Home Girl
(Page 3 of 3)
Badu spent a lot of her time at the center, dancing, acting, learning about African culture. She picked up her mother’s love of sixties soul like Motown and seventies soul like Earth, Wind & Fire—funky yet mystical, sexy as well as socially responsible. She began writing songs at six on a family piano; soon she was rapping too. “My nickname from elementary school was Apples,” she told me, “because my cheeks were so big they said I squirreled away apples in there. My rap name was Apples.”
We passed the rec center and St. Philip’s, an all-black school where Seven is enrolled. “I wanted him to know his heritage,” Badu said. We passed the elementary school her mother went to, then a nursing home. “My great-grandfather was there. I’d walk there every day to visit him.” We drove by two older men sitting on a front porch, and Badu honked; they looked and waved. We drove by the house she was raised in, where Thelma lives now.
Badu lives in a big house on White Rock Lake, but she spends a lot of time on the streets where she grew up. She teaches math, science, and art at the Africa-Care Academy, where both her children have gone, and talks about starting her own fine-arts school in the same neighborhood. She’s done things like cut the ribbon for the opening of a new playground at a public housing development and sing a song she wrote for the opening of the Freedman’s Memorial Cemetery. “Make some noise for our ancestors,” she said to the crowd, and that could be her call to arms in the community. In 2003 she started an umbrella organization called Beautiful Love Incorporated Non-profit Development (BLIND), which raises money, holds coat drives, and organizes seminars at high schools to talk about things like AIDS and drugs.
Her biggest project is right in the middle of the neighborhood, on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, near the intersection of Interstate 45 and U.S. 175: the Forest Theater, a giant old movie house from the late forties. Badu used to see Pam Grier and Bruce Lee movies there, and in 2003 she began leasing it and fixing it up. “This theater is really the only thing left in this neighborhood,” she said. She renamed it the Black Forest Theater and has played benefits there, while other artists, such as Prince, George Clinton, and Snoop Dogg, have also performed. Badu allows people in the community to use the theater free for church services, quinceañeras, and dance classes, and it is also the headquarters for BLIND.
We walked around the inside—the huge main room with high ceilings, the black-and-white-checkered floor, the winding art-deco lobby—then went out front. Giant Afro combs with black fists as handles were painted on the doors. Words on the marquee read “Brothers fighting over who got the fattest chains like slaves on a slave ship.” A Muslim man in a coat and tie hawked issues of The Final Call to drivers waiting at the light, and Badu stopped and chatted. A bus driver opened his door and yelled, “Hey, Erykah!” She yelled back, “What’s up?” A steady stream of cars honked, and she waved.
Next door was a strip of six ragged stores including a barbershop that’d been there since 1961; Elaine’s Kitchen, a Jamaican restaurant; Sankofa Arts Kafé, which used to be the Green Parrot, a club run by Badu’s grandfather and his brothers; and Dread-N-Irie’s, a men’s clothing shop run by a Nigerian man named Sonny Otutu, who used to manage a club in Deep Ellum that Badu freestyled at in the early nineties. Badu would like to buy and renovate the whole lot, theater and stores, but right now she can’t afford it. “Maybe we can use it to generate some kind of rebirth,” she said. “So people can see who we are.”
We drove to St. Philip’s to pick up Seven—who wore the school uniform of blue slacks and white shirt and sported a mohawk—and drove back to Badu’s house, where she took me upstairs to her home studio to play me some songs she’d been working on. She has a large mixing board, a rack of effects, some keyboards, a guitar, and a very expensive microphone specially made for her, as she puts it, “nasally” voice. She records everything on hard drives with computer programs such as Pro Tools and GarageBand, sometimes with an engineer, sometimes on her own. She might use what she does there as a blueprint, or it might make it to the final album. In a house of artistic playthings, this is her sandbox.
Badu sat with a Mac on her lap and called up a menu of song files. “I’m still listening to the music on a lot of these, trying to come up with the words,” she said. “When I work on a vocal, I put the drums, bass, and keyboards on one track, then do as many vocal tracks as I need to come up with the lyrical idea.” She clicked on a song she had been working on the night before, and a snaky, jazzy guitar riff over bass and drums came out of the speakers, her voice hovering over it in a melody full of words you would find in the dictionary and syllables you might not. “The music is ninety percent of the song. Lyrics are five percent and melody is five percent—they live in the music. After I do the music, I find the melody and use it to create a phrase.”
“Do you ever hear the words first?” I asked.
“That,” she insisted, “would be poetry. I’ll sing a phrase; there are lots of things floating around unclaimed in my brain. But there are periods where nothing comes to me, months and months. If it’s not coming to me, that means I have to go out and find it—maybe in a painting, maybe within certain sound frequencies. I’ve been reading a lot about Quetzalcoatl and Nikola Tesla; maybe that’ll make its way into these songs.”
Once again, Badu is taking her time; the new album was supposed to come out in 2005, then 2006, and now later this year. In fact, though, she’s already completed one record—and discarded it. “It was a theme album about Loretta Brown, this fabulous space chick, a young woman from 2060, but in her mind she lives in 2040. Twenty-sixty is like the 1960’s, but she dresses in the fashion of the 1940’s. I recorded fifteen songs, did a photo shoot, made a video, but then changed my mind. I didn’t feel it anymore.”
She started over and now has, by her count, about eighty pieces. Some are complete, and some are just riffs or bass and drum loops. She has culled these down by half, splitting them into two batches for possible albums. One she recorded with an actual band, Funk Sway, which includes Doyle Bramhall II and Wendy and Lisa from Prince’s old group, the Revolution. The other album has, in her words, “more of a street edge.” She played me a song from it with dramatic, ascending synthesizer strings that sounded like something from Foxy Brown; on another she sang, “To be a dancer, don’t nobody know,” in a voice that sounded like Diana Ross. “I’ll put horns on that tomorrow night. I think it needs sax, trumpet, and trombone.” I told her that what I was hearing didn’t sound much like anything she’d done before. “I don’t know,” she answered. She clicked on a song called “Black Girl Lips,” a slow, careening, singsongy tune with Badu playing rudimentary guitar and singing, “Everybody wants some big fat black-girl lips.” She’d gotten the idea, she said, a few nights earlier after she and her mother had watched a Dateline episode about plastic surgery. “I thought, ‘Everybody wants some big fat black-girl lips, but they don’t want to hear nothing we have to say.’”
I asked if she worried that she was starting too many songs without finishing enough. “There’s a method,” she insisted. “It will be finished when it’s finished. That’s pretty mean to the record label, but what can I do? I want to tell a cohesive story, show what I’ve seen, how my imagination has developed between Worldwide Underground and now.”
I told her about a comparison I found irresistible: Beyoncé versus Badu. Houston versus Dallas. Heavily marketed pop star versus relentlessly free spirit. Badu deflected any invitation to dis Beyoncé. But why not, I asked, at least aim to write a huge radio hit that would pay for everything: the theater, the fine-arts school, a new house for your mother? I even suggested a title: “Groovylicious.” Badu ignored me. “I don’t listen to the radio,” she said. “I should, to see what’s going on. Maybe someday I’ll be smart enough to figure it all out—how to get this money. Right now I don’t want to. I believe in what I’m doing so much I don’t want to compromise anything. I don’t feel like I have to right now. I know what you’re saying—it would make sense. I mean, I have a brand. If I really worked hard, I could make fifty million dollars by the end of next year. But I want to do it the right way. I always see my grandmothers’ faces. They wouldn’t be happy if I wasn’t happy.”
It was dinnertime and getting late, but Badu burned me a couple of CDs’ worth of music she’d been listening to lately, each one full of obscure seventies soul and funk by musicians like the Sylvers, Parliament, and Gary Bartz, whose “Music Is My Sanctuary,” from 1977, with its unpredictable jazz-soul sound and mystical lyrics, is clearly a great-uncle of some of Badu’s own creations. We went downstairs, and Puma, who had been playing with Ysheka, squealed when she saw her mother and ran into her arms. It was almost time for Seven’s tae kwon do lesson just around the corner, and Badu was set to take him there. They would ride on skateboards. She would come back to the studio later that night, write and demo three new songs, and quit at about five in the morning.
