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The mind of a one-woman multitude

By Melena Ryzik
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, NEW YORK
Monday, Mar 03, 2008, Page 13

US soul singer Erykah Badu with her group Erykah Free performs during a concert at the Caprices Festival in Crans Montana, Switzerland, late Saturday, March 10, 2007. PHOTO :AP

The day after she finished her new album at Electric Lady Studios, the West Village recording shrine that Jimi Hendrix built, the multi-platinum R 'n' B singer Erykah Badu was back in her surprisingly modest apartment in Brooklyn, puttering. In the tiny kitchen she poured organic pomegranate juice into a jelly jar, then stretched out on a mattress on the floor as New AmErykah, Part One (4th World War), just released by Universal Motown, played on her laptop. After weeks in the studio, she was so happy to be home that she refused to leave, rescheduling appointments and interviews around her domestic whim and one really, really good bath. (More on that later.)

She patted the spot next to her; why not conduct an interview in bed?

"This is my museum," Badu, 37, said of one-bedroom in Fort Greene where she has lived on and off since coming to New York, demo tape in hand, 11 years ago from her native Dallas, where she was Erica Wright.

"Since I've been here, I've had two children, a few boyfriends, a lot of records," she continued in her slight, girly drawl. "Everyone that comes over here draws on the wall or leaves something. You're looking at my mind when you're looking at these things." Decorating the hallway, for instance, is a 1m-tall ankh; artwork by her 10-year-old son, Seven, underneath a magazine photo of his father, the rapper Andre Benjamin of OutKast; yellow caution tape; dried flowers; protest-style placards; and a metal trash can lid, hung on the wall like an art piece. ("I thought it was cute," she said.)

As idiosyncratic as the memorabilia on her walls, her first full-length album in eight years is a dense, stylistic mash-up. By turns overtly political and intensely personal, with 1970s-groove instrumentation, hip-hop phrasing and a roster of beats and samples from collaborators like the DJ and producer Madlib, it is fierce but weird. And apart from Honey, the bouncy, playful single, it is largely uncommercial. In his review for the New York Times, Ben Ratliff called it "a deep, murky swim in her brain."

After a public bout of writer's block that led to her Frustrated Artist tour in 2003 and 2004, Badu is eager to promote what she calls her magnum opus. New AmErykah is part of a creative torrent that includes a sequel record, due in the summer, and an unrelated retro-minded album, Lowdown Loretta Brown, scheduled for the fall, both on Universal Motown. Badu also plans to start a lifestyle magazine, The Freaq, this summer; the first issue will come with a copy of New AmErykah: Part Two. Both records will also be available on a USB stick for fans to plug into their computers; for added value Badu wants to record a USB commentary track to explain her references and inspiration. A tour will start in May.

"I swear to God, this must be my artistic peak," Badu said in an earlier interview at Electric Lady, where she walked around barefoot, belled anklets jingling above her tiny, manicured feet. "I hope my sexual peak comes soon too," she added, and laughed. Then, switching to bohemian mama mode: "If something happened to me, I would want them to say, 'This is what your mother was about.'"

Badu is "one of those performers that don't necessarily fit in," said Stephen Hill, executive vice president for music talent and programming at BET, which has been aggressively playing the video for Honey. "She creates music as she wants to, and then it's up to the public to decide." He added that the new album was "not like anything that's out there, and that's what makes it exciting," especially when the mainstream music business feels slack.

Of course Badu already had a legacy to build on. Her debut album, Baduizm, released in 1997, sold nearly 3 million copies, winning her two Grammys and comparisons to Billie Holiday, Diana Ross and Chaka Khan. By the time her follow-up, Mama's Gun, was released in 2000, she had earned a title: the queen of neo-soul. And she was part of an era of left-of-center black singer-songwriters like Jill Scott, Angie Stone and Macy Gray; her male counterparts included D'Angelo and Maxwell. Like Badu many of them struggled to keep their creative momentum, conflicted about their early mainstream success.

"I think most of us went through our psychosomatic, quasi-self-saboteur stage," said ?uestlove, the drummer for the Philadelphia group the Roots and a member of what he called the Soulquarian scene, which flourished in the late 1990s and included Badu and other socially conscious acts like Talib Kweli and Common.

"Once we got that first taste of success, I think just the pressure of reacting got to all of us. Some of us released some of the craziest records of our career," and some, like D'Angelo, retreated altogether, he said. As Badu's popularity exploded, there was a backlash, he said. Her hair, her love life, her mystical beliefs all came into question. "Is she real or is she fake, is she pretentious?" he said. "She was thrown off."

But in 2004, ?uestlove gave her a computer - her first - for Christmas. She chatted online with producer friends like him, Q-Tip and J Dilla, and they began to bombard her with music. "Everybody sending me these things, saying, 'Erykah, come on, we want you back, we need you to do this,'" Badu said.

Her son introduced her to GarageBand, the music-making program for Macs, and she was off. With the laptop, "I could be here, in my own space, with headphones on, and the kids could be doing what they doing, and I'm cooking dinner still, I'm making juices still, and it's so easy just to sing," she said. "You got an idea - boom! Idea, boom!"

As mystical as Badu's interests are - ancient Egypt, which she calls Kemet, astrology and the power of positive thinking, a la The Secret - she is equally grounded in the realities of the contemporary music business.

"I know Erykah Badu is a brand," she said. "And I try to make sure that I'm on point with that - every part of me. I'm healthy. I make sure I'm at the meeting. I try to be on time."

"Try" may be the operative word. Her publicist, working at a computer nearby, looked up skeptically when she said this. "Carla, keep typing," Badu said mock-authoritatively. She smiled and added, "Hey, procrastination is living."

As her publicist no doubt knew, on the morning of the interview Badu's procrastination included a Very Important and Much-Delayed Bath. It was so relaxing and emotionally potent - she talked about it in response to a question about finding her spirituality - that it led to the cancellation of a photo shoot and other meetings.

"I hadn't been away from that studio, girrrl - I was using the funk," she said. "That's why you hear it, I was so funky."

As she floated in the tub ("I always go all the way underneath the water and try to hold my breath a long time," she said), she had a revelation: "Different thoughts kept coming into my head. The first thought was, ooh, I wonder if my hair gonna be cute when I get out. And then another voice over me said, Ego, we need you, we're going to need you for our mission. And another voice over my head goes, oh, Willpower, bless your heart, you're going to be stronger soon. And then another voice - oh Heart, you're so compassionate, you have to toughen up a little.

"I figured out, like, wow, all of these things in me are fighting to have a space all the time, and it's like a dialogue going on inside of me all the time."

Badu is certain her fans are now ready to hear it. "Being humble is so 2007," she said. "Trust me."
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