The Awl

Lordy, Lordy Erykah Badu Is 40! (Tomorrow)

Dave Bry — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 16:30:34 +0000

Hey! Awl-fave Erykah Badu turns 40 tomorrow! Happy birthday to her. She put out a new video a couple weeks ago, too, in case you haven't seen it. It sort of looks like what Terry Gilliam's storyboarding for the ministry of information scene in Brazil might have. (That style of animation is big in videos lately.) At the end of it, just as you'd expect, Erykah boards an ankh-shaped rocket and blasts off into outer space. Which is what everybody should do on their 40th birthday.

---

See more posts by Dave Bry

1 comments

Big Krit, "I Ain't [Doody]"

Dave Bry — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 10:30:15 +0000

Fans of Dr. Dre or Erykah Badu will recognize the slinky guitar riff from the young Mississippian rapper Big Krit's latest (it's a sample from Soul Mann and the Brothers' cover of "Bumpy's Lament" from Isaac Hayes' soundtrack to Shaft.) But to me the coolest thing about this song is the perspective: Krit rhymes in the persona of a pot-smoking, X-box-playing, Cribs-watching loser. One who has dreams of glory and riches like we're used to, but one who, at the end of the song, is clearly not going anywhere good. And pretty harshly called out for it. There's a lot of Notorious B.I.G. here. In an impressive way.

---

See more posts by Dave Bry

4 comments

Erykah Badu And Rick Ross, "Window Seat" Remix And "Turn Me Away (Get Munny)"

Dave Bry — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:40:57 +0000

Here's the good-looking cliffhanger of a new video Erykah Badu made with Rick Ross, who everyone for some reason loves right now. I don't much. "BMF" is great. Really great. But like Ross's first big hit, "Hustlin'" from 2005, it's mostly the beat. Made by rising Virginian producer Lex Lugar, it's big and open in a way that suits the heavyset rapper's blustery style. But most everything else I've heard leaves me pretty cold.

While people, some of whose opinions I very much respect, gush over the "lush," "magisterial" soundscapes of the "Maybach Music" "series, those backdrops never sound right for his raps. Badu sounds okay on that stuff, Barry White would sound better. Ross sounds just sounds off-pace and swallowed up to me, and-I really don't know what it is that people are hearing-his lyrics are really never anything to write home about. He often doesn't rhyme and he usually gives the impression that he thinks what he's saying is extremely momentous-and it's not. When he calls himself "Biggie Smalls in the flesh" on the oddly interesting, but still mostly clumsy "Tears of Joy," you wish Lloyd Bentsen was standing at a podium next to him.

---

See more posts by Dave Bry

4 comments

Jay Electronica, "@FatBellyBella"

Dave Bry — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:30:34 +0000

I don't know if it'll go down with Outkast's "Ms. Jackson" or Common's "The Light," but you can count this new song by New-Orleans-born rapper Jay Electronica as another good one inspired by the woman who must stand, at this point, as hip-hop's all-time greatest muse, Erykah Badu. (Who else would it be? Janet? Sade? Roxanne? Jane?) You'll remember that Jay-the excellent and fast-rising rapper who Jon Caramanica wrote so nicely about last week in the Times-posted live reports on his Twitter page as Erykah gave birth to their daughter, Mars Merkaba, a year-and-a-half ago. He is an open book.

---

See more posts by Dave Bry

1 comments

Listicle Without Commentary: 21 Songs That Prove 2010 Has Been A Startlingly Good Year For New Music So Far

Maura Johnston — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 17:00:51 +0000

21. Justin Bieber feat. Ludacris, "Baby"

20. The Vaselines, "I Hate The '80s"

19. Fantasia, "Bittersweet"

18. Wye Oak, "Emmylou"

17. Ne-Yo, "Beautiful Monster"

16. I Blame Coco feat. Robyn, "Caesar"

15. Cotton Candy, "Fantastic & Spectacular"

14. Monarchy, "The Phoenix Alive"

13. Inky, "Let's Get Sad"

12. Big Boi, "General Patton"

11. LCD Soundsystem, "Change"

10. hollAnd, "Sauvignon Blank"

9. Sade, "Soldier Of Love"

8. Erykah Badu, "Gone Baby Don't Be Long"

7. Janelle MonÃ¡e feat. Big Boi, "Tightrope"

6. Raheem DeVaughn, "I Don't Care"

5. Tracey Thorn, "Singles Bar"

4. The-Dream, "Florida University"

3. R. Kelly, "When A Woman Loves"

2. Sleigh Bells, "Rill Rill"

1. Robyn, "Dancing On My Own"

---

See more posts by Maura Johnston

103 comments

The Best New Thing You Haven't Heard Of This Week: Seth Colter Walls and Maura Johnston On The New Newness, Strange Jazz, And The Semi-Return Of Hole

Seth Colter Walls — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:00:40 +0000

Seth Colter Walls: Maura, has it been a good first third of 2010, music-wise? What were the highlights? And what depressed the shit out of you?
Maura Johnston: 2010 has actually been a great year for music. So far! And there's more to come!!
Seth: Really? Because I've felt slightly... underwhelmed. (Though I'm glad you are confirming that the rest of calendar year 2010 is still to come.)
Maura: Well, I know the whole existence of the future has been a cause for worry recently. But I am optimistic!

Seth: Make me excited about all the stuff that came out recently. I probably missed a lot of great things? That Tracey Thorn record is a killer, I'll admit.
Maura: Yes and that's actually a future record! It comes out in May. As does the LCD Soundsystem.
Seth: LCD = also good. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. What's been top-notch great that's also legal to own already? For me, the list is sort of small:
Seth: Joanna Newsom was superb. Ditto Badu.
Maura: I have to dive into the Newsom. But I am with you on the Badu!
Seth: The new Ted Leo album, The Brutalist Bricks, really impressed me. Tighter than recent efforts, but with just as many hooks spilling out everywhere.

Maura: He's so great, and underappreciated.
Seth: Like everyone knows he's "good," but he gets NO BUZZ.
Maura: You saw that Village Voice interview with him, right? He talks about the economics of being in his situation really honestly. And he's still going — yesterday on Twitter he gave a little lesson in what way of buying music benefited musicians the most.
Seth: Maybe he should make a video about an army of cigarette-sunglasses who massacre an ocean full of naked ladies! I bet that would make his music better, or at least more appreciated.
Maura: Well the thing is, artists who have been around a while just aren't appreciated. The craving is for The New — or the Not Around For Long Enough For People To Remember — at all times.
Seth: So let's talk about the NEW NEWNESS (tm'ing that phrase in music criticism, btw).
Maura: Hurry!
Seth: The NEW paradigm to talk about NEW things all the NEWtime. Newly!
Seth: For example: I sort of can't believe that anyone thought this Fang Island band was Best New Anything, aside from Best New Thing I Hadn't Heard of This Week.
Maura: "I Hadn't Heard of This Week." That's part of the problem, right? The pressure is on to take the pulse of the more dynamic indicators. Which is why every blog these days has one of those annoying Tweetmeme badges that shows real-time how many people are Tweeting about each post.
Seth: Oh yeah. (And please Tweet this post, kind readers, while we whine about this.)
Maura: And so like your more mainstream outlets are talking less about what's good and more about "what's happening" in music, as anyone who's covered Biebermania can tell you.
Seth: Aha. I have not covered this.
Maura: That was not what you would call a review-borne phenomenon. Although I do enjoy some of his songs quite a bit.
Seth: Right, because the mass of interest was formulated by 12-year-olds, who don't need reviews!
Maura: But who act in enough of a mass to be noticeable.
Seth: Here's my enduring frustration about "act[ing] in enough of a mass to be noticeable." Let's think about things to drink. I enjoy a nice shot or two of whiskey every now and again.
Maura: I do as well!
Seth: Though I wouldn't be surprised if you told me that the most popular drink, by volume, was Similac. But you know what? I DON'T FUCKING CARE. I don't need or want to read a story about this "hip new drink that all the twelve month olds are really buzzing up on their baby blogs, because their bodies can't handle anything else anyway!"
Maura: Oh totally.
Seth: I would just like my adult drink.
Maura: But the problem is one of economics. As in, the economics of content not working, and higher-ups on the editorial and business sides collectively freaking out. In theory, covering the super-popular, pageview-heavy stuff is supposed to float the items that aren't as much of a click-frenzy.
Seth: Yeah, call me when it's more than a theory on a whiteboard in a meeting, cuz people are ruthless about bouncing from websites.
Maura: I mean I have been in a fairly morose "the system is broken" mood for, oh, the past 18 months or so.
Seth: Can you tell me what magazine this is? "State Of Rock: 40 reasons to get excited about music, starring: The Black Eyed Peas."
Maura: Oh, Rolling Stone.
Seth: At first I thought it was the cover of Why Don't You Commit Suicide? Weekly, but upon closer inspection, you're correct.
Maura: Which is hilarious given the one-two punch of Rolling Stone's slavish devotion to "doing it live" and the Peas' abysmal performance on Idol last week.
Seth: I hesitate to embed, but it really was a spectacle of awful ...

Maura: The Peas kind of fascinate me.
Seth: I guess my feelings are, Wow: you have patterned your band's music after the sound my ATM makes upon any transaction, and your stage aesthetic after the Power Rangers. Also I'm rather weary of profiles of artists that talk about what great marketers and businesspeople they are.
Maura: Totally understood.
Seth: Like when Usher's new album came out. It's like, okay, did he write any good R&B songs? Because I'm not buying his Habits of Seven Highly Annoying People.
Seth: I have a theory about this.
Seth: So in olden times, when wages rose generally, there was a middle class, etc., rock/pop/dance icons were allowed to be "popular" and therefore "great" simply on account of doing good work — or having a good look, or whatever. It wasn't super-important for them to be annoying cross-platform marketing temples because nobody particularly needed to behave that way in life to be comfortable (broadly speaking). But in an age in which everybody is on 15 social-networking sites, the pop stars have to do it too. Or else they lose the cachet of somehow seeming to model the appropriate kind of "winning" behavior that most people expect from people "at the top."
Maura: There's that. But there's also the idea that at this point, people making money from the old-school, big-conglomerate music business? Are kinda newsworthy, in that fewer people are doing that every day. Think of it as a beaten-down-dog-can-still-bite-man kinda thing.
Seth: Oh, that's a smart point.

NEXT: Digital Seven-Inches And The Lost Concept Of "Fun." Plus, It's Time to Talk About Courtney Love Again.

---

See more posts by Seth Colter Walls

25 comments

Hungary Is A "Grubby Hive Of Nationalism," According To Eloquent German Editorialist

Dave Bry — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:20:57 +0000

"Twenty years after the end of the collectivist dictatorship, Hungary has turned into a grubby hive of nationalism in which far-right blood and soil ideologies are flourishing, pseudo-democrats are hailing the glorious history of the Magyars and militant racists are fighting against an allegedly 'overflowing' number of foreigners and ethnic minorities living in the country by parading around the streets with machetes and Molotov cocktails."
-Der Spiegel translates an essay from German paper Die Tageszeitung about the far-right Jobbik party's strong showing in the Hungarian elections that took place on Sunday. Elsewhere in Die Tageszeitung, there's a picture of former German prime minister Helmut Kohl holding a white cabbage wrapped up like a birthday present in German-flag ribbons, a review of the new Erykah Badu album ends with the question, "Miss Black President?" and the new MGMT album is described as a "psychedelisches picknick."

---

See more posts by Dave Bry

8 comments

Erykah Badu, "Window Seat"

Dave Bry — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 09:30:02 +0000

Earlier this month, I wrote about Erykah Badu's performance of her new song "Window Seat" on the Jimmy Fallon show. In it, I noted that she was wearing an unorthodox outfit that revealed more of the shape of a woman's body than we usually see on network television. (For the record, I'm very much pro the shape of Badu's body; honestly, I like to see as much of it as I can.) As we learned over the weekend, we hadn't seen nothin' yet.

In the video for "Window Seat," which was released on Saturday, the wonderful singer walks through Dealey Plaza in her hometown of Dallas, right where president Kennedy was shot in 1963, and takes off all her clothes. It was filmed real fast, apparently, with no warning given to onlookers who might be forgiven for being a bit distracted themselves at the sight of a famous hometown girl, publicly starkers, as they say in England, on a Wednesday afternoon. It was St. Patrick's day, actually, so most of them were probably good and drunk. Badu's been writing about the experience on her twitter feed:

"I heard people yelling diff things @ me but i held my head up and kept moving. there were children there. i prayed they wouldnt b traumatized..." and "..didnt remember what kind of undies i wore that day so i chked 1st b4 removing pants. lol. i knew my intent was good. that thought made it ok."

There's lots of interesting things about the video: the radio broadcast of the moments before the Kennedy assassination, the stress evident on Badu's face as she walks, the fact that she fed a parking meter when she set out. But my favorite is the guy in the red jacket and blue-striped that she passes early on. He seems to have recognized her-he stares, and then picks up her jacket and sandals and chases after her for a bit. Is he a colleague? A production assistant? Or just someone collecting souvenirs? Oh. And hip-hop gossip blogger Sandra Rose is already saying the whole thing was shot on green screen. Hmm. Doesn't seem like that to me. But I guess we'll have to wait for the Zapruder film to surface for frame-by-frame analysis. Whatever the case, it's all pretty terrific.

The video was inspired by a similar one that Brooklyn indie-rock duo Matt and Kim made last year for their song "Lessons Learned."

And here's from the "secret shows" (not at all secret!) that Badu played this weekend.

---

See more posts by Dave Bry

9 comments

This is Prince Listening to Erykah Badu's "New Amerykah Part Two" on Tuesday

Choire Sicha — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 11:00:49 +0000

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

13 comments

Erykah Badu, "Strawberry Incense"

Dave Bry — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:40:03 +0000

This is a new Erykah Badu song. Produced by underground hip-hop hero Madlib, it sounds like something that could either be the first song or the last song on her new album, New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh), set to arrive in two weeks. The picture is the cover. Which is awesome and makes me wonder what Erykah Badu thinks of Avatar? Here are some other pictures, of her surfing last month in Hawaii.

They are just pretty awesome, period.

---

See more posts by Dave Bry

3 comments