Martins College of Art and Design, living in a semi-legal squat. She studies fashion at the prestigious Central St. Helen isn't long for the place she remembers as 'full of poodles and no poodle parlors.' By train, London is just two hours away. She has some help from her Christian socialist parents, but there is still struggle: 'She was a white woman who had two brown children in the early '60s,' the artist says of her mother, 'and came to England with one suitcase and nowhere to live. They were only actually together for four years - my first four years, anyway.'ДЄnne, an in-home nurse, takes Helen and older brother Banji to Holland-on-Sea, a holiday town of bungalows and retirees. 'I'm sure it isn't in every case, but basically my mother and father didn't get on very well. 'I don't know if it's true about mixed marriages,' Sade told BET in 1984. After Adebesi's graduation, the couple heads back to bustling Ibadan, and in the year before Nigerian Independence, Helen is born. To a working class girl from East Oakland - and there are jillions of us from thousands of East Oaklands - Sade's British accent reads as enviably posh and 'different.' But, to borrow from Langston Hughes by way of Lynelle George, life for Sade ain't been no crystal stair.ДЄnne and Adebesi, the parents of Helen Folasade Adu, marry while he's working on his master's at the London School of Economics.

But we don't care, because we are also two-stepping to the best songs on Stronger, singing along: Oooh, what a life. This while on my door in Oakland there's a 3-Day Notice To Pay Rent Or Quit. We stomp on them, to Run-DMC in the moonlight. In the 'hood that will be home to Oracle Park, frail piers jut into the Bay. I'm doing this in pre-tech-boom San Francisco, crossing the bridge from Oakland because going to 'the City' daily means my next leaps will be longer. When I'm lying about my university status in order to keep my third and favorite job at the newspaper where I'm paid nothing.

When I'm working shifts at a nonprofit organization that helps youthful offenders. When I'm trying to 'get success.' When I'm working a fancy retail gig. I've tried to say how it was, in those Discman days between 1985's Promise and 1988's Stronger than Pride. Sade to BET's Donnie Simpson, promoting the U.S. That's basically what pushed us along, just the hope that we would get success.' That's what made us get out of bed in the morning very early when we'd been to bed very late, maybe, the night before. When I am 20, everything is terrible and beautiful and possible. I could not have known then that Sade would speak for and to me in every decade of my life. Some of us believed it would save everyone. What can I make? What can I sell? How best to act? I turned my Sade up because a religious belief in music kept me sane. My attitude was, I can't trust a social safety net. We considered as givens not just the grimy details of our hard knock lives, but also 'the AIDS' we didn't understand, the lack of Black faces at local universities and the low-key PTSD of living in our city's ' bloodiest years.' To paraphrase my fellow native Too Short, in the '80s, our beloved Oakland was the right damn town in which to get killed. It's that my friends are all working plans - collecting diplomas or selling dope or both - while performing nonchalance. It's that the news keeps saying 'Reaganomics' and I can't afford the good college I got myself into. Or a partner who will call because he likes to and because he said he would. It's that I don't know if I'll ever have a job that pays more than survival coin. It's not just the boy with his long lashes and fast car and ability to compartmentalize. Even the album's title feels coded: It would be beautiful to shine bright, but I want to feel indestructible.Д«ecause things are falling apart.

Haven't I told you before, she sings: We're hungry for a life we can't afford. This is 1986, and though Sade's second album, Promise, is everywhere, I crave the multiple entendres of Diamond's 'Cherry Pie.' There's grit - 'Sally,' 'Frankie's First Affair' - in the way Sade names names. The twirling cassette, from a girl named Sade, is called Diamond Life. I am abandoned and loudness is a weighted blanket. My head is between a landline and my booming system. I am jealous of his freedom yet refuse to leave my neatly made secondhand mattress. The boy who had just as much sex with me as I with him has no decision in his belly, and he hasn't called. There is no clue as to what next Tuesday will bring, let alone the rest of this one, when the Challenger explodes every minute on the mute TV. When I am near 21, and poor, and pregnant. I've tried to say how it was, in those boombox times. The artist released her fifth album, Lovers Rock, in November 2000. Sade performs live at New Jersey's PNC Bank Arts Center in 2001.

Sade by your side free listen