Music about resistance has endless precedents, but what separates this album from its previous peers is its focus, or seeming lack thereof. She could write the hits, but her focus was on telling a story, and sending a message.
And that vision remained as uncompromising as ever despite label executives’ ultimatum concerning radio play, she managed to keep the original album intact while sneaking in the excellent yet conceptually-untethered single “ Honey” at the end. Even considering what Badu was known for, this was new territory. She gives up almost three minutes of “Twinkle” to vocal chameleon Bilal, who retrofits Peter Finch’s iconic monologue from Network into the track’s rumination on systemic racism and police brutality. News clips and speeches are sampled freely and surface with the nervous tension of a fever dream. Moods shift constantly from warm to chilly, from foredoomed to hopeful. It’s remarkably static, but also positively quivers with unpredictability. It’s socially conscious, even a little didactic at times, but that didacticism works because it’s supported by some truly risky maneuvers.
In that sense, New Amerykah Part One was the logical extension of her ultimate goal. Self-pride? Sure, but the pride she exuded was also intertwined with her identity as a black woman and her goal to advance that culture in a marked way by process of emphasis. By being honest about her limits and nailing down the things about herself she considered unimpeachable, she succeeded time and time again, and she did it with a searing self-assurance that indicated a specific sense of pride. Worldwide Underground, a 50-minute “EP” that might have paled in comparison to her normal level of output, still found her being honest with her creative block: she supported the project on the cannily-titled “Frustrated Artist Tour”. Mama’s Gun, the 2000 followup to her debut, remained within the R&B wild but played with structure and form, essentially forming one long suite that dove deep into her psyche. Badu was and is proud of her talent and her voice, but more importantly, she makes few compromises in enacting her creative vision. Looking back, even if some critics accused Badu for playing up herself as both a performer and a brand, it was those qualities that made her such an iconic role model for many in the Black community. It’s yet another pointed statement in an album almost exclusively focused on the issues still facing Black people in the 21st century: poverty, drug addiction, police brutality, the prison system, and on. Over a soupy sample of Curtis Mayfield’s iconic “Freddie’s Dead,” she and guest vocalist Georgia Anne Muldrow (who originally conceived the piece) are at the point of resignation, recognizing the meager ways in which American culture has changed since desegregation. On “Master Teacher,” a knotted, winding medley from her 2008 masterpiece New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War, her use of “woke” was fresh and novel.
The timing was almost too perfect: in addition to being an unimpeachable artwork on its own, Butterfly examined the plight of black entertainers as collateral from America’s continued treatment of Black people after the Civil Rights Movement, right as the country was on the brink of a grand (if failed) reevaluation.Įrykah Badu had it right before that though. Look at the reception to Kendrick Lamar’s game-changing To Pimp A Butterfly in 2015, shortly before the BLM movement found itself in the center of the preceding year’s presidential election. Black artists at that point, for all their groundbreaking works, were not regaled on a national critical stage (a stage largely bereft of Black critics) until mass awareness shifted our lenses. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement permanently changed the discourse of American politics and culture, to the point where those who were newly conscious of the enduring struggles of African-Americans had begun to retrospectively reevaluate the worthiness of media from the last thirty years, when hip-hop was a fledgling art and soul music was on the cusp of a renaissance.
0 kommentar(er)
