Today in our History – March 10, 1964 - Neneh Mariann Karlsson was born
GM – LIF - Today’s American Champion American Champion - Better known as Neneh Cherry, is a Swedish singer-songwriter, rapper, occasional DJ and broadcaster. Her musical career started in London in the early 1980s, where she performed in a number of punk and post-punk bands in her youth, including The Slits and Rip Rig + Panic.
To date, Cherry has released five studio albums under her own name. Her first, Raw Like Sushi, was released 1989 and peaked at number three on the UK Album Chart, thanks in large part to the worldwide hit single "Buffalo Stance". Her second studio album was 1992's Homebrew. Four years later she released Man, with her next studio album, Blank Project, coming in 2014. Her most recent album, Broken Politics, was released in 2018.
In addition to releasing these studio albums, she formed the band cirKus in 2006 and has collaborated with The Thing, releasing an album entitled The Cherry Thing in 2012.
Cherry has won two Brit Awards and an MTV Europe Music Award, She has also been nominated for a Grammy Award.
Remember – “I've always looked to other women for inspiration and kicks. When a woman stands up and does her thing, it never ceases to excite and inspire me.” - Neneh Cherry
Today in our History – March 10, 1964 - Neneh Mariann Karlsson was born.
Cherry was born as Neneh Mariann Karlsson in Stockholm, Sweden, the daughter of Monika "Moki" Karlsson (1943–2009), a Swedish painter and textile artist, and the musician Ahmadu Jah (1936–2018). Jah was born in Sierra Leone, West Africa, the son of a tribal chief, and went to Stockholm to study engineering at university.
Cherry's parents separated early and her mother married the influential American jazz musician Don Cherry, who helped raise Cherry since birth. Cherry took her stepfather's surname.
From her mother's side, Cherry also has a half-brother, musician Eagle-Eye Cherry. From stepfather Don Cherry's side, she has a stepsister, violinist Jan Cherry, and a stepbrother, jazz musician David Ornette Cherry. Through her father Ahmadu Jah's marriage to Maylen Jah (née Bergstr?m), Cherry is the half-sister of singer Titiyo and record producer Cherno Jah.
Cherry's parents, Moki and Don Cherry, bought and converted an old schoolhouse in the countryside outside the small town of H?ssleholm in Sweden in 1970. In the early 1970s, the family moved to the United States, when Don Cherry taught at Dartmouth College. Cherry dropped out of school at 14 and moved to London.
Cherry moved to the United Kingdom when she was 15, in the midst of the punk era, and she remembers finding "her people" there. Cherry had met Tessa Pollitt, Viv Albertine and Ari Up from The Slits earlier as her stepfather, Don Cherry, was touring with them and took the 15-year-old Neneh along. She and Ari lived in a squat in Battersea. She felt at home, after ending up there because The Slits invited Don Cherry to go on tour with them with Prince Hammer and Creation Rebel.
In London, Cherry joined the punk rock band The Cherries. She moved through several bands, including The Slits, New Age Steppers, Rip Rig + Panic, and Float Up CP. She also deejayed, playing early rap music on the reggae pirate Dread Broadcasting Corporation.
Cherry has stated that she found her voice singing along with Poly Styrene from X-Ray Spex. She grew up in a musical family; she remembers singing with her father at the piano.
Cherry said she has never really thought of herself as a rapper. She sees herself as a "singer that does a bit of rapping."
Breaking into the U.S. music industry was not a positive experience for Cherry. She said that while "Buffalo Stance" gave her a mainstream crossover moment in the U.S. she found the American music industry stiflingly attached to labels and genre identities.[30]
In 1983, Cherry married drummer Bruce Smith and had a daughter, Naima. They divorced in 1984. Naima is a London-based photographer, who had a son named Louis Clyde Flynn Love (who goes by Flynn)[36] in 2004.
In 1986, Cherry met producer Cameron "Booga Bear" McVey at Heathrow Airport. Cherry and McVey were en route to Japan as fashion models as part of London designer Ray Petri's Buffalo Posse. Cherry proposed, and the couple married in 1990. Cherry and McVey have two daughters: Tyson, born in 1989, and singer Mabel, born in 1996.[34] Cherry and McVey have a collaborative work relationship: McVey produced and co-wrote Raw Like Sushi. Together they have supported a variety of British acts and they were in the group cirKus together. Cherry has a stepson, Marlon Roudette (former frontman of Mattafix), via McVey's prior relationship with Vonnie Roudette.
The Cherry-McVeys have lived throughout Europe. In 1993, they moved near Málaga, Spain, and lived there until 1999. In 1995, they briefly lived in New York City. They bought a home in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, New York. Soon after moving in, the couple was held up at gunpoint and robbed by a teenage hoodlum. The entire family packed up again and headed back to Berkley Grove in London's Primrose Hill.
They next returned to Cherry's childhood home in H?ssleholm, Sweden, living in the same schoolhouse turned home (featured in Homebrew album artwork) in which Cherry was raised as a child.
The family has a country house near Birmingham and Wolverhampton, apartments in London and Stockholm, plus the family home in the old schoolhouse in Sk?ne County that she and her half-brother inherited when their mother died in 2009. As of 2014, Cherry says she commutes between London and Stockholm.
Since the late 1980s, Cherry has frequently worked with the stylist and jewelry designer Judy Blame.
On her street style, Cherry cites LL Cool J as an influence, as well as the photographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Judy Blame, and designer Ray Petri. Research more about this great American Champion and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!