FEATURE:
On & On
Erykah Badu’s Baduizm at Twenty-Five
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I am doing some early…
album anniversary features at the moment. One that I wanted to cover was Erykah Badu’s Baduizm. It turns twenty-five on 11th February. One of the finest albums of the 1990s, I wanted to explore a couple of reviews and an article that dives into a classic album. Blending Jazz, Soul and R&B, Baduizm sounds like nothing else that was around in 1997. It is an album that still sounds like it has no direct companion. It is such a remarkable debut from Badu. After leaving university to pursue music, Badu then began touring with her cousin, Robert ‘Free’ Bradford. She recorded a nineteen-song demo, Country Cousins. That caught the focus of Kedar Massenburg. He organised for Badu to record a duet with D'Angelo, Your Precious Love, after which she eventually signed to Universal Records. Otherside of the Game, On & On, Appletree and Next Lifetime are the best-known tracks on Baduizm, though every track is great. It is not a shock that Baduizm resonated with critics upon its release. Certified three-time Platinum in the U.S. and reaching number two on the album chart there, Baduizm ranks alongside the very best albums ever. Albuism looked back at the album in 2017 and noticed how Badu looked nothing like how female R&B artists of the ‘90s were ‘supposed’ to look. There was no big leather jackets, straight hair and preordained and controlled soundbites and facial looks:
“Nor did she sound like them. New Jack Swing’s hip-hop beats and flashy sensibilities had reigned for a decade or so, but its appeal was wearing thin. Surging from the south came a more organic, classic soul influenced sound with the merest of nods to the sound of theintervening drum machine-driven soul of the ‘80s and ‘90s. As D’Angelo’s“Brown Sugar” erupted out of Virginia, so straight out of Brooklyn via Texas came Badu. Both shared the same musical DNA and both rejected the status quo in the strongest imaginable way.
Looking back, it’s easy to think of Baduizm as a laid-back, jazzy affair—a feeling only heightened by the comparisons she drew at the time to the peerless Billie Holiday. But it’s easy to forget just how hard this album goes. For as much as it is more organic than the prevalent R&B of the time, the boom-clack of the snare and the relentless bass resolutely hit home throughout. It may also be the most traditional of her albums in terms of song length and structure, but to mistake this for an easy listen is to miss the point entirely. For beneath the veneer of the smooth soul sound lurk the darker corners of the human condition.
The most obviously applicable label for Badu was “earth mother.” With its talk of ciphers and cups of tea, lead single “On & On” cast her as serenely disassociated from the troubles and strife of the world, somehow able to rise above it all. “Appletree” bounces impishly with a self-affirmation that sprang from the heart of a strong, loving family. But the rest? Well, the rest was the portrait of a flawed, fallible, yet ultimately bold young woman at the beginning of a wildly adventurous journey.
Philadelphia’s The Roots would become the lynchpin of this sound, the eye at the center of this whirlwind of creativity. Not just Badu, but Bilal, Common, Jill Scott, Musiq Soulchild and, of course, D’Angelo all profited from their artistry and collaboration. It was this kinship that cemented this re-upholstering of soul music during the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
It was The Roots again who drove the neck-snapping “Sometimes,” which was testament to the notion that the album went hard, despite the image projected by some critics. “Next Lifetime,” meanwhile, yearned for an answer to the question: “How can I want you for myself / When I’m already someone’s girl?” From the shy, hesitant first meeting to the morally sound resolution to see each other in the next lifetime, it describes a magnetically charged relationship that would doom all participants to pain and heartache—a deliriously told story. And so it went. The snappily disdainful delivery of “Certainly” belies the vulnerability of having been taken in by a lover, while the depiction of loving someone who doesn’t love you back on “No Love” added to the heartbreak quotient on offer.
With this album began a far from conventional career trajectory: children, writer’s block, service as a doula and life in general enriched the story of an artist unafraid to take risks, unwilling to compromise, and unable to live by anyone else’s expectations. What better way to forge an iconic legacy?”.
It is hard to put into words just how important and different Baduizm was. Almost spiritual and transcendent in its power and sounds, I think we will be talking about it for many more years to come. In their critical review, AllMusic had this to say about 1997’s Baduizm:
“Two years after D'Angelo brought the organic sound and emotional passion of R&B to the hip-hop world with 1995's Brown Sugar, Erykah Badu's debut performed a similar feat. While D'Angelo looked back to the peak of smooth '70s soul, though, Badu sang with a grit and bluesiness reminiscent of her heroes, Nina Simone and Billie Holiday. "On & On" and "Appletree," the first two songs on Baduizm, illustrated her talent at singing soul with the qualities of jazz. With a nimble, melodic voice owing little to R&B from the past 30 years, she phrased at odds with the beat and often took chances with her notes. Like many in the contemporary rap world, though, she also had considerable talents at taking on different personas; "Otherside of the Game" is a poetic lament from a soon-to-be single mother who just can't forget the father of her child. Erykah Badu's revolution in sound -- heavier hip-hop beats over organic, conscientious soul music -- was responsible for her breakout, but many of the songs on Baduizm don't hold up to increased examination. For every intriguing track like "Next Lifetime," there's at least one rote R&B jam like "4 Leaf Clover." Jazz fans certainly weren't confusing her with Cassandra Wilson -- Badu had a bewitching voice, and she treasured her notes like the best jazz vocalists, but she often made the same choices, the hallmark of a singer rooted in soul, not jazz. Though many fans would dislike (and probably misinterpret) the comparison, she's closer to Diana Ross playing Billie Holiday -- as she did in the 1972 film Lady Sings the Blues -- than Holiday herself”.
I am going to wrap up soon. There is another review that I want to bring in. Pitchfork revisited Baduizm last year. It proves that Baduizm remain so utterly powerful and spellbinding, almost twenty-five years since its release:
“Outside Texas, a generation of soul stars was cropping up in enclaves like Philadelphia, home of the Questlove-backed Roots, who’d just brought keyboardist/songwriter James Poyser into the mix. Working with Badu, they doused Baduizm with live instrumental flourishes on three tracks: “Afro (Freestyle Skit),” the scratchy lounge number “Sometimes,” and the sleek “Otherside of the Game,” about the dilemma of loving a drug dealer. The latter’s occasional horn stabs waft between rim shots as Badu submits, “Work ain’t honest, but it pays the bills.”
The album’s most transcendent moment, “Next Lifetime,” finds her at another crossroads, not above entertaining an illicit affair. The possibility of it hangs in the air and folds beautifully into the song’s woozy ambiance: “How can I want you for myself when I’m already someone’s girl?” Her solution is more divine than definite: She’d have to see him in another lifetime, maybe as butterflies, such a gorgeous way to use reincarnation as a send-off.
You could just sit and listen to Badu and get lifted if you wanted, but the path to true enlightenment required deeper engagement. “On and On” debuted when I was in eighth grade, where the girls in my chorus class ingested its cosmic mantras, having experienced only puppy love. “You rush into destruction ’cause you don’t have nothing left,” we sang anyway. We, too, picked our friends like we picked our fruits. Paired with the ease of bebop, Badu’s lyricism formed scriptures that were too self-aware to be sanctimonious. As a teacher, she had banter for days. “I work at pleasing me ’cause I can’t please you,” she asserts. There’s a moment in the middle of “Appletree” where she drags a line, as she does, like the most confident cigarette pull, and finishes her thought with a high wail: “I… can’t control the soul flowing in me. Ooh-wee.”
Badu has long been held up as an Earth Mother with an endless stash of sage and knowledge whose image resonated because she adhered to the lifestyle in the real world. This was, of course, an integral appeal of the neo-soul movement: the visual contrast between the authentic bohemian goddess and the glamorized R&B star. Badu brought African aesthetics and scholarship into the pop arena without flattening what they represented. There was a meaning behind the headwrap; the incense and candles she lit on stage; the numerology, derived from the Five Percent Nation (“Most intellects do not believe in God/But they fear us just the same,” Badu crooned in “On and On.”) At the same time, her music actively challenged bad politics and systems. She sounded not only informed but empathetic. And this is the same analog girl who later became a digital savant and a doula who sells out vagina-scented incense. But the current era of reckoning has revealed how some of hip-hop’s most radical thinkers have failed to confront retrograde ideals within their own generation. You could hear the record stop when Badu said schoolgirls should wear knee-length skirts or when she “saw the good” in Bill Cosby and Hitler. Turns out, there are limits to being theoretical versus pragmatic; it lifts the veil a bit off a musician known for both her social awareness and otherworldly mystique. Sometimes the teacher needs teaching.
But under the tenets of Baduizm, that’s how the world should work: an infinite exchange of ideas on our endless journeys of self-discovery. Life is a circle, and fittingly, Baduizm’s endpoint is its beginning: “Rim Shot.” By then, Badu has taken you on an odyssey. It’s a testament to her voice, purpose, and charisma that the album maintains intrigue through its latter half, anchored by musings like “No Love” and “Drama.” Amid subtle knocks, Badu rattles off a list of afflictions: “World inflation, demonstration, miseducation/No celebration to celebrate your lives.” Her follow-up, 2000’s Mama’s Gun, would organize these loose threads into an overtly political project with a less circuitous worldview. As Daphne Brooks wrote for Pitchfork, that record “offers a more pointed, sustained, and grounded statement.” Baduizm, though, set a mood and intention for decades to come, not only for Badu but for her future benefactors. The album positioned her as an artist in flux, immune to categories, whose career is proof of Black music’s ability to morph too quickly to ever be contained”.
I wanted to look ahead to twenty-five years of Erykah Badu’s Baduizm. Marking her as one of the leaders and most important figures in the neo-soul genre, it helped bring that genre to the masses. A glorious album that will never fail to inspire and stun, take some time out today to listen to…
ONE of the great debut albums.