Day 181: Erykah Badu – Baduizm
I’m more aware of Erykah Badu as a person than I am her music and it was high time I corrected that. I should have listened to her ages ago. I semi-recently watched a few videos of her, one of them being her episode in the Vogue YouTube series Objects of Affection where she showed off cool objects she had collected that were in her home studio, or her badudio, as she called it, and thought she is just so damn cool. Is her music as cool as she is? Time to find out.
Album cover courtesy of Kedar Entertainment
Erykah Badu is from Dallas, Texas, and she was discovered after she recorded a demo with her cousin, although she’d been a musician for long before that, having freestyle rapped on the radio at the age of 14. Record executive Kedar Massenburg got her to record a duet with D’Angelo, which led to her opening for D’Angelo and getting signed on Massenburg’s label, Kedar Entertainment. Her first single “On & On” became an immediate hit and earned her a Grammy, while her 1997 debut album Baduizm became a landmark album in neo-soul.
Badu described Baduizm as an experience that’s meant to get you sonically high: “Baduizm is lighting my incense, lighting my candles, knowing the creator, knowing myself.” It does succeed in that. There wasn’t really any question about it, of course the album is just as effortlessly cool as Erykah Badu herself. The album blends genres, from soul to R&B to hip hop to jazz, with her Billie Holiday-sounding jazz vocals, with the resulting album being warm an absolute pleasure to listen to.
Apparently Questlove had been a session musician on the album and he thought the market wasn’t ready to hear someone like her. He told her, “Don’t you wanna sell any units? You got a chance: You sing. Stop tryin’ to be so artsy.’” Terrible advice. Badu rightly responded “Watch. You’ll See.” The whole album feels very true to her vision and like an expression that only she could have provided, which is probably what makes it so good.
It’s a rock solid 9/10, I (ba)do see myself listening to her a whole lot more in years to come.
Also, fun fact: Outkast’s “Ms. Jackson” was written for her mother. She had been together with Andre 3000 and after they broke up, he wrote it to say sorry to her mom.