Presenting her Dallas upbringing and culture with such honesty, mixed with an innovative genre-bending approach that accounts for southern hip-hop, R&B, funk, and soul, Badu exposes black feminism and afrofuturism to the world in an approachable fashion. Many of the world’s most successful artists today give credit to Badu’s music as an enabler for their creative processes. Whether it be expansive production styles or out-of-the-box lyrics, artists after Badu came up have been more willing to represent themselves without having to pander to widely-understood stereotypes or norms. In a contemporary music landscape where authenticity comes from materialism and misogyny, Erykah Badu’s realness and empathy create a space for artists to express themselves in a genuine fashion. ‘Baduizm,’ her personal philosophy, is based in empathy and honesty and impacts the way she carries herself as well as the way she makes music.
Check out parts two, three, and four.įrom her debut in 1997, Erykah Badu and her music have empowered people across intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, and class. Five years passed (during which she reportedly completed three albums' worth of material) before Badu put out her next studio album, 2008's New Amerykah.This is part four of a four-part series on Erykah Badu’s massive role in communicating and normalizing Black feminism and Afro-futurism in contemporary discourses. Badu worked through the writer's block that followed by organizing the Frustrated Artist Tour and releasing EP Worldwide Underground in 2003. She followed her triple-platinum, Grammy-winning debut with a successful 1998 live album (which included the hit song "Tyrone") and Mama's Gun, which Badu released in 2000 after taking some time off to raise the son she had with Outkast's Andre 3000. That show led to a record contract, collaborations with artists such as the Roots, and Baduizm, written almost entirely by Badu.
Although her unflappable, purring vocals garnered well-deserved comparisons to the legendary Billie Holiday, Badu, who was born Erica Wright, got her start with some of today's hottest acts, beginning with D'Angelo, whom she opened for in her hometown of Dallas in 1994. Erykah Badu's sound echoes with strains of lush 1970s soul, cucumber-cool jazz and modern-day hip-hop - a blend that made her music a noteworthy standout in a sea of Xeroxed sound-alikes when Baduizm, her debut album, dropped in 1997.
0 kommentar(er)
