Too Trusting?: Erykah Badu Angered, Duped by Flaming Lips Video
Singer Erykah Badu has said she feels “disgusted” and “violated” after rock band The Flaming Lips posted a music video showing her and her sister naked. Badu recorded a song with the band, who asked the singer and her sister Nayrok to sit in a bath full of blood, glitter and creamy liquid for the video. Badu said she was not shown the edited version, which she called a “tasteless, meaningless, shock motivated video”.
The band apologized after releasing the explicit video without approval.
The alternative rockers teamed up with the Grammy-winning soul singer to record a version of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face for their latest album. The singer said she thought the concept for the accompanying video was “disturbing” but went along with it “out of respect for you and the artist you ‘appear’ to be”. (more…)
They say genius lives on the edge of insanity, or maybe, I just made that up. In any case, it seems more and more that this is an ideal that Erykah Badu lives by when composing her music. Just picking up the album a listener might expect to be in for something strange by just looking at the album cover which is a cartoon drawing of Badu wearing matching four-finger rings and an afro wig constituted of pictures and symbols with an array of meanings. This album follows up her last offering Worldwide Underground which was a little uneven and took some time to fully grow on me, though it did feature some really smooth grooves and organic production. Badu’s balancing act between the brilliant and the bizarre is a constant struggle throughout the album. For every gem such as “Soldier” and “Telephone” there seem to be two questionable if not outright weird tunes like “The Cell” or “Master Teacher”. The overall strangeness of a number of the cuts is compounded by Badu’s habit of speaking in riddles, esoteric mysticism and cultural nationalism, which seems to only have intensified over the years. I am able to make sense of most of the references on a song like “The Healer” or “Twinkle” but will the general public or even her general listening audience (perhaps that’s the point). If you listened to the album’s lead single “Honey” listeners probably were not prepared for the full weirdness that they were about to experience with Badu’s New Amerykah, Pt. 1: 4th World War. Overall I appreciate the creativity of Badu and the way she is able to channel the soulful sound and deeply organic instrumentation of 70’s soul i.e. Roy Ayers, onto her current day LPs. This ability leads to some beautiful grooves when it’s done properly (“Me”, “Telephone”). However there are just too many ventures off into Erykah’s world of esotery, where it only seems to matter if things make sense to her, for this album to fully satisfy.