Grab Bag: Erykah Badu's "Amerykah"

It is cause for celebration whenever an artist of Erykah Badu's depth and stature releases a new album. Fans has been waiting five years for this one, too, so there was a lot of taut expectation accompanying its release. Interestingly (or perhaps predictably) for such a prominent artist, however, Badu's new record is being met with extreme reactions, both from the critics and from audiences. To many of the neo-soul faithfuls, their long wait was in vain: New Amerykah, Part 1: Fourth World War follows very few of the soulful formulae that defined her earlier work, and a quick survey of amazon.com reviews reveals a lot of disappointment. To fans of indie hip-hop and progressive soul (think George Clinton meets Cannibal Ox), however, this record represents a powerful homecoming of political activism and sonic experimentation into the mainstream of black pop music.

The first thing listeners will notice about this release is that it is much more sample-reliant and produced than her earlier efforts. In fact, she even made some of the beats herself on GarageBand, and moments in the album have a very indie vibe, especially for someone as established as Badu. But one thing we have learned from her previous albums is that this is an artist who only surrounds herself with the best of the best: when she dove into a little acid jazz and groove music back in the late 90s, she grabbed up ?uestlove on drums and Roy Hargrove on trumpet. Similarly, the producers she works with on New Amerykah are all top-notch, although you won't find any household names here. The producers are all kings of the underground, with 9th Wonder and Madlib (of MF Doom, Madvillainy, and Quasimoto props) leading the roster.

A couple of amazing production moments stand out to me: the first song-proper, "The Healer," is a remarkably gentle, subtle affair - not something one would expect to kick off an album. There is a mood of incense-beclouded eastern mysticism here, complete with bells playing a pentatonic theme and even a koto (or perhaps pi'pa) sample. This lulling, down-tempo style of production is still relatively rare in hip-hop: if I had to chose any sampled and produced song to meditate to, this would be the one. Badu's vocal begins with a blended together list of world deities: as many rappers shout out to their crew at the beginning of a song, Badu gives a shout out to a pantheon of gods. Only at the top of the totem pole in the lyrics - "bigger than religion / bigger than government" - is hip-hop itself. Her artistic reorientation away from live bands and towards the hip-hop aesthetic of samples and beats is proclaimed from the start.

"Twinkle" is perhaps the most "indie hip-hop" track on the album; it's also a powerful statement for black empowerment. After a smattering of gun shots and violence at the beginning, the skittering beat enters. The production ethos on this one is similar to El-P and some of the best Def Jux records: even a jumpy, irregular pattern, when repeated enough, can groove. This cut is an amazing example of reinforcing lyrical content with production qualities, in this case that disempowered ghetto-dwellers are really gods ("They don't know they're angels / They don't know they're gods / They take what they are given / Even if it seems odd"). The "twinkle" inherent in these people are sonically represented by the pulsating, jittery synth line in the beat, and to great effect. Rarely do production and vocal delivery/lyrics come into such perfect yoke as to generate a genuinely moving statement.

Sometimes, however, the grand designs of the album fall spectacularly short and end up in a miasma of incoherence. Like some of Badu's past records (Mama's Gun being a good example), New Amerykah follows a very idiosyncratic pacing, with each track containing a couple totally dissimilar grooves and ideas that, on another artist's album, would have comprised two separate tracks. And there's a lot of transitional material, narrative, and sound effects gluing everything together as well. At its best, this technique offers the listener a liberating journey outside of the confines of the traditional album; at its worst, it is ill-conceived and discontinuous, like a 5th grader's collage art project at school.

New Amerykah, flaws aside, is a compelling and timely collection of music. At a time when black radicalism is being hotly debated in the mainstream media (see my "Wright is Right" post), Badu brazenly places herself among the lineage of powerful black leaders that the white mainstream loves to hate (in the track "Me," she sings: "I salute you, Farrakhan"). However, she invokes this history in a totally non-menacing manner: she doesn't snarl about the radical leader, she coos it. Furthermore, Badu tackles inner-city poverty, Iraq, and drugs while managing to stay completely positive. In an age of so much materialism and negativity in mainstream radio music, this comes as a welcome breath of air. In addition to the socio-politically conscious lyrics, Badu's adoption of some of the hip-hop aesthetic makes it easier for her to draw directly from recorded black history, to give homage in the form of samples and reappropriations of old sounds (the funky blackspoitation material of the intro being a good example). On the cut, the narrator sums up the record quite nicely when he says: "we take your history and make it a modern mystery." New Amerykah is totally indebted to history, yet manages to be 100% modern.