Anniversaries: Who Is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds, Vol. 1 by Jill Scott
Jill Scott opened that world to us with love, with laughter, with a poet’s pen and a powerhouse voice. Twenty-five years later, she showed us the way, and the culture is still catching up to her lead.
At the turn of the millennium, Philadelphia was vibrating with creative and political energy. Neo-soul and alternative hip-hop were flourishing: local heroes The Roots were fresh off the experimental success of Things Fall Apart, and fellow Philly singer Musiq Soulchild was introducing a new strain of mellow, heart-on-sleeve R&B. A few years earlier, in 1997, the city had hosted the Million Woman March, a massive grassroots gathering of Black women that brought hundreds of thousands to the streets in a show of solidarity and community uplift. Even the city’s sports culture was making waves, the swagger of Sixers star Allen Iverson was capturing imaginations. Jill Scott emerged from this moment as a kind of cultural sponge and amplifier. She didn’t just benefit from Philly’s creative ferment; she absorbed and helped sustain it. Who Is Jill Scott? brims with the flavor of everyday Philadelphia life. She populates her songs with “images of regular people” and neighborhood texture: friends teasing and supporting each other, kids playing, elders sitting on stoops, the smell of collard greens cooking next door. The album situates Scott’s inner world firmly within a community, and that communal warmth anchors even her most introspective musings. In this sense, the record carries forward the legacy of Philly soul and the grassroots spirit of that late-‘90s moment. It’s as much a love letter to the block as it is to any man.
Jill’s path to creating the album also speaks to her storytelling skills and collaborative approach. Before she ever released a single, she was known in Philly’s spoken-word circuit, and she caught a break when Questlove of the Roots noticed her talent. The Roots enlisted the then-unknown Scott to co-write what would become their 1999 Grammy-winning hit “You Got Me.” Jill originally penned and performed the song’s hook, crafting the poetic lines of a woman assuring her lover of her fidelity. In a now-legendary twist of music-biz fate, The Roots’ label insisted that a more famous voice be used on the single, and Jill’s vocals were replaced by Erykah Badu’s. There were no hard feelings. Badu was an established star and fellow traveler in neo-soul’s rise, but the swap could have been a footnote in history if Jill Scott hadn’t persisted. The Roots camp made sure audiences knew who had co-written the song by bringing Scott on tour to perform “You Got Me” live. Night after night, the woman dubbed ‘Jilly from Philly’ took the stage, spelling out her name in jazzy scats and winning over crowds with her down-to-earth charisma. The experience was formative. Here was a crash course in merging spoken poetry with hip-hop musicianship, in writing lyrics that tell a story, and in holding one’s own next to rap’s bravado, all lessons she carried straight into her debut album. Scott slyly nods to this apprenticeship by including a live Roots interlude on Words and Sounds, Vol. 1, dropping a snippet of her original “You Got Me” performance into the tracklist. It’s a full-circle moment, a reminder that Jill Scott arrived as part of a collective of Philly creatives who all believed in the power of mixing genres and voices. That spirit of collaboration and authenticity infuses the entire album.
In 2000, Black women in pop culture were routinely forced into narrow archetypes. For much of the ‘90s, you were expected to be either a diva or a vixen, conscious or pop, a feminist icon or the wholesome girl next door. Trina, Foxy Brown, and Lil’ Kim were celebrated (and criticized) for raunchiness, while Mariah Carey and Destiny’s Child were propped up as pristine divas, and heaven help the women like Missy Elliott or Da Brat who dared to cover up, for they’d face ugly speculation about their sexuality. Even Erykah Badu, kindred neo-soul royalty, was treated as an eccentric other. Jill Scott shattered these false binaries. She arrived as herself, full stop, “simultaneously femme, sexual, black, soulful, messy, and experimental.” In other words, real. Her image was refreshingly down-to-earth (in the “Gettin’ In the Way” video, she’s in a simple red headwrap and a denim button-up, more of an around-the-way homegirl than a glamor queen) and her music followed suit. Scott’s songs chronicled love, heartbreak, sex, and everyday life from the perspective of a young Black woman who refused to simplify herself for anybody’s comfort.
Take the pairing of “Exclusively” and “Gettin’ In the Way,” two companion pieces at the heart of the album. “Exclusively,” as we’ve seen, is the giddy internal monologue of a woman savoring the thrill of a secret morning tryst, sensual pleasure sharpened by a touch of feminine intuition that something might be amiss. Its sultry, playful vibe immediately shifts when the new girl at the counter hints that Jill’s lover might not be as exclusive as she had hoped. That revelation segues seamlessly into “Gettin’ In the Way,” where the mood turns confrontational. Over a chunky midtempo groove laced with bluesy guitar and horns, Scott unleashes a “derisive declaration” aimed at a meddling rival. “You better back down before you get smacked down,” she repeats with tart firmness, defending her emotional turf with both humor and chutzpah. Scott performs the song as a clear-eyed critique of how a man’s infidelity (and society’s gender games) can pit two women against each other. Yet she infuses it with such wit and righteous sisterly ire that it feels less like tearing another woman down and more like righteously calling out the game itself. This balance between joy and judgment, vulnerability and strength, is the album’s lifeblood.
Jill Scott’s vocal approach is crucial to that balance. She doesn’t sing at you so much as she sings to you, or with you. Her voice is a versatile soprano that can soar into open-throated ecstasy (hear her jazz-trained scatting and operatic runs on “He Loves Me (Lyzel in E Flat)”), but just as often she opts for a speaking cadence or a sotto voce murmur that draws you closer. She’ll interrupt a melody to chuckle, or drop into a whisper as if sharing a secret, then erupt with a gospel holler the next moment. This dynamic phrasing upends the smooth, unattainable polish common in R&B at the time; instead of projecting an airbrushed fantasy, Scott prioritizes feelings and truth.
Even a throwaway “Mm-hmm” or “Right” uttered mid-song carries narrative weight, because it sounds so organically her. It’s the sound of a young Black woman speaking her mind in real time, unconcerned with appearing prim or proper. Little wonder that fans immediately took to Scott as an almost familial figure. She has described her own writing approach in plain terms: “I wrote this album like a human being. I sing like a Black woman. I didn’t talk about what everyone else is talking about,” she told Billboard in 2000, hoping that even if listeners didn’t share her exact experiences, “at least they understand.” That ethos of the universal through the specific is all over Words and Sounds, Vol. 1. By being unabashedly herself—a full-figured, natural-haired, around-the-way girl with a big voice and bigger spirit—Jill Scott invited a whole generation to see the beauty and poetry in their own ordinary lives.
This set a new template for what R&B could sound like at the dawn of the 21st century. The album’s subtitle, Words and Sounds, is a literal mission statement. By fusing jazz-inspired instrumentation, spoken-word cadences, and neo-soul warmth, Scott and her team (the A Touch of Jazz production collective helmed by DJ Jazzy Jeff) created a lush soundscape that perfectly complements her narratives. You can hear the live jam-session feel in the supple bass lines, shimmering Rhodes keys, and subtle horn flourishes that underpin tracks like “It’s Love.” The latter even ventures into D.C. go-go rhythm, showing Scott’s willingness to experiment with groove. Unlike the synthetic, hyper-polished R&B of the late ‘90s, Scott’s album favored organic sounds, a conscious throwback to the sophisticated soul of an earlier era. Her producers have noted that they approached the project “with little thought for the commercial aspect... just to make a really good album that people would love from beginning to end.”
What we got is a record that flows like a live set or a novel, complete with interludes and hidden tracks, encouraging full immersion rather than cherry-picking singles. Within this LP, Jill’s voice is the binding thread. She handles words with as much importance as melody. In songs like “Love Rain,” she delivers entire verses in a spoken-word slam poetry style, then glides into singing on the choruses, making poetry and song “even out” in a beautiful balance. The influence of her literary idol Nikki Giovanni is evident in the vivid imagery and narrative heft of her lyrics, even as her vocal phrasing draws from jazz divas and gospel greats. This fusion was more than just aesthetic; it carried an implicit message. Here was a young Black woman confidently remixing forms—jazz, soul, hip-hop, poetry—to tell her story, on her own terms.
In doing so, she was enacting what author Joan Morgan famously described as a “hip-hop feminist” approach—a remix of the Black feminist voice for a new generation. Morgan wrote that no one book (or by extension, one album) could capture the truth of Black womanhood—“Truth is what happens when your cumulative voices fill in the breaks, provide the remixes, and rework the chorus.” Jill Scott’s debut is one such vital voice filling in the breaks, reworking the old soul chorus with new textures. She stands in her femininity and blackness without apology, owning the sexual and the spiritual parts of herself equally. Call it hip-hop feminism or just an honest self-portrait—either way, Who Is Jill Scott? expanded the template of what a soul singer could be in the 2000s.
Over the years since Jill Scott first asked the world who she was, the answer can be heard in the artists who have followed her trailblazing path. The album’s influence rumbles in how contemporary Black women in music freely inhabit their full complexity. Today, hugely successful women like SZA or Rihanna can be delightfully candid, messy, and vulnerable in their music, and stars like Noname or Cardi B are celebrated for speaking directly to other Black women about their lives without filter. That comfort with relatability in pop—the idea that an artist can invite you into her kitchen, bedroom, or diary and still be a superstar—owes a debt to Who Is Jill Scott? Back in 2000, Jill’s fluid blend of sensuality, strength, vulnerability, and round-the-way familiarity was a revelation. Now it’s practically a prerequisite for the new generation of R&B and hip-hop starlets. You can draw a line from Scott’s conversational, jazz-inflected storytelling to the neo-soul revivalism of artists like H.E.R. and Ari Lennox (who peppers her songs with playful spoken interludes much like Jill).
You can feel Scott’s fearless sensual honesty echoed when Beyoncé purrs about love and monogamy on Lemonade, or when a rapper like Megan Thee Stallion flips between sexual agency and personal introspection. Whether it’s explicit or subtle, Jill Scott’s DNA is in the mix. She demonstrated that a Black woman artist didn’t have to conform to one of the music industry’s pre-fabricated boxes. She could be intellectual and earthy, “less cerebral but [deeply] emotive,” as Scott was often compared with her neo-soul peer Badu, and she could foreground both her mind and body in her art without shame. As one writer observed, Jill’s magic lay in “supplying ordinary topics in a grounded style” and in “the power of her vulnerability,” depicting love, lust, heartbreak, and confidence with meticulous care and a secure sense of determination. In other words, Jill knew how to get to the heart of our humanity by embracing all the contradictions within herself.