Erykah Badu: C /D, S&D

it was an attention whore video, guys, she got what she wanted.

dope album, though.

okay I am 2 minutes into this album and it is amazing

video is kinda trite but cute; fine by me. beyond the highbrow framing i still find it quite affecting wrt the song itself, specifically the "need you to want me/ need some attention" aspect, but then i suppose maybe i just favour triteness that's of my own making.

great, great album anyway - haven't had the strongest badu affinity to date but this is already my favourite of hers. at first i guess i was feeling like she mightve half-assed it a little but the final track casts such a profound shadow back over the rest of it all somehow, it's pretty amazing.

After a few listens, I'm convinced it's weaker song-for-song than New Amerykah; occasionally the production and arrangements are monotonous. But the good songs reflect the advances of 4th World War.

i find the dilla cut fairly tedious after a while personally but that's about it.

I'm convinced it's weaker song-for-song than New Amerykah

What album of the last few years isn't, though?

Well, sure, but 4th World War is a great album and this one is very good.

i find the dilla cut fairly tedious after a while personally but that's about it.

as a huge dill and madlib stan, their tracks are my least favourite thus far, but maybe they're just slow burners

And I'm very satisfied with that.

xpost

After a few listens, I'm convinced it's weaker song-for-song than New Amerykah; occasionally the production and arrangements are monotonous. But the good songs reflect the advances of 4th World War.

4th World War is a great album and this one is very good.

This. But I'm glad it's a very good album. My brain can only be melted so many times.

For anyone else who bought the CD: is the "I'm fxxking your friends" line edited out?? Or is there an uncensored CD version out there?

two days nonstop listening has me in agreement of "very good"

they played us the uncensored version at the playback

kinda surprised that this album would be the one to hook in a badu sceptic like rtc!

it is very good though.

yeah i guess i can see how i might've come across as badusceptic before but really it's nothing diehard or anything - i'm somewhat indifferent to new amerykah compared to most on here, but i fux ok with baduizm and stuff to a degree. this album seems to have a balance that particularly appeals to me though.

i think it's hilarious that there wasn't an uproar about the video until she released it? like, somehow all the people who saw her running around dallas naked weren't offended enough to make it news at that point?

well it was probably a closed set w/ extras, not a guerilla shoot, y'know?

every news report I've read has said it was a guerrilla shoot

oh ok i hadn't read anything abt it

Yeah, I've heard no permits, no actors, but who knows.

If it was really as guerrilla as she says it was, I think there would be more reactions to her once she got butt-nekid.

i imagine ppl had no idea who she was, & she got outta there quickly enough that the popo didnt catch on, so some folks were just like "lol some crazy naked lady in the park lol"

also i definitely prefer this record to 4th world war but then i find the idea of referring to an album's unique aesthetic as 'advances' like its working in some linear pattern that this is not to be kinda annoying so

Someone who preferred Ankh to War would think that.

< / tease >

Totally digging this album. Loved part 1 too, it's weird hearing this and thinking of them as companions, this certainly has a more "slender" aesthetic bandwidth (to be pretentious about it), i.e. more stripped down, more focused on sex, love and intimacy, but then there's still some sharp satirical digs in the lyrics. I kinda dig that strange text/manifesto that accompanies the album too.

I'm happy with this album and enjoy it but I'm not in love with it.

that's kinda where i'm at too, but it's growing on me

the 'advances' thing just doesn't really make sense since hasn't the line always been that most of these albums were recorded during the same period before first was released?

not quite sure how sex love & intimacy add up to a narrower aesthetic bandwidth than underwater stovetops but ok

Its highs aren't as high as its predecessor's, but I think it flows better as an album.

I dunno, I get kind of bored during parts of it

I'm happy with this album and enjoy it but I'm not in love with it.

this is where i'm at too. i like that it feels casual and not too labored-over though, and i'm digging get munny, gone baby, and incense a lot. window seat & agitation too, but i've heard window seat a lot and agitation is so short (although so is incense, and that one feels like it could go on way longer).

for an album where the flow initially seems so important, i get the feeling that i'll be cherrypicking favourites a lot more than listening to it ~as a work~ in the future (in terms of how it works as an album it reminds me more of worldwide underground than anything else: that had the feeling of a band jamming away with erykah wandering occasionally through to pick up and drop threads of songs, this is sparer but you get what i mean i think).

^^^both those posts cataloguing my exact reactions

I'd like to put in words for "20 Feet Tall" and "Out of My Mind, Just in Time" tho. I have a feeling those are joints I'll be chewing on for a while

looking at the track listing it's only "umm hmm", "love" and "incense" that strike me as remotely skippable, actually

I'd subtract "Incense" and add "Fall in Love", but yeah

"Love" is skippable; "Umm Hmm" is not.

yeah, maybe those will be growers but the middle chunk (umm hmm through fall in love) blends together for me in a mush of dilla-ish drums and love lyrics. i still like it but i've been skipping to the last two tracks.

This isn't an immediate "HOLY SHIT PAY ATTENTION TO ME" album in the vein of 4WW but I've noticed that when I start playing it, I always want to listen to the entire thing; I've had zero desire to cherrypick songs from it, whereas with 4WW I almost immediately zeroed in on "The Healer", "Cell", "Master Teacher" and "My People" and skipped over the other tracks.

yeah, that's my experience.

there is some good spring time shit on here

Pitchfork: Prince and Rick James seem risqué for a 10 year old...

That was my taste. My family had a very open relationship about music and art. Nothing was taboo and everything was up for discussion-- by the time I was 10, I was a genius. I take the same approach with my son now. He listens to King Crimson, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix.

Pitchfork: Prince and Rick James seem risqué for a 10 year old...

okay what kind of puritanical nonsense is this

signed, a dude who first heard Prince at age 8

Also Prince was kind of a big deal when Erykah was a kid in the early '80s! It would've been pretty hard to avoid him.

(OK, maybe in '81 he wasn't quite a superstar yet.)

"I Wanna Be Your Lover" was #1 on the R&B charts and just missed the Billboard top 10 in 1978 and "Let's Work" was a #1 club hit in 1980; he wasn't an ubiquitous superstar but it also wasn't like no one knew who he was, and if Badu's parents were already bumping Rick James, they were almost certainly bumping Prince.

that mid-section is kinda like a lot of the jams on WWU. I might feel like listening to them sometimes, but I don't have to listen to them, nawmean?

wwu hits way harder imo

and if Badu's parents were already bumping Rick James, they were almost certainly bumping Prince.

Yeah -- they even toured together in 1980.

signed, a dude whose first 45 was "Let's Go Crazy."