When Erykah Badu told Zach Witness, an unheralded producer from East Dallas, that she might like to come to his home studio and work on some music, he didn’t dare believe her. Badu, who is forty-five, has lived in Dallas all her life. But she spends a considerable part of every year on the road, as has been her custom since 1997, when she released her début album, “Baduizm,” which sold millions of copies, earned her a pair of Grammys, and made her one of the most celebrated soul singers of the modern era. The word people used back then was “neo-soul,” but nowadays it seems appropriate to omit the “neo”—not because her music has grown more old-fashioned but because it has grown harder to categorize, and maybe even easier to enjoy.
Witness is twenty-three, and he had been a fan of Badu ever since he was five years old, when he saw her surreal appearance on “All That,” a comedy show on the kids’ channel Nickelodeon. “This woman came on with incense, a head wrap, and tea,” he remembers. She was impossibly elegant, intoning lyrics that sounded like a dreamy distant cousin of the blues:
No doubt many Nickelodeon viewers were confused, but Witness was converted, especially once he discovered that the singer was also a local. Badu had come of age in the late nineteen-eighties, in Dallas’s embryonic hip-hop scene; two decades later, as Witness nursed his own obsession with hip-hop, he tried to live up to her example. (As a teen-age d.j. called White Chocolate, he entertained black and Latino crowds at the local skating rink.) Last year, he paid tribute to Badu with a faintly psychedelic remix of one of her best-loved songs, “Bag Lady,” which he posted online, along with a note in which he confessed that he viewed her as “a second mother.”
The remix was just one small sign of Badu’s enduring appeal and influence. Although she sometimes calls herself Analog Girl, she is adept at social media, and when she heard Witness’s remix she responded, on Twitter, with a four-letter word of praise: “Oooh.” Badu and Witness traded messages, and she told him that she had been thinking about recording a version of “Hotline Bling,” the viral hit by Drake, built around a passive-aggressive reminder to an old flame: “You used to call me on my cell phone.” This exchange scarcely prepared Witness for the shock of seeing Badu, a few days later, at the front door of his house—the same house where he had once watched her on television. She took him out for vegan food, and then they got to work.
The first session took about twenty minutes; Badu sang the words a few times, and before she finished warming up Witness had captured what became the final version. With a few lyrical edits, she made the song seem teasing and affectionate, as if she were both taking part in a dating ritual and observing it fondly from afar. While Drake moaned that his ex was “wearing less and going out more,” Badu seemed happy to report that hers was “getting dressed and going out more.” Eventually, she and Witness created a musical diptych, with two versions of “Hotline Bling,” a semitone apart, separated by a spoken interlude, purportedly the outgoing message on Badu’s cell phone:
The joke, if it was a joke, quickly grew more ambitious. Badu thought of other songs about phones: “Mr. Telephone Man,” by New Edition; “U Don’t Have to Call,” by Usher. She and Witness recorded eleven tracks in about as many days, culminating in an inspired reimagining of the Isley Brothers’ “Hello It’s Me,” for which Badu enlisted a special guest: André Benjamin, known as André 3000, from OutKast, who is the father of her oldest child. (Witness remembers trying not to act starstruck when he showed up: “It was literally André fucking 3000 on my porch, like, ‘What’s up, man?’ ”) Badu and Benjamin’s playful duet helped to turn her quirky phone project into a major musical event. She called the collection “But You Caint Use My Phone,” borrowing a line from “Tyrone,” one of her biggest hits. It was not quite an album, but when it arrived on iTunes it leaped to No. 2 on the album chart, behind Adele’s “25.” On music Web sites, Badu was suddenly ubiquitous again.
Some fans were surprised by Badu’s new sound: a singer once known for incense and head wraps had tackled—and possibly improved—an electro-pop hit by Drake. Most were simply happy to have something fresh to listen to, because Badu hadn’t released an album since 2010. “I’m a touring artist, not a recording artist,” she says, and she remains a big draw throughout the world. Her concerts and other appearances, combined with her garrulous presence on social media, have helped to solidify her position as one of the country’s most revered singers: a nineties star whose early hits have aged well and whose later work is both warmer and bolder than the songs that made her famous. She has also become a touchstone for a generation of younger musicians—the cool big sister they always wanted, as well as a self-empowered sex symbol. (“My ass and legs have gotten thick,” she once sang. “Yeah, it’s all me.”) Drake is one of many younger peers who count Badu as a friend and a mentor, a fact that he publicized with one of the most decorous boasts in hip-hop history: “Remember one night, I went to Erykah Badu house—she made tea for me / We talked about love and what life could really be for me.”
On a recent weekend, she had a late-night d.j. gig in Brooklyn, where most of the attendees looked scarcely older than “Baduizm” itself. They were all initiates, none more obviously than the young woman in a head wrap and bejewelled sunglasses who planted herself onstage, in front of the turntables, and sat cross-legged throughout the set, acting as a combination cheerleader and spiritual guardian. When security tried to remove her, Badu intervened, saying, quietly, “Let her go—she all right.” The woman bowed to Badu in appreciation. When the show was over, Badu bowed back.
Over the years, Badu’s onstage persona has come to more closely mirror her offstage personality. “She’s regal—but she’s ghetto at the same time,” as one friend puts it. Her early appearances earned her a reputation for high-mindedness which she is now happy to shed, and, among those who know her best, she is equally noted for her knowledge of herbal medicine and for her tendency to respond to seemingly benign comments with a profoundly corny punch line: “That’s what she said!” As a musician, Badu sometimes seems, gratifyingly, to be aging in reverse, embracing a youthful spirit that didn’t hold as much interest for her when she was young and dignified. “I’m the O.G.,” she says now. “Godmother. Auntie. They keep aging and getting old—and I just stay the same.”
Badu was a rapper before she was a singer, and a dancer before she was either, starting when she was a stubborn, quirky four-year-old, growing up in a working-class neighborhood in South Dallas. She was born Erica Wright, and she didn’t see much of her father, who struggled with drugs and spent time in prison. She was brought up by her mother, Kolleen Wright, along with her godmother and her two grandmothers—four mothers altogether. Or five, Badu says, “if you count Mother Nature.” One of her cousins, Robert (Free) Bradford, described the women around Badu as firm but not uptight. “They were cool—like, soul sisters with a hippie vibe,” he says. Badu bonded with her mother over Chaka Khan records and clashed with her over clothes: she was incorrigibly rumpled, nappy, sockless. Badu was a sensitive girl in a city that could be tough; for her protection, her mother enrolled her in a Catholic school, where Badu learned to think of herself as “weird.” She found a tribe of fellow-weirdos at Booker T. Washington, a performing-arts school that has produced Edie Brickell, Norah Jones, and Roy Hargrove, the trumpeter, who became an occasional collaborator.
Badu’s high-school years, in the late eighties, coincided with the ascendance of hip-hop, which captivated her and her friends while also making them feel slightly self-conscious about their home town. As some other Southern cities, including Houston and New Orleans, were inventing their own distinctive forms, Dallas was slower to develop. Badu and her friends envied—and sometimes adopted—the sounds and slang of New York hip-hop, which seemed like the epitome of toughness and sophistication. At school, she studied dance and theatre; outside it, she called herself Apples, half of a hip-hop duo, the Def Ones. During college, at Grambling State, in Louisiana, she kept in touch with the Dallas scene, and with her cousin Bradford, who was away at college in Chicago and learning music production. He sent her beats to rap over, but one of them inspired her to sing, instead, and the resulting song became a blueprint for their music. Working as a duo, they put together a demo under the name Erykah Free.
In New York, explorers like Groove Theory and Guru were combining hip-hop beats with R. & B. and jazz, and Erykah Free seemed like part of this new movement. Within a few months, they got an offer, with a catch: a young executive named Kedar Massenburg, who managed a rising singer named D’Angelo, was interested, but he didn’t want a duo. Badu signed a solo deal. “It took a while to get over it,” Bradford says now. Yet he remains close to Badu, and still admires her music. “ ‘Baduizm’ is one of the greatest projects ever,” he says. “So it happened the way it was supposed to.” Badu never doubted that she would find an audience. “I thought I was ahead of my time,” she says. “There was nothing like what I was doing—and they agreed, the music business.”
By signing with Massenburg, Badu acquired not just a major label, Universal, but a cohort: Massenburg arranged for her to record a duet with D’Angelo, and he put her in touch with one of her favorite acts, the Roots, which created hip-hop with a live band. To help market his charges, Massenburg coined the genre name “neo-soul,” which has stuck to both D’Angelo and Badu ever since. The term gestured back to the sound of nineteen-seventies soul, while delivering an implicit critique of contemporary music. Massenburg wanted listeners to understand: “You’re getting a certain level of consciousness that’s not your typical R. & B.” Badu sometimes made this critique explicit. “Music is kind of sick,” she said, incense in hand, during a BET special that served as her coming-out party. “It’s going through a rebirthing process, and I found myself being one of the midwives.”
In retrospect, it’s not clear that the era’s music was in such critical condition. (Look at Billboard’s list of the top R. & B. songs of, say, 1996 and you see one classic after another: Mary J. Blige, “Not Gon’ Cry”; Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, “Tha Crossroads”; Aaliyah, “If Your Girl Only Knew”; BLACKstreet, “No Diggity.”) And though the term “neo-soul” was affixed to a number of performers—including Bilal, Lauryn Hill, Alicia Keys, Maxwell, and Jill Scott—not many of them embraced it. Still, the success of Badu and the others convinced some listeners that a musical reformation was under way. R. & B. had grown more boisterous, under the influence of hip-hop, and Badu’s sophisticated songs provided a pleasant change of pace. Neo-soul spoke to and for an increasingly confident black bohemian culture—politically aware, spiritually minded, middle class. Its exponents took pains to show that mainstream hip-hop videos offered only a partial representation of black life.
Of course, “Baduizm” had its own understated hip-hop swagger. Badu’s willowy voice, softened by vibrato, inspired comparisons to Billie Holiday, but she had a rapper’s sense of rhythm and restraint: she knew how to stack syllables and deploy slang, and she knew when not to smother the beat with extraneous ad-libs. The song that transfixed Zach Witness, “On & On,” became the first neo-soul single to reach the top of Billboard’s R. & B. chart. Though it was almost smooth enough to be a slow jam, its lyrics more closely resembled a hip-hop freestyle. “On and on, and on and on / My cipher keeps moving like a rolling stone,” Badu sang, and in this context “cipher” might refer to a group of rappers standing in a circle, trading rhymes.
Her second studio album, “Mama’s Gun,” was even craftier than her début and, in Badu’s view, even better. It was anchored by a weighty hip-hop thump, and by lyrics that hinted at militance. (Massenburg says that some Universal executives were initially nervous about releasing an album with “gun” in the title.) Coming from a different singer, its lead single, “Bag Lady,” a cautionary tale for women too preoccupied to find love, might have sounded mean-spirited. “When they see you coming / Niggas take off running,” she sang. But Badu dispensed her hard truths gently, delivering two words of advice—“Pack light”—while encouraging listeners to hear her as someone who needed help at least as much as they did.
“Mama’s Gun” was recorded with a crew of musicians known as the Soulquarians, led by Ahmir (Questlove) Thompson, from the Roots; around the same time, they were also working on “Voodoo,” by D’Angelo, another of the great neo-soul albums. But, after “Voodoo,” D’Angelo retreated into his own world, while Badu’s world kept expanding. Unlike some of her contemporaries, she has never been content merely to resurrect an earlier musical era, which may explain why she has turned out a more engrossing body of work than any of the other acts associated with neo-soul. In the years since “Mama’s Gun,” Badu has grown less interested in establishing her independence—which no one, in any case, could doubt—and more interested in finding ways to connect. She calls herself “super mutable,” and part of the intrigue in following her career has been watching her form unlikely alliances. She was one of the most vocal supporters of Tyler, the Creator, when he was at his most antisocial, and she made an unexpected appearance on a Rick Ross album, singing the hook to a particularly sleek ode to conspicuous consumption. “Money and clothes, they gon’ come and go,” she sighed, while Ross and his collaborators explained the particulars of this process.
These days, one of Badu’s favorite young rappers is D.R.A.M., an inventive Virginian with a tuneful flow. He and Badu have been exchanging ideas, and a few weeks ago she dropped by Witness’s house to add her part to a song that D.R.A.M. had sent her, possibly for release on his upcoming mixtape. “I love this,” she said, laughing, as Witness hit play. “This kid has my heart.” The microphone was set up a few feet from the computer—Badu avoids vocal booths, because she finds the isolation inhibiting. She laid down her verse in two takes and then moved on to the chorus, nimbly matching D.R.A.M.’s delivery. “We on the clock / All the time / All the time / We on the clock,” she murmured. “Even when we make no moves / Father Time don’t never stop.”
“You’ve been practicing,” Witness said. “Before, you were having trouble keeping up with the rhythm.”
“I’ve been listening to it every day,” Badu said, satisfied. “Can I ride to that?” She wanted Witness to give her a copy of the song, and a few minutes later she was gone, disappearing down a quiet East Dallas street in her everyday car, a black Porsche Panamera with sky-blue rims and a license plate that reads “SHE ILL.”
The first major purchase that Badu made when she got famous was a house for her mother. The second was a house for herself, on White Rock Lake, in North Dallas, where she has lived ever since. The house was small, but as she toured she saved enough money to build new bedrooms and guest rooms, and found enough objects to fill them all. From the street, it looks like a tidy gingerbread house, glowing with multicolored lights; from within, it resembles a vintage shop with no room to grow, packed with statues and crystals and beads and candles and incense. The house is the nucleus of Badu’s extended nuclear family, and the décor provides an exhaustive record of her interests and accomplishments. The walls are full of paintings of Badu, donated by fans, and photographs of her friends and peers; on a table, an MTV Video Music Award sits snugly between a sewing machine and a golden pig statue wearing pearls.
On a cloudy recent afternoon, Badu was dressed down, in loose jeans and a baggy denim shirt, made baggier by a tear that ran from the hem nearly up to one armpit. This modification may have been accidental, but on her it looked like evidence of a trend that the rest of the world hadn’t yet caught up with. She was reminiscing about 1997, the year of her triumphant début. “You know how you get to pick groupies out of the audience, and stuff like that?” she said. “I didn’t get to do any of that.” She had met André Benjamin at a club in New York, and their son, Seven, was conceived in the chaotic weeks after “Baduizm” was released. “Me and Erykah actually had to sit down and figure if we were going to keep this child,” Benjamin says. The couple toured through the pregnancy. “She would hit the stage, I would hit the stage, then we would go back to the hotel and I would be putting shea butter on her stomach,” he says. Badu threw herself into research, learning enough about Reiki to become an instructor and earning certification as a holistic-health practitioner.
Seven Benjamin was born at Badu’s house in 1997, on the same day her record company released “Live,” a CD meant to satisfy the demand of fans who loved “Baduizm” and wanted more. The back cover was dominated by an image of Badu’s swollen belly, and motherhood became a central part of her public persona. “I breast-fed onstage, in the limo, backstage at the Soul Train awards,” she says. A few years later, her friend Afya Ibomu (the wife of STIC, from the hip-hop duo Dead Prez) was due to give birth, and Badu flew to New York to help. “Her labor was fifty-two hours—all natural, no anesthesia,” she says. “We walked it out, we bounced it out, we talked, we sang, we danced, we drank oil, we threw up, we took a bath. All kind of things.” Inspired by the experience, Badu got some formal training, and she has assisted in dozens of births since then; on Twitter, she calls herself Erykah Badoula.
From the beginning, Badu’s fans have looked for connections between her lyrics and her evolving family life. Her defining song might be “Tyrone,” in which she tells a deadbeat boyfriend to ask his friend for a ride home: “You better call Tyrone.” But she denied that it was about Benjamin, although Benjamin admits that “Ms. Jackson”—an OutKast track apologizing to a girlfriend’s mother, released after the couple had publicly split—was inspired by Badu. Unlike most R. & B. singers, Badu isn’t particularly drawn to lyrics about romantic love. But then there is “Green Eyes,” the ten-minute song that ends “Mama’s Gun,” which is an extraordinarily plainspoken evocation of the frustration and humiliation of a slow-motion breakup:
A few years later, on an autobiographical track, Benjamin put the matter more succinctly: “We’re young, in love—in short, we had fun / No regrets, no abortion, had a son.”
In the years after Seven was born, Badu reconnected with an old friend: Tracy Curry, also known as the D.O.C., or Doc, the most renowned rapper Dallas has ever produced. He moved to Los Angeles in the late nineteen-eighties, and became a ghostwriter for N.W.A.; his celebrated début album, “No One Can Do It Better,” came out in 1989. A few months after that, Curry was in a gruesome car accident that reduced his booming voice to a whisper. (The film “Straight Outta Compton” depicts Dr. Dre rushing to his hospital bed and asking, “Is he paralyzed?”) Struggling to accept that his hip-hop career was effectively over, Curry spent more than a decade drunk and high and rootless, before coming home to Dallas. He began spending time with Badu and gradually became her boyfriend, a position that enabled him to put his newfound humility into practice. “I needed to be able to forget about me for a minute and enjoy her—enjoy what I missed, through her success,” he says now, in his famous rasp. “If she needed her bag carried, or her foot rubbed, or whatever the hell that she may have needed, I couldn’t wait to do it.” They had a daughter, Puma, in 2004, and stayed close even after they split up, a few years later. Curry is now engaged, and his fiancée is pregnant; they are planning a water birth, with Badu as their doula.
“I have an interesting life,” Badu says. “I couldn’t have planned it this way—who would?” In 2009, she gave birth to a third child, a precocious girl named Mars, whose father, like the other two, is a prominent rapper: Jay Electronica, a cult favorite from New Orleans. “I’m nowhere near a single mom,” she says. “I mean, I am, but the fathers are always here.” All three fathers live much of the year in Dallas, and they have formed a tight community, which has Badu’s lakefront house—built, like her family, through accretion—as its hub. All three children were homeschooled through second grade, with Badu holding forth in her converted rec room or, when necessary, on her tour bus. Now they are enrolled in local schools; Seven is headed to college in the fall.
One afternoon, Badu was talking about Curry as she pulled into her driveway with Mars, who had something on her mind.
“How did Doc lose his voice?” she said.
“He had a car accident,” Badu said quietly. “He didn’t have a seat belt on, and he got threw into a tree. They operated on him, and when he woke up he didn’t have a voice.”
Mars seemed skeptical. “He told you?”
“Yeah,” Badu said. “He told me. And it was on the news. Everyone knows. He was a big star—one of the greatest of all time.”
Mars considered this. “Not greater than my daddy,” she said.
Badu erupted in laughter. “Ho-o-o-o-o! ” she shouted. “That’s what Seven says, too.”
Neither Badu’s blended family nor her string of relationships with prominent musicians has gone unnoticed by fans. Years ago, on Okayplayer, a Web site co-founded by Questlove, Badu defended herself against criticism:
To make sure that no one misunderstood, she included a blunt valediction:
More often, though, Badu’s love life has inspired curiosity, along with jokes about her supposedly mystical power over men. During an interview on BET, she acknowledged the chatter: “There’s an urban legend that says, If you get involved with Erykah Badu, you’ll change gods, wear crocheted pants, and all this other stuff.” (“Crocheted pants” was a reference to the rapper Common, whose music and outfits grew notably more outré when he dated Badu, in the early aughts. He has admitted that she did buy him a pair of knitted trousers, but insists that the ill-fated decision to wear them for a photo shoot was his alone.) Badu once wrote a song called “Fall in Love (Your Funeral),” in which she uses the rumors to create a negative-psychology pickup line. “See, you don’t wanna fall in love with me,” she coos, while sending precisely the opposite message: of course you do.
Badu is that rare veteran musician who claims to harbor no ill feelings toward the music industry. But she concedes that she has sometimes been disappointed by the reaction to her later albums, none of which have had as big an impact as her début. “I thought ‘Mama’s Gun’ was my apex,” she said. “Nobody else thought so.” In fact, critics loved it, but it sold about half as many copies as “Baduizm.” With “Worldwide Underground,” her funky and digressive 2003 album, sales dropped by half again.
In musical terms, though, “Worldwide Underground” was a new beginning: Badu, once known for her meticulous recordings, was adopting a looser, more spontaneous approach. Her songs typically start as grooves, which inspire her to hum along, and then mumble along; she fits words to the melody by transcribing her own mumbles, using a method that she can’t quite explain. James Poyser, a producer and a keyboardist who is one of Badu’s closest collaborators, describes her as a canny and sometimes mysterious editor. As they record, she might discard a promising session without explanation, or suddenly get excited about an old musical sketch that Poyser doesn’t even remember. He has learned that her judgments tend to be correct. During the sessions for “Worldwide,” Badu often recorded him when he was just fooling around. When he hears his parts of the album now, he wants to fix them. “Part of me cringes,” he says. “But it’s just raw, and it works.”
Her evolving recordings doubtless reflect her evolving live show, which has grown markedly less solemn in the years since she first brought her incense sticks to Nickelodeon. On her 1997 live album, she paused to explain one of her oversized rings to the crowd. “This is an ankh—an ankh is an ancient Kemetic symbol,” she said. “The word ‘Kemet’ is the original name for Egypt.” Nowadays, she wears her esoteric knowledge more lightly, and often she prefers teasing to teaching. She might interrupt her own songs with electronic noises, or stop and start her musicians over and over, mimicking an old-school bandleader. (“One time!”) Years ago, during a show at the Apollo Theatre, she tarried so long at a theremin that the crowd grew puzzled, then amused, then annoyed, and then finally resigned—willing to wait for as long as it took for Badu to do whatever she was doing. In 2014, she opened for the comedian Dave Chappelle at Radio City Music Hall—or, rather, closed for him, since her performance didn’t start until half an hour after his gig was finished. Just about everyone stayed, including Chappelle, who watched from the wings for an hour as she and her band stitched together earthy funk and otherworldly pop.
It is important for a singer—especially one with a beloved back catalogue, an unhurried record-release schedule, and a family to support—to keep touring without turning her concerts into jukebox revues. At big festivals, Badu happily plays the hits, but at her own concerts she has more room to maneuver. When she emerged, in 1997, she was embraced by all the venerable African-American publications (Jet, Ebony, Essence), which encouraged readers to claim her as one of their own—an eccentric niece, perhaps, long before she was an eccentric auntie. At her concerts now, young hipsters might sit side by side with loyal R. & B. fans who grew up listening to the same Chaka Khan records that she did.
During a recent edition of “Black Girls Rock,” an awards ceremony broadcast on BET, she delivered a performance fierce enough to convert any unsuspecting five-year-olds who may have caught it. Badu’s fashion sense, like her music, has grown less predictable over the years, and on this night she was wearing a painted knee-length robe over denim overalls and about a cubic foot of beads hanging from her neck; in place of the head wraps of two decades ago, she wore a tall black hat with a rounded crown and a flat brim, precisely cocked. She was singing “Soldier,” a call-and-response protest song, which sounded especially militant in the polite context of an awards show:
Michelle Obama was in the audience, and cameras caught her closing her eyes and nodding to the beat. Janelle Monáe, a younger R. & B. singer who is both a friend and a fan of Badu, stood and sang along.
The song came from “New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War,” released in 2008. The recording sessions for the album had been open-ended, leaving Badu with twice as much material as she needed, so she divided the songs by theme and set half of them aside. The ones she selected—peopled by crooked cops and wicked scientists, healers and teachers—evoke a mood of political protest. Although Badu describes herself as “not very political,” her skepticism of politics owes something to a tradition of black nationalism that urges African-Americans to be self-reliant—wary of a political system that is untrustworthy by design. One of the teachers she hailed on “4th World War” was Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam. But even her most overt calls to arms tend to turn inward: “As sure as all and all is one, we all shall grow before it’s done / So I salute you, Farrakhan, yes, cuz you are me.”
Another song, “Master Teacher,” returned again and again to a vague but resolute pledge to keep struggling: “I stay woke.” In 2014, as the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum, Badu’s pledge was revived on Twitter, where the refrain became “#staywoke,” a prescriptive hashtag, or sometimes just “woke,” a description of anyone who is socially aware, or purports to be. “They probably don’t even know where they got it from,” Badu says, sounding more proud than offended.
One evening, Badu was in her kitchen, making dinner for the family. In one pan, she boiled collard greens with nutritional yeast and Bragg Liquid Aminos; in another, she fried some faux chicken. Badu distinguishes between the vegan life style, which strikes her as off-puttingly “hardcore” (with its proscriptions, for instance, against leather clothing), and a vegan diet, which she views as a matter of common sense. “It’s pretty healthy for certain blood types and bodies,” she says. “Mine happens to be one of them.”
After dinner, Badu had to help her daughter Puma and a friend get ready for a school talent show: they were planning to sing and dance their way through “Beautiful Liar,” a duet by Beyoncé and Shakira. Curry was nearby, but Puma insisted that he stay out of sight while she rehearsed, ostensibly because she wanted the routine to be a surprise to him, though possibly also because he is known to have strong opinions that he doesn’t mind sharing. “You see how they do me?” he said, smiling and shaking his head as he padded down the hall in his socks.
Badu turned up the track. “You know, I’ve never listened to the lyrics before,” she said. “These are two beautiful girls who have realized—”
“They just got pla-a-ayed! ” Puma shouted. She and her friend were having fun: messing up, laughing, taking breaks to field phone calls. But Badu’s relaxed manner can be deceptive. To her, there is nothing casual about putting on a show.
“Whenever you get near the stage, that means you are focussed on your performance,” she told them. “You’re not fidgeting, you’re making eye contact, you’re serious—got it? If you got it, say, ‘Got it!’ ”
“Got it!” the girls said, and Badu took up a position a few feet away, so she could see for herself.
Badu thinks a lot about presentation, which contributes to her judiciousness in releasing new music. Two years after “4th World War,” she delivered the sequel, “New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh,” which she describes as “creative, artistic, flowing, watery, feminine.” In other words, it was a counterpart to her protest album, and possibly also a remedy for it. The strange, wry compositions were love songs, as conceived by a singer fully aware of the absurdity of falling in love and falling out again. It is her subtlest, most playful album, and possibly her best. Its lead single, “Window Seat,” is remembered for its video, in which Badu walked through Dallas, slowly disrobing and finally lying down, naked, in Dealey Plaza, where John F. Kennedy was assassinated. News outlets dutifully covered—which is to say, created—the ensuing controversy. But attentive listeners noticed an undercurrent of self-incrimination. As she walked, Badu pondered the joys and sorrows of solitude, in a plaint that could have been addressed to a partner or to an audience: “I need your attention, yes / I need you next to me / I need someone to clap for me.”
Badu remembers the subsequent tour as an abbreviated version of the rock-star life she had missed the first time around. “My midlife crisis was, like, a party period,” she says. For the first—and, so far, last—time in her life, she became a drinker, draining bottles of plum wine and tequila with the virtuoso bassist known as Thundercat, who was playing in her band. “I had a great time,” she says. “But there’s only so long a mind like mine can do something like that.” So she got back to work, even if what she produced was not always what fans expected.
In interviews, Badu sometimes refers to tantalizing projects that fail to appear, like a concept album about the Harlem Renaissance, or a rhythm-driven collection inspired by drum sounds she has gathered from Africa, South America, and Australia. “This was going to be my new album—it was going to start with drums,” she says. But then she got distracted by “But You Caint Use My Phone,” and now she isn’t sure when she will return to the drum recordings. She is in no rush to release another album, and for someone like her, who is both a mid-career artist and a perfectionist, an album might not bring in enough money to justify the years it would take to record. “I have to actually steal time to write albums,” she says. “I have to shoot hooky. My team has to be looking for me. ‘Where are you?’ ‘I’m writing a album!’ ‘What you doing that for?’ ”
In the meantime, she is responding to the complicated incentive structure of the modern music industry, in which the most reliable paychecks often come from miscellaneous engagements, and in which veteran acts must find ways to remind fans that they exist. She has recently moved to resume a long-dormant acting career. In 1999, she played Rose Rose, the abused daughter in “The Cider House Rules”; earlier this year, she turned up at Sundance to promote her role in an independent film called “The Land,” about families in a tough Cleveland neighborhood. And last week she sparked a worldwide Twitter conflagration by suggesting that a New Zealand high school was right to ban short skirts, “so male teachers are not distracted.”
She has also nurtured a side career in fashion; in 2014, Riccardo Tisci selected her to be the new face of Givenchy. During the spring Fashion Week in New York, she served as a stylist for her friend Kerby Jean-Raymond, the founder of an upstart label called Pyer Moss. The collection’s theme was “double bind,” a theory of mental conflict that Jean-Raymond linked to depression. To illustrate the concept, Badu wrapped the models’ ankles in masking tape, while adorning their hats with bright buttons advertising various drugs: “XANAX,” “MOLLY,” “BOOZE,” “PROZAC.” When the models had walked and Jean-Raymond had taken his bow, Badu headed backstage, where the rapper Wale was waiting patiently to greet her. A male model, shirtless, asked her, “How do you feel, Ms. Badu?”
She beamed. “I feel awesome,” she said.
If Badu is bothered by the motley nature of the projects currently occupying her time, she doesn’t show it. She has spent much of the past few months working on the music for “Legends of Chamberlain Heights,” an animated series scheduled to make its début on Comedy Central this fall. She had a personal reason to take the job: one of the consulting producers of the show is Carl Jones, a former producer of “The Boondocks,” whom Badu is currently dating. “I had to interview alongside all these other composers,” she says. “Talked all kinds of shit. ‘Deadlines? No problem!’ ” But the network had every reason to hire her. Instead of paying exorbitant fees to license old recordings, it could simply hire a Grammy-winning, chart-topping singer to make some new ones.
So it was that Badu showed up, one afternoon, at a low-slung house in Dallas belonging to her friend Richard Escobedo, a producer also known as Picnictyme. She had invited a local keyboard player to come along; together, they were scheduled to record half a dozen snippets of music, each meant to evoke a specific mood—or, in some cases, a specific record that the producers didn’t want to pay for. The session was loose and laid-back, and Badu couldn’t help getting inspired to make each snippet better than it needed to be. As a rough cut of the cartoon played on the computer monitor for reference, Badu grew more interested in the beat, an old-fashioned hip-hop boom-bap, padded with a slouchy bass line. It reminded her of “My Block,” a classic track by the Houston rapper Scarface, so she FaceTimed him. He looked delighted to hear from her. “Get yo’ soup-can ass off my phone,” he exclaimed.
“Get yo’ gator-mouth ass off my phone,” she replied.
After a few minutes, they got back to work, although she had a hard time sticking to her assignment. The beat was starting to sound like the beginning of a song, and now Badu thought she might want to keep it for herself, perhaps for the album that she can never quite refrain from working on. “I like it,” she said. “I don’t think we should give it to them.”
She put on headphones, took off her sneakers, and inched closer to the computer, nodding at Escobedo. “Open up the mike,” she said. “Let’s see what happens.” ♦
