Michael Odell CD OFTHEWEEK You’ll have noticed that writing poetry in coffee shops, plundering jumble-sale threads and being love-battered yet plucky is now “in”. But just four years ago, if you were a female R&B act, you wore knee-high leather boots and demanded regular oral sex and housekeeping from your “nigga”, safe in the knowledge you were surfing the zeitgeist. You were a brutalised urban hard nut who lived by hip-hop’s values. All that changed with Erykah Badu’s 1997 debut, Baduizm.
She interpreted the same harsh world through a poet’s eye, and bent R&B, hip-hop and jazz styles to her visions. Since then shops selling head-wrap material have never had it so good: Lauryn Hill, Macy Gray and Jill Scott now crowd Badu’s territory. So do we still need her? You’ll feel a fool for ever doubting it.
Her new album, Mama’s Gun (Motown), opens with Badu forgetting that her debut shifted three million copies: she tells herself to turn on the oven “to warm the apartment”, to take her vitamins and to “capture these voices”. Her issues are common among the nu-soul sisterhood: race, gender, bills, the big, scary city. And of course she’s been going out with some real assholes, so there’s a relationship autopsy or two.
Even with this array of worries, Didn’t Cha Know is as sweet a pep talk as you could hope for. On Cleva she toys with the kind of honesty that would be heresy in the parallel universe of hip-hop: “This is how I look without make-up and with no bra/my ninnies sag down lo,” she laments. The pay-off, though, is the beguiling refrain: “But I’m cleva …” She tells us how she makes her $7 dress look fly and how she’s handy with words; add Roy Ayers’s vibes and it’s irresistible.
Of course you do wonder how one woman can spout so much New Age twaddle. But just to prove she’s not a hippy flake, she bares her teeth on Booty, a fantastic stop-go rant at a sister suffering at the hands of a bad man. “Ya know the whole encyclopaedia/but your nigga thinks I’m deeper,” snarls Badu before the clincher: “I don’t want him cause of what he doin’ to you.” The male love rat we know from countless R&B vignettes, but Badu saves special venom for the self-hating woman who harbours him: “Ya got the beans and rice and the hot ho cakes/but ya nigga still over here in my plate,” she spits.
By the second half of the album Badu is done with angst and indulges herself with jazzy swooning. Orange Moon is a beautiful thing. No one else could sing, “I’m an orange moon” and make you believe her quite so completely. She ends with Green Eyes, a transcendent jazz suite dealing with the three acts of a love affair: denial, acceptance and the relapse. The first is a jokey, faux-1930s jazz scat and a tribute to Badu’s heroes. The second, in which the reluctant lover’s defences are breached, shows just what a class act Badu is: “Silly me I thought your love was true/Change my name to Silly E Badu!” she trills.
Lyrically, musically, technically, Badu wipes the floor with all comers. The hippy chicks, with their broad emotional agenda, are bossing the world right now, and this fantastic album by the original and best of the bunch shows you why.