FEATURE:
The Lockdown Playlist
PHOTO CREDIT: Anthony Barboza/Getty
Erykah Badu at Fifty
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FOR this birthday Lockdown Playlist…
PHOTO CREDIT: Robert Maxwell
I am featuring an artist who I love a lot. Erykah Badu is a tremendous artist and her debut album, Baduizm, is one of my favourites. That was released in 1997. Her fifth studio album, New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh), was released in 2010. I hope we have not heard the last of the extraordinary Badu. I want to bring in some Wikipedia information that provides details about a musical titan:
“Erica Abi Wright (born February 26, 1971), known professionally as Erykah Badu (/ˈɛrɪkə bɑːˈduː/), is an American singer-songwriter, record producer and actress. Influenced by R&B, 1970s soul, and 1980s hip hop, Badu became associated with the neo soul subgenre in the 1990s and 2000s along with artists like D'Angelo. She has been called the Queen of Neo soul. Badu's career began after she opened a show for D'Angelo in 1994 in Fort Worth; record label executive Kedar Massenburg was highly impressed with her performance and signed her to Kedar Entertainment. Her first album, Baduizm, was released in February 1997. It spawned four singles: "On & On", "Appletree", "Next Lifetime" and "Otherside of the Game". The album was certified triple Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Her first live album, Live, was released in November 1997 and was certified double Platinum by the RIAA.
Her second studio album, Mama's Gun, was released in 2000. It spawned three singles: "Bag Lady", which became her first top 10 single on the Billboard Hot 100 peaking at #6, "Didn't Cha Know?" and "Cleva". The album was certified Platinum by the RIAA. Badu's third album, Worldwide Underground, was released in 2003. It generated three singles: "Love of My Life (An Ode to Hip-Hop)", "Danger" and "Back in the Day (Puff)" with 'Love' becoming her second song to reach the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #9. The album was certified Gold by the RIAA. Badu's fourth album, New Amerykah Part One, was released in 2008. It spawned two singles: "Honey" and "Soldier". New Amerykah Part Two was released in 2010 and fared well both critically and commercially. It contained the album's lead single "Window Seat", which led to controversy”.
I will bring in the playlist itself soon. Before then, I came across an interesting article from The New Yorker of 2016. They highlighted the Godmother of Soul. A few interesting sections stood out to me:
“More often, though, Badu’s love life has inspired curiosity, along with jokes about her supposedly mystical power over men. During an interview on BET, she acknowledged the chatter: “There’s an urban legend that says, If you get involved with Erykah Badu, you’ll change gods, wear crocheted pants, and all this other stuff.” (“Crocheted pants” was a reference to the rapper Common, whose music and outfits grew notably more outré when he dated Badu, in the early aughts. He has admitted that she did buy him a pair of knitted trousers, but insists that the ill-fated decision to wear them for a photo shoot was his alone.) Badu once wrote a song called “Fall in Love (Your Funeral),” in which she uses the rumors to create a negative-psychology pickup line. “See, you don’t wanna fall in love with me,” she coos, while sending precisely the opposite message: of course you do.
Badu is that rare veteran musician who claims to harbor no ill feelings toward the music industry. But she concedes that she has sometimes been disappointed by the reaction to her later albums, none of which have had as big an impact as her début. “I thought ‘Mama’s Gun’ was my apex,” she said. “Nobody else thought so.” In fact, critics loved it, but it sold about half as many copies as “Baduizm.” With “Worldwide Underground,” her funky and digressive 2003 album, sales dropped by half again.
In musical terms, though, “Worldwide Underground” was a new beginning: Badu, once known for her meticulous recordings, was adopting a looser, more spontaneous approach. Her songs typically start as grooves, which inspire her to hum along, and then mumble along; she fits words to the melody by transcribing her own mumbles, using a method that she can’t quite explain. James Poyser, a producer and a keyboardist who is one of Badu’s closest collaborators, describes her as a canny and sometimes mysterious editor. As they record, she might discard a promising session without explanation, or suddenly get excited about an old musical sketch that Poyser doesn’t even remember. He has learned that her judgments tend to be correct. During the sessions for “Worldwide,” Badu often recorded him when he was just fooling around. When he hears his parts of the album now, he wants to fix them. “Part of me cringes,” he says. “But it’s just raw, and it works.”
Her evolving recordings doubtless reflect her evolving live show, which has grown markedly less solemn in the years since she first brought her incense sticks to Nickelodeon. On her 1997 live album, she paused to explain one of her oversized rings to the crowd. “This is an ankh—an ankh is an ancient Kemetic symbol,” she said. “The word ‘Kemet’ is the original name for Egypt.” Nowadays, she wears her esoteric knowledge more lightly, and often she prefers teasing to teaching. She might interrupt her own songs with electronic noises, or stop and start her musicians over and over, mimicking an old-school bandleader. (“One time!”) Years ago, during a show at the Apollo Theatre, she tarried so long at a theremin that the crowd grew puzzled, then amused, then annoyed, and then finally resigned—willing to wait for as long as it took for Badu to do whatever she was doing. In 2014, she opened for the comedian Dave Chappelle at Radio City Music Hall—or, rather, closed for him, since her performance didn’t start until half an hour after his gig was finished. Just about everyone stayed, including Chappelle, who watched from the wings for an hour as she and her band stitched together earthy funk and otherworldly pop”.
To mark the fiftieth birthday (on 26th February) of the legendary Erykah Badu, I wanted to compile her greatest recordings together. If you are new to her music, have a listen to the tracks and I am sure they will make an impact. I think that her songs are…
SO strong, soulful and wonderful.