At 55, the most elusive artist in soul music teams up with one of the most influential hip-hop producers of the past three decades. The lineup: sixteen tracks of astonishing craftsmanship, and almost as many grand moments of emotion.
“I may intimidate you at first but I come to stimulate your universe.” Erykah Badu hadn’t released an album since New Amerykah Part Two: Return Of The Ankh, in 2010, and these are the words she chooses to mark her big return. Style, that must be it. Unless it’s charisma, audacity, or simply the confirmation of what Questlove once said about her: “Never look into her eyes for more than five seconds, or she will take control of your mind.”
Be that as it may, there is in that sentence the promise of plunging into a world unlike any other. That of an artist who has always embraced her eccentricities, a singer with a soft but uncompromising voice, a “witch doctor” in her own words at the opening of Witch Doctor.
The fifteen other tracks emphasize the incredible magnetism of these multiple facets of personality, with which Erykah Badu has always enjoyed playing. This is what had given her previous albums their spiritual, sensual, mystical, or confessional dimensions. Today, it is what gives Before the World Blows such depth, intensified by the presence behind the boards of The Alchemist, a legend of hip-hop production. He’s the one responsible for Mobb Deep’s The Realest or Jadakiss’s We Gonna Make It. He’s also behind some of the best recent records by Larry June, Freddie Gibbs, or Earl Sweatshirt.
The Heart of Soul Music
The collaboration with Erykah Badu began in 1997, during a joint tour with Cypress Hill, where he served as the roadie. Then, years later, a mutual friend played matchmaker perfectly, nudging the two artists to reunite in the studio. For 18 months, Erykah Badu and The Alchemist undertook numerous trips back and forth between Dallas and Los Angeles, inviting a few of their friends (Steve Lacy, Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, Westside Gunn, or Jay Electronica) and envisioned Before the World Blows as a project built around human relationships: how men and women interact, love, deceive, hurt one another, remember, or end up isolating themselves under the pull of new technologies.
What remains of these reflections, never morose, always meditative? Tracks with languid grooves, long and beautiful smoky ballads (Echos and Black Box, placed at the ends of the tracklist), an evident fondness for funk bass and jazz keyboards, a nearly cosmic approach to percussion, a certain restraint, both in the singing and in the instrumentals, and the sense, despite the richness of the melodies, of being carried into atmospheres of incredible lightness. And if, in the end, this is what the soul music sounds like?
Before the World Blows (Control Freaq Records/Young/Wagram). Release on August 28.
