Apr 2008
His Holiness in the Pacific Northwest
Apr/04/2008 *
cornerpocket
* permalinkage
As a result of the Dalai Lama's recent visit to the Pacific Northwest, I've been inspired to create, collect and share various sounds and words I've created to honor him and his work in this world. Here are some links to pages throughout this site that will hook you up with downloadable wisdom:
You can stream or download a podcast of his 2008 talk from Seattle here and his 2004 talk from Vancouver, B.C. here.
I wrote a story about the Dalai Lama's visit to Seattle for the Cascadia Weekly newspaper; it also discusses author Pico Iyer's new biopgraphy The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. You can view and/or download a pdf of the story right over here. Another story I wrote about the Dalai Lama's 2004 visit to Vancouver B.C. is available here.
Finally, DJ Fundi posted a mix entitled "A Lament for Tibet" featuring music from the Himalayan region at the Podcast Cafe right here.
Namaste.
(updated 5/19/08)
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"Return of the Rock Lobsters"
Apr/04/2008 *
music reviews
* permalinkage
RETURN
OF THE ROCK LOBSTERS
By Marc Spitz/The New York Times
(Listen to The B-52's live on stage in Montego Bay, Jamaica, circa 1982 and preview their new album "Funplex" over at the Podcast Cafe's Live Archive!)
A harsh wind is blowing around the four members of the B-52s as they view Lower Manhattan from a seventh-floor observation balcony at the New Museum, which rises over a nearby flophouse on a gentrifying stretch of the Bowery. From this height, they can see every newly opened bar, cafe and boutique. “The neighborhood didn’t look anything like this,” said the guitarist Keith Strickland, 54, referring to the late 1970s, when these new wave pioneers from Athens, Ga., first conquered the downtown rock scene. “I walked out this morning and said, ‘Where am I?’ ”
A few minutes earlier, the band, which also includes the vocalists Kate Pierson, 59, Cindy Wilson, 51, and Fred Schneider, 56, had traveled a few short blocks south from the retro-chic Bowery Hotel, which opened on the site of a former gas station last year. Along the way, the four had passed the shuttered storefront of CBGB, the punk club, now defunct, where fans in Fiorucci dresses and vintage sharkskin suits lined up to hear the band’s primal yet lyrically futurist dance-rock. “Oh, CBGBs,” Ms. Wilson said mournfully.
“Kiss it for luck,” Mr. Strickland said to Mr. Schneider.
“I’m not kissing that,” he replied with a mock shudder.
On the eve of “Funplex” (Astralwerks), the band’s first studio release in 16 years, the B-52s are reckoning with a new frontier that barely resembles the one they imagined on optimistic tracks like their 1983 single “Song for a Future Generation.” “We have to jump back into the void we left behind,” Mr. Schneider said. “We’ve gone through three different types of music eras or styles since we put out our last album. People watched MTV. Now everyone’s on the In-ter-net.”
By Marc Spitz/The New York Times
(Listen to The B-52's live on stage in Montego Bay, Jamaica, circa 1982 and preview their new album "Funplex" over at the Podcast Cafe's Live Archive!)
A harsh wind is blowing around the four members of the B-52s as they view Lower Manhattan from a seventh-floor observation balcony at the New Museum, which rises over a nearby flophouse on a gentrifying stretch of the Bowery. From this height, they can see every newly opened bar, cafe and boutique. “The neighborhood didn’t look anything like this,” said the guitarist Keith Strickland, 54, referring to the late 1970s, when these new wave pioneers from Athens, Ga., first conquered the downtown rock scene. “I walked out this morning and said, ‘Where am I?’ ”
A few minutes earlier, the band, which also includes the vocalists Kate Pierson, 59, Cindy Wilson, 51, and Fred Schneider, 56, had traveled a few short blocks south from the retro-chic Bowery Hotel, which opened on the site of a former gas station last year. Along the way, the four had passed the shuttered storefront of CBGB, the punk club, now defunct, where fans in Fiorucci dresses and vintage sharkskin suits lined up to hear the band’s primal yet lyrically futurist dance-rock. “Oh, CBGBs,” Ms. Wilson said mournfully.
“Kiss it for luck,” Mr. Strickland said to Mr. Schneider.
“I’m not kissing that,” he replied with a mock shudder.
On the eve of “Funplex” (Astralwerks), the band’s first studio release in 16 years, the B-52s are reckoning with a new frontier that barely resembles the one they imagined on optimistic tracks like their 1983 single “Song for a Future Generation.” “We have to jump back into the void we left behind,” Mr. Schneider said. “We’ve gone through three different types of music eras or styles since we put out our last album. People watched MTV. Now everyone’s on the In-ter-net.”
New wave’s most unapologetic loons, the B-52s crashed the Billboard chart with their self-titled debut in 1979. On the album cover, the female members wore beehive wigs; Mr. Schneider dressed like an oily used-car salesman, complete with pencil mustache. “It wasn’t like we said, ‘We need an outrageous look,’ ” Ms. Pierson said. “That was what we wore to parties.”
While most rock fans were listening to Billy Joel and REO Speedwagon, the B-52s were harmonizing about giant lobsters, headless space invaders and Jacqueline Onassis. Onstage the band did extinct dances like the mashed potato. Some people got it. Many did not. Occasionally, University of Georgia students pelted the members with garbage. But the B-52s’ unusual mix of the avant-garde (they cite John Cage and Yoko Ono as influences), 1960s fashion (Diana Vreeland is another hero) and party-friendly pop (girl groups, garage rock) eventually struck a nerve, winning fans like John Lennon and a young Kurt Cobain. And every few years they enjoy a high-profile rediscovery. Most recently their first hit, “Rock Lobster,” was the soundtrack for the drunken conception of a baby in the film “Knocked Up.”
By definition, new wavers should never become oldies acts, but the B-52s have been touring clubs and theaters on and off since the late 1990s. While many of their reactivated contemporaries, like the Police, have not recorded new material, the B-52s were growing tired of playing the same songs every night and desired a fresher set list. “I don’t wanna rehash the past,” Ms. Pierson and Mr. Wilson sing on the new “Eyes Wide Open.” “I just want release.” To that end, “Funplex” has a much more modern sheen than its predecessors. The band’s twangy guitar riffs used to be accompanied by cowbell, organ and a steady backbeat. Now songs like “Juliet of the Spirits” have a shimmering electronic feel too. And, Mr. Schneider said, the group moved on to singing “about the year 3000.”
But one thing will never change: When the band embarks on the True Colors tour with Cyndi Lauper and Joan Jett this summer, Ms. Wilson and Ms. Pierson will be wearing their trademark wigs, lest the audience riot. “There are times when I wish we could just be like the Indigo Girls,” Ms. Pierson said with a sigh. “But we’ve got to maintain the hair.”
“I used to think the importance of the band gets lost, or overshadowed, by the hairdos and the outfits,” she added. But now she realizes that “our most important legacy is that people had fun.”
“They come up to us and say, ‘You got us through high school,’ ” she said.
Mr. Strickland befriended Ms. Wilson’s brother, the band’s co-founder and guitarist, Ricky Wilson (who died of AIDS in 1985), at school in Athens in the early 1970s. Ms. Pierson, a New Jersey native, wound up in that liberal college town after vagabonding in the ’60s. Mr. Schneider, also from the Garden State, intended to study forestry at the University of Georgia. According to band lore, the B-52s (named after local slang for their female singers’ signature beehives) formed after sharing a five-strawed Polynesian cocktail at a Chinese restaurant, which led to a jam session at a friend’s house.
The first song they wrote was about killer bees. Their best song was about a beach party gone bloody. By 1977 the band scored a short gig at Max’s Kansas City in New York, where some people in the crowd assumed that the women in the band were drag queens. “We were nervous as hell,” Mr. Schneider said. “Everyone was standing there with their arms folded.”
They were convinced that they’d bombed, but the booker invited them back. By the time “Rock Lobster” was released as an independent single in 1978, the B-52s were drawing the likes of William S. Burroughs, David Bowie and John Cale to their Manhattan shows.
Punk was evolving into the much more marketable and accessible new wave, with bands like the Cars and Talking Heads enjoying hit debuts. A major-label bidding war ensued; the band signed with Warner Brothers and released its debut album, “The B-52’s,” in 1979. The album went gold and the follow-up, “Wild Planet,” cracked the Top 20 in 1980. In 1982 the group even performed the song “Private Idaho” on the CBS soap opera “The Guiding Light.” “That inspired a whole generation of actors,” Mr. Schneider quipped. “Angelina Jolie became an actress after seeing it.”
Their next few albums had only marginal success, which was partly related to the band’s grief over Mr. Wilson’s death at 32. So for “Cosmic Thing,” the group’s sixth album, released in 1989, the band enlisted as co-producer Chic’s Nile Rodgers, who had worked on second-act hits for David Bowie and Duran Duran. “I had them do things on that album that they’d never done before,” said Mr. Rodgers, which included painstaking multiple tracking of Ms. Wilson and Ms. Pierson’s trademark harmonies. “I remember, when I finished, calling the record company and saying, ‘I hope you do the right thing here, ’cause you got a smash on your hands.’ ”
He was right; the record sold four million copies and spawned the B-52s’ best-known hits, “Love Shack” and “Roam.” But the band, whose members still considered themselves outsiders at heart, “wasn’t ready for the bigness of that record,” Mr. Rodgers said. By 1992, when “Good Stuff” was released, the group was floundering.
“We had not had that kind of success before, and everything changed,” Mr. Strickland said. “For me it got too heavy. It just had to stop.”
This decade, during the ’80s revival, young D.J.’s began playing B-52s songs at parties. Geordon Nicol, of the Manhattan D.J. and promotions trio Misshapes, remembers playing “Planet Claire” at a packed party, but to his surprise, “It didn’t go over so well,” he said in an e-mail message. “I couldn’t understand how such an incredible song could go over everyone’s heads like that.” He thinks that there is a certain stigma attached to saying you love the B-52s, at least for those “who think ‘Love Shack’ and ‘Roam’ are all the band has to offer — most people miss out.”
What was supposed to be a brief break from recording lasted well over a decade. In that time, Ms. Wilson formed the Cindy Wilson Band, Mr. Schneider became a satellite radio D.J., and Ms. Pierson opened Kate’s Lazy Meadow, a motel in the Catskills with theme suites like “The Annie Oakley” and “The Sakajawia.” Meanwhile, Mr. Strickland learned how to use Pro Tools recording software. “I was listening to a lot of electronic dance music and early rock ’n’ roll,” Mr. Strickland said, “and it occurred to me that I should put these two sounds together with our own sound. That was the magic formula. Then all these ideas started coming out again.”
The band gathered in Athens and upstate New York to jam and quickly decided that it was time to record again. Mr. Strickland suggested the title “Funplex” after a word he’d seen in a newspaper. For the first time, the band’s lyrics are highly carnal. “I am now an eroticist,” Mr. Schneider sings on “Deviant Ingredient.” “I am a fully eroticized being. I have no neurosis.” On “Ultraviolet” he sings, “There’s the G spot/Pull the car over,” which will surely end up in the museum of groaners some day.
“It surprised me,” Mr. Strickland said of his bandmates’ lyrics. “Little did I know they were going to get all sexy” in their 50s.
But the B-52s have always celebrated music’s power to “make you feel a lot better,” as the early song “Dance This Mess Around” proclaims. Its lyrics list 16 dances, like the “shy tuna,” “the hyp-o-crit,” and the “escalator.” The band traditionally performs them live, but as the members get older they admit that it’s getting harder and harder to get them right.
“We can’t do all 16 anymore” Mr. Strickland confessed during a coffee break in the band’s hotel suite.
“I danced in bad shoes so my knees are a little shot,” Mr. Schneider said.
“We’ve entered the phase in our life,” Mr. Strickland said sarcastically, “where we’re talking about our knees.” There was a moment of quiet group contemplation, followed, as usual, by peals of laughter.
Positive review of "Funplex" over at Pitchfork Media: "This overriding theme of Funplex-- temporarily forgetting your troubles and giving over completely to the pleasures of getting down-- underscores the album's two best moments, "Juliet of the Spirits" and "Eyes Wide Open". "Juliet" is the album's ladies-only electro-jam, Pierson and Wilson's voices pushed into a deleriously high register, and asserting on the wide-eyed chorus "I'm not afraid anymore." "Eyes" moves from a dark, claustrophobic verse to an expansive disco-tinged refrain, triggered by Strickland's crisp, echoed guitar: "I don't wanna clash/ I don't wanna rehash the past/ I just wanna release!"
Erykah Badu's "New Amerykah"
Apr/04/2008 *
music reviews
* permalinkage
MONARCH
Erykah Badu transforms the flotsam and jetsam of hip-hop.
by Sasha Frere-Jones/The New Yorker
On a Monday evening in August of 1996, I went to see the Roots perform at the Knitting Factory, in downtown Manhattan. The band had come from Philadelphia for a three-night stand in support of their “illadelph halflife” album. At one point during the set, I noticed a tall woman with an enormous head wrap standing in the front row of the crowd. Toward the end of the evening, the group’s bassist, Leonard (Hub) Hubbard, gestured for the woman to come onstage. The lead rapper, Tariq (Black Thought) Trotter, announced, “This is a friend of ours from Dallas, Texas. Her name is Erykah Badu.”
Erykah Badu transforms the flotsam and jetsam of hip-hop.
by Sasha Frere-Jones/The New Yorker
On a Monday evening in August of 1996, I went to see the Roots perform at the Knitting Factory, in downtown Manhattan. The band had come from Philadelphia for a three-night stand in support of their “illadelph halflife” album. At one point during the set, I noticed a tall woman with an enormous head wrap standing in the front row of the crowd. Toward the end of the evening, the group’s bassist, Leonard (Hub) Hubbard, gestured for the woman to come onstage. The lead rapper, Tariq (Black Thought) Trotter, announced, “This is a friend of ours from Dallas, Texas. Her name is Erykah Badu.”
“I was
skeptical about her jumping onstage,” the band’s
leader, Ahmir (?uestlove) Thompson, told me by
telephone last week. “We kinda looked at singers as
soft, and we thought that most singers looked down on
hip-hop the same way that actors looked down on
rappers-cum-actors.” Badu was different, though.
“Most singers need to pick the key and tell you how
the song goes,” ?uestlove said. “She didn’t need
anything. She was quick.” Dressed in long, draping
clothes that she had made herself, and wearing what
?uestlove described as “the highest platform shoes
I’d ever seen in my life,” Badu looked like a queen.
She was rail thin, with a wide face and terrifyingly
subtle and balanced facial geometry. Imagine the good
monarch from a desert planet, the one you’d consult
for wisdom just as your universe-saving mission
started falling apart.
That night, she sang a song that suggested a vocal comparison that has dogged her, and other singers, in the past decade, though it wasn’t such a common reference point in 1996: Billie Holiday. Badu has astonishing pitch and a broad range, but her voice is slightly nasal, and she was smearing words together with Holiday’s smiling inflection. The song she chose was “Appletree,” a cutesy number with an anachronistic bent: “And if you don’t want to be down with me, you don’t want to be from my apple tree.” The performance was riveting. “We had a friend from Philadelphia in the audience, who was working on a record with us,” ?uestlove recalled. “After she saw Erykah, she literally packed up and went home. She said, ‘There’s no way I can compete with that.’ ”
Badu has long since dropped the Lady Day inflections. Her just released album, “New Amerykah Part One (4th World War),” is a brilliant resurgence of black avant-garde vocal pop, convincing in its doubts and stable in its unmoored ways. This lineage started, roughly, in the late sixties, with Sly Stone, on the West Coast, and, a bit later, Marvin Gaye, in Detroit; continued through George Clinton’s various iterations of Funkadelic and Parliament; and bled into the work of one of the great soul acts of the nineties, D’Angelo, a friend of Badu’s. In fact, “New Amerykah” sounds a lot like an unintended sequel to D’Angelo’s masterpiece (and his most recent album, now eight years old), “Voodoo.” Like “Voodoo”—and like Miles Davis’s “On the Corner,” as several critics have noted—“New Amerykah” is a relatively short record that feels infinitely relaxed, and favors sound and mood over choruses and verses. It is the work of a restless polymath ignoring the world around her and opting for an idiosyncratic, murky feeling that reflects her impulses. (Badu helped construct many of the backing tracks herself, running GarageBand on a laptop.) The success of that sound has resulted in Badu’s best opening week since her first album, “Baduizm,” was released, eleven years ago: both albums débuted at No. 2 on the Billboard charts.
“Baduizm” was one of the first releases to be tagged “neo-soul,” a genre that has little to do with older soul music but does tend toward slow tempos, a pronounced bass line, hushed instrumental moves, like quiet rim shots (“I want a rim shot, hey, diggy diggy,” goes the first song on “Baduizm”), and the use of an electro-acoustic keyboard, most often a Fender Rhodes. This is what the Roots sounded like in 1996 as well, at least a little. (?uestlove, also a producer, has appeared on all but one of Badu’s four studio recordings.)
“New Amerykah” is a swirling, turbid thing, and while it represents a shift in stylistic emphasis, it isn’t a total departure. From the beginning of her career, Badu pushed against the tendencies of neo-soul, no matter how well her music fit into smooth radio formats. Her first hit, “On & On” (1997), for example, wasn’t about any one subject, though there was a specific basis for some of the lyrics: the Nation of Islam of Gods and Earths, a splinter group formed in Harlem by Clarence 13X Smith after he broke with the Nation of Islam, in 1963. Smith’s philosophy holds that only five per cent of the population possess “knowledge of self,” and that they have an obligation to educate the ignorant eighty-five per cent. (The other ten per cent are enlightened but self-interested and creepy.) Smith was murdered in 1969 (the crime is still unsolved), but his teachings found new popularity with New York rappers in the late eighties and early nineties. When Badu sings, “My cipher keeps moving like a rolling stone,” she’s employing Smith’s usage of “cipher”—a ring of people reciting portions of Smith’s teachings. The word eventually became more common in hip-hop, where it is used to describe a group of rappers arrayed in a circle and reciting rhymes. All this undertow is probably imperceptible to most of the three million people who have bought “Baduizm,” but, when Badu refers to “master teachers” on “New Amerykah,” the ghost of Smith is present.
?uestlove was right about Badu: her records may not feature much rapping, but her music is steeped in the sounds and culture of hip-hop. One of the first tracks to leak from “New Amerykah” was “The Healer,” a song that has little to do with any known genre. It begins with a brief snippet from a song by Malcolm McLaren featuring the World’s Famous Supreme Team, an obscure reference that will be instantly recognizable to hip-hop’s faithful—a sort of secular analogue of Smith’s Five Percent philosophy. “The Healer” was produced by Madlib, an independent hip-hop producer who usually works with rappers; the music flirts with total stasis, though it still has an audible beat. Bells, unidentifiable knocks, a lonesome instrument that might be a sitar, or a guitar, and lots of empty space: this is Badu’s backdrop. She starts by chanting a shout-out to a variety of religions: “Humdililah, Allah, Jehovah, Yahweh, Dios, Maat, Jah, Rastafari.” The core of the song, which is sort of a chorus, is a spoken series of assertions about hip-hop: it’s “bigger than religion,” the government, and a variety of other things. Badu also sings a dedication to “Dilla,” a reference to the hip-hop producer James (Jay Dee) Yancey, a beloved figure and collaborator of Madlib’s who died, from complications of lupus and a blood disorder, in 2006, at the age of thirty-two.
But if you listen only once to “The Healer” it is clear that the song itself, like the other songs on “New Amerykah,” isn’t so much hip-hop as it is a reorganization of the historical flotsam and jetsam that were recycled and turned into hip-hop. The album’s opening track, “Amerykahn Promise,” demonstrates how widely the album ranges. Over a seventies funk vamp, Badu mumbles; a chorus of female voices sings “American promise”; and a deep male voice intones, in the manner of a corrections officer speaking over a P.A. system, “Excuse me, young lady, excuse me, you’re causing quite a disturbance over here.” (He later asks for a “brain-tissue sample.”) This seventies production is actually from the seventies; it is the backing track from a 1977 album produced by the vibraphonist Roy Ayers, who gave it to Badu to rework. (She is singing over the original master tape.) What the track most recalls is the opening of a Funkadelic record, like “Maggot Brain,” or the moments when George Clinton would let a variety of characters play out paranoid scenarios, and blend explicit political satire into unhinged, improvisatory funk.
The feeling of paranoia is strong on several tracks. “Twinkle,” a remarkably odd track that Badu co-produced with the engineer Mike Chavarria—he is responsible for many of the album’s deep and strange sounds—starts with a sample of what might be film dialogue, and seems to involve a fight. The music is full of dread and uneasiness. Badu raps, “Children of the matrix be hittin’ them car switches, seen some virgin Virgos hanging out with Venus bitches,” and then uses melodic singing to explain what is going on: “They don’t know their language, they don’t know their God.” The song dissolves into humming keyboards as a male voice rants for a minute and a half: “We know the air is unfit to breathe and the food is unfit to eat. . . . I want you to get angry!” After a minute, you realize that it doesn’t just sound like Peter Finch’s rant from “Network”; it is that rant, but with a new score, something like the Art Ensemble of Chicago locked in a room with Brian Eno. Badu has promised that the second volume of “New Amerykah” will be more emotional, which could be just as good. For the moment—a deeply apolitical moment in R. & B.—we should simply be grateful that a verified pop star has quietly brought politics and noise back into black pop. ♦
There's another good review of Badu's new album over at The New York Times.
That night, she sang a song that suggested a vocal comparison that has dogged her, and other singers, in the past decade, though it wasn’t such a common reference point in 1996: Billie Holiday. Badu has astonishing pitch and a broad range, but her voice is slightly nasal, and she was smearing words together with Holiday’s smiling inflection. The song she chose was “Appletree,” a cutesy number with an anachronistic bent: “And if you don’t want to be down with me, you don’t want to be from my apple tree.” The performance was riveting. “We had a friend from Philadelphia in the audience, who was working on a record with us,” ?uestlove recalled. “After she saw Erykah, she literally packed up and went home. She said, ‘There’s no way I can compete with that.’ ”
Badu has long since dropped the Lady Day inflections. Her just released album, “New Amerykah Part One (4th World War),” is a brilliant resurgence of black avant-garde vocal pop, convincing in its doubts and stable in its unmoored ways. This lineage started, roughly, in the late sixties, with Sly Stone, on the West Coast, and, a bit later, Marvin Gaye, in Detroit; continued through George Clinton’s various iterations of Funkadelic and Parliament; and bled into the work of one of the great soul acts of the nineties, D’Angelo, a friend of Badu’s. In fact, “New Amerykah” sounds a lot like an unintended sequel to D’Angelo’s masterpiece (and his most recent album, now eight years old), “Voodoo.” Like “Voodoo”—and like Miles Davis’s “On the Corner,” as several critics have noted—“New Amerykah” is a relatively short record that feels infinitely relaxed, and favors sound and mood over choruses and verses. It is the work of a restless polymath ignoring the world around her and opting for an idiosyncratic, murky feeling that reflects her impulses. (Badu helped construct many of the backing tracks herself, running GarageBand on a laptop.) The success of that sound has resulted in Badu’s best opening week since her first album, “Baduizm,” was released, eleven years ago: both albums débuted at No. 2 on the Billboard charts.
“Baduizm” was one of the first releases to be tagged “neo-soul,” a genre that has little to do with older soul music but does tend toward slow tempos, a pronounced bass line, hushed instrumental moves, like quiet rim shots (“I want a rim shot, hey, diggy diggy,” goes the first song on “Baduizm”), and the use of an electro-acoustic keyboard, most often a Fender Rhodes. This is what the Roots sounded like in 1996 as well, at least a little. (?uestlove, also a producer, has appeared on all but one of Badu’s four studio recordings.)
“New Amerykah” is a swirling, turbid thing, and while it represents a shift in stylistic emphasis, it isn’t a total departure. From the beginning of her career, Badu pushed against the tendencies of neo-soul, no matter how well her music fit into smooth radio formats. Her first hit, “On & On” (1997), for example, wasn’t about any one subject, though there was a specific basis for some of the lyrics: the Nation of Islam of Gods and Earths, a splinter group formed in Harlem by Clarence 13X Smith after he broke with the Nation of Islam, in 1963. Smith’s philosophy holds that only five per cent of the population possess “knowledge of self,” and that they have an obligation to educate the ignorant eighty-five per cent. (The other ten per cent are enlightened but self-interested and creepy.) Smith was murdered in 1969 (the crime is still unsolved), but his teachings found new popularity with New York rappers in the late eighties and early nineties. When Badu sings, “My cipher keeps moving like a rolling stone,” she’s employing Smith’s usage of “cipher”—a ring of people reciting portions of Smith’s teachings. The word eventually became more common in hip-hop, where it is used to describe a group of rappers arrayed in a circle and reciting rhymes. All this undertow is probably imperceptible to most of the three million people who have bought “Baduizm,” but, when Badu refers to “master teachers” on “New Amerykah,” the ghost of Smith is present.
?uestlove was right about Badu: her records may not feature much rapping, but her music is steeped in the sounds and culture of hip-hop. One of the first tracks to leak from “New Amerykah” was “The Healer,” a song that has little to do with any known genre. It begins with a brief snippet from a song by Malcolm McLaren featuring the World’s Famous Supreme Team, an obscure reference that will be instantly recognizable to hip-hop’s faithful—a sort of secular analogue of Smith’s Five Percent philosophy. “The Healer” was produced by Madlib, an independent hip-hop producer who usually works with rappers; the music flirts with total stasis, though it still has an audible beat. Bells, unidentifiable knocks, a lonesome instrument that might be a sitar, or a guitar, and lots of empty space: this is Badu’s backdrop. She starts by chanting a shout-out to a variety of religions: “Humdililah, Allah, Jehovah, Yahweh, Dios, Maat, Jah, Rastafari.” The core of the song, which is sort of a chorus, is a spoken series of assertions about hip-hop: it’s “bigger than religion,” the government, and a variety of other things. Badu also sings a dedication to “Dilla,” a reference to the hip-hop producer James (Jay Dee) Yancey, a beloved figure and collaborator of Madlib’s who died, from complications of lupus and a blood disorder, in 2006, at the age of thirty-two.
But if you listen only once to “The Healer” it is clear that the song itself, like the other songs on “New Amerykah,” isn’t so much hip-hop as it is a reorganization of the historical flotsam and jetsam that were recycled and turned into hip-hop. The album’s opening track, “Amerykahn Promise,” demonstrates how widely the album ranges. Over a seventies funk vamp, Badu mumbles; a chorus of female voices sings “American promise”; and a deep male voice intones, in the manner of a corrections officer speaking over a P.A. system, “Excuse me, young lady, excuse me, you’re causing quite a disturbance over here.” (He later asks for a “brain-tissue sample.”) This seventies production is actually from the seventies; it is the backing track from a 1977 album produced by the vibraphonist Roy Ayers, who gave it to Badu to rework. (She is singing over the original master tape.) What the track most recalls is the opening of a Funkadelic record, like “Maggot Brain,” or the moments when George Clinton would let a variety of characters play out paranoid scenarios, and blend explicit political satire into unhinged, improvisatory funk.
The feeling of paranoia is strong on several tracks. “Twinkle,” a remarkably odd track that Badu co-produced with the engineer Mike Chavarria—he is responsible for many of the album’s deep and strange sounds—starts with a sample of what might be film dialogue, and seems to involve a fight. The music is full of dread and uneasiness. Badu raps, “Children of the matrix be hittin’ them car switches, seen some virgin Virgos hanging out with Venus bitches,” and then uses melodic singing to explain what is going on: “They don’t know their language, they don’t know their God.” The song dissolves into humming keyboards as a male voice rants for a minute and a half: “We know the air is unfit to breathe and the food is unfit to eat. . . . I want you to get angry!” After a minute, you realize that it doesn’t just sound like Peter Finch’s rant from “Network”; it is that rant, but with a new score, something like the Art Ensemble of Chicago locked in a room with Brian Eno. Badu has promised that the second volume of “New Amerykah” will be more emotional, which could be just as good. For the moment—a deeply apolitical moment in R. & B.—we should simply be grateful that a verified pop star has quietly brought politics and noise back into black pop. ♦
There's another good review of Badu's new album over at The New York Times.