Legendary neo-soul, funk artist Joi performs at 'Sounds Like ATL' concert

Before Joi hits the stage Tuesday evening, she joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom to talk about the legacy of her groundbreaking work in soul and neo-soul music. 

Interview highlights follow below:

On Joi’s pivotal first hearing of her music hero Betty Davis:

“The first song of hers that I heard was ‘If I’m in Luck I Just Might Get Picked Up,’ and I had heard of her before but had not heard the music. So everything was just sort of legend, the things that I had heard previous … And when I first heard ‘If I’m in Luck,’ it was like a ton of bricks had hit me, or like a missing link, a piece to something had been found,” said Joi. “It was 100% transformative.”

“I did not get to meet Miss Betty, but I did get to communicate with her, and I was able to do a remark for the liner notes of the redistributed box set of her work that Light In The Attic put out in the mid-2000s, which helped with the spreading of the gospel of Betty,” Joi recounted. “Any chance I’m given, I’m going to sing her praises and shed some light on her genius. So I proudly took on that, as I saw it, almost the responsibility to let people know about her, and that women have been out here doing their very best in a world that continually tells them that they can’t.”

On her role as the first Black model in a Calvin Klein ad:

“It was such an incredible experience, first of all, and again, one of those moments of feeling the butterflies and cartwheels in my belly as it was happening. But dually, what was happening at that time, just with my experience with being on set, it became just very clear to me with how we were being communicated — and when I say we, I mean the models,” Joi recalled. “The handling was just sort of talking ‘at’ us. There wasn’t really so much input about what we wanted to do. I felt like we were just not being regarded, in a way.”

“There can be some other things you can get from a strong visual, and I understand the creative architecture around that, and the importance of that, but how we were being handled is what struck me, and that we weren’t being regarded as well as we should be regarded. And that particular instance turned me away from wanting to be like a model or something full-time … The actual experience just made me feel like, ‘Oh man, we’re just kind of invisible, with this sort of patch-quilt presentation for another thing that’s trying to be sold.”

On Joi’s first encounters with the Dungeon Family:

“I don’t even know if I specifically remember. It’s kind of one of those situations where you just feel like you’ve always known somebody,” Joi said. “I do remember that they were working on the [OutKast] album, and the ‘Player’s Ball’ had already been out, and they were trying to just get that album finished, and they may have been doing ‘Ain’t No Thang But a Chicken Wang…’ I just remember walking in and it being super, super, super jamming, and them being like, ‘Oh, you’re the girl from the ‘Sunshine and the Rain’ video. Will you freestyle over the song?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, okay,’ and that was kind of like our first meet-up, and from that point forward, we were just cool and became family, and enjoyed working together, and created some great stuff.”

Joi headlines this month’s “Sounds Like ATL” showcase at City Winery, taking place Tuesday, Aug. 9. Tickets and more information are available here.