mind—I absolutely love the girl and her music, but there’s always the suspicion of severe mental distress just lurking beneath the surface. You just don’t know when she’s going to explode, like she did at the MTV Awards.

With Macy Gray, at least, you know where you stand. Even when she’s being her quirky, unpredictable self, she doesn’t wig out too much. When she was skewered at last year’s MTV Awards with a raunchy spoof of her video for “I Try,” she was visibly annoyed, but nevertheless poked fun at herself when she got up onstage as a presentor. This self-directed sense of humor is really what keeps her eminently sane, and it’s also what makes her new album, The Id, so damn charming.

From the staccato opening lines of the album—“hot like hot wings in hot chocolate in hell!”—Macy Gray makes it clear that it’s all good, clean, mentally healthy fun. Even when singing about sex, as she does time and time and time again on The Id, Gray just does it with a wink and a smile, stripping the subject of sleaze and facing it with a great deal of humor. “Your mama told you to be discreet/ keep your freak to yourself/ but your mama lied to you all this time,” she sings on “Sexual Revolution,” urging everyone to “express what is taboo in you” and “share your freak with the rest of us.” Fiona Apple would have turned that into an Elektra Complex-complicated nightmare; Missy Elliott is likely to overstate the sex. In Macy Gray’s hands, it might not be a forceful declaration of sexual independence, but it sure is a lot of fun. By the time the chorus comes around, the song’s mock-serious intro has dissolved into funky disco beats that buoys the chorus of cries declaring, “this is my sexual revolution!”

“Gimme All Your Lovin’ or I Will Kill You” is the title to one of the other tracks, but there is no Eminem-style violence to be found here, just a couple of well-timed punchlines: “ I couldn’t get the man to fall in love with me/ turns out he likes the girls with long and wavy hair/ and mine was short and…” (pause) “kinky.” The other titles give away the mood of the songs: “My Nutmeg Phantasy,” “Boo,” “Freak Like Me.” There are a couple of almost-serious takes, but by and large the music is loose and funky, even more so than on her first album, On How Life Is. Guest appearances also spice up the track list: Slick Rick on “Hey Young World Part 2”; Erykah Baduh on “Sweet Baby”; Angie Stone and Moe Def on “My Nutmeg Phantasy.”

For an album that pays homage to the id—defined by Sigmund Freud as “the part of the psyche that is the source of instinctual impulses and demands for satisfaction,” and by Macy Gray as “what you do before you think…the real you…unedited”—it’s nowhere near as uncontrollably freaky as its title might suggest. Humorous, loose, funky, and lighthearted, you’ll wish you had more of The Id in your psyche.—Kristine Fonacier