FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Erykah Badu – Baduizm
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I shall broaden out…
when it comes to Vinyl Corner selections, as I realise that I have to get a bit creative when it comes to genre and time period. I have not included Erykah Badu’s debut album, Baduizm, yet, and it is one of my favourite albums of the 1990s – it arrived on 11th February, 1997. In terms of cribbing from Wikipedia:
“After leaving university in order to concentrate on music full-time, Badu then began touring with her cousin, Robert "Free" Bradford, and recorded a 19-song demo, Country Cousins, which attracted the attention of Kedar Massenburg. He set Badu up to record a duet with D'Angelo, "Your Precious Love," and eventually signed her to a record deal with Universal Records. Recording sessions for the album took place from January to October 1996 in New York City, Philadelphia, and Dallas”.
I remember Baduizm coming out and what a different record it was to anything around. Critics gave the album such positive reviews; Badu’s vocals are soulful but there is a rawer quality that makes the songs so exciting and passionate. Baduizm was certified three-times-platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. It is a real treasure that people should own on vinyl, as it is a classic from the 1990s.
I am going to bring in a couple of reviews for Baduizm but, in terms of its recognition and success, few artists released such an important debut in the 1990s.
“In 1997, Badu received six nominations and won three: Favorite Female Solo Single for "On & On", Favorite Female Solo Album for Baduizm and Best R&B/Soul or Rap Song of the Year for "On & On" at the Soul Train Lady of Soul Awards. In 1998, Badu received fourteen nominations and won eight, including Favorite R&B/Soul or Rap New Artist at the American Music Awards; Best Female R&B Vocal Performance for "On & On" and Best R&B Album for Baduizm at the Grammy Awards; Outstanding New Artist and Outstanding Female Artist at the NAACP Image Awards; Favorite Female Soul/R&B Single for "On & On", Favorite Female Soul/R&B Album for Baduizm and Favorite New R&B/Soul or Rap New Artist for "On & On" at the Soul Train Music Awards”.
Many people associate Baduizm with the singles, On & On, and Appletree…but a digger dive will reveal less obvious treasures – I especially love No Love, and Drama. In fact, I think the album is absolutely busy with wonderful songs and fantastic performances! I think that anyone who has not head Baduizm needs to sit down with it and appreciate the album’s depths – in addition to Badu’s stunning voice.
In their review of Baduizm, this is what AllMusic noted:
“Two years after D'Angelo brought the organic sound and emotional passion of R&B to the hip-hop world with 1995's Brown Sugar, Erykah Badu's debut performed a similar feat. While D'Angelo looked back to the peak of smooth '70s soul, though, Badu sang with a grit and bluesiness reminiscent of her heroes, Nina Simone and Billie Holiday. "On & On" and "Appletree," the first two songs on Baduizm, illustrated her talent at singing soul with the qualities of jazz. With a nimble, melodic voice owing little to R&B from the past 30 years, she phrased at odds with the beat and often took chances with her notes. Like many in the contemporary rap world, though, she also had considerable talents at taking on different personas; "Otherside of the Game" is a poetic lament from a soon-to-be single mother who just can't forget the father of her child. Erykah Badu's revolution in sound -- heavier hip-hop beats over organic, conscientious soul music -- was responsible for her breakout, but many of the songs on Baduizm don't hold up to increased examination. For every intriguing track like "Next Lifetime," there's at least one rote R&B jam like "4 Leaf Clover." Jazz fans certainly weren't confusing her with Cassandra Wilson -- Badu had a bewitching voice, and she treasured her notes like the best jazz vocalists, but she often made the same choices, the hallmark of a singer rooted in soul, not jazz. Though many fans would dislike (and probably misinterpret) the comparison, she's closer to Diana Ross playing Billie Holiday -- as she did in the 1972 film Lady Sings the Blues -- than Holiday herself”.
I think Baduizm has had a big impact on genres like Neo-Soul and music in general, but one of the most obvious aspects of the album is how hard it is to categorise and genre-lise. It is, in my view, such a broad and unique album that one struggles to compare it or easily label what its sounds/styles consist. Nearly twenty-four years after its release, and Baduizm is still being discovered, played and loved. Pitchfork wrote an article in 2017 to mark twenty years of Erykah Badu’s extraordinary debut. I wanted to bring in a few passages from that piece:
“When Baduizm debuted on February 11, 1997, it was just as she had described, jam-packed with concepts that spoke to a higher consciousness. Lead single “On & On,” the song that first brought her to wider public attention, makes several references to the teachings of the Five Percent Nation, a cultural movement grounded in the belief that all black people are divine. A core part of the Five-Percenter doctrine revolves around the idea of the black man as God. But Baduizm was more concerned with the empowered black woman, putting her work, relationships, family values, and quest for knowledge under the lens.
The album’s melodies and instrumentation reflected a range of influences, most notably jazz, soul, hip-hop, and R&B. Blended as they were on Baduizm, the result was branded as neo-soul, a concept attributed to record exec and D’Angelo manager William “Kedar” Massenburg. He signed Badu to her first label deal and released Baduizm on Kedar Entertainment, his imprint via Universal Records. Massenburg was already marketing D’Angelo as an alternative R&B artist when an early Badu demo landed in his lap, and “Erykah [was] a natural for me to follow that blueprint,” he boasted to Billboard.
The album’s success was a boon for neo-soul, which Massenburg capitalized on by retrofitting earlier works (D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar; Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite) with his label and guiding the careers of future stars like India.Arie. If there was ever a chance that neo-soul would truly outpace traditional R&B, Baduizm made the case for it as a critically and commercially viable entity, not a niche genre, before blockbuster works like The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and D’Angelo’s Voodoo blew the roof off the discourse. For several years after Baduizm’s release, the Grammys’ R&B performance categories were flooded with neo-soul nominees, even after the genre’s mainstream apex.
Erykah Badu’s role in neo-soul made her a visionary of the modern soul revival, and it’s an influence that reverberates still through Janelle Monàe, Solange, D.R.A.M., and many more. But more than just representing a moment in time, Badu emerged from the neo-soul haze unscathed, with a classic debut firmly in her pocket and an unwavering drive to inspire and create. That’s what she’s here for. And she’s still fly”.
I shall wrap things up in a minute but, when I need an album that can make me feel better whilst revealing something new each time, then Baduizm is never far away. I have not owned the album on vinyl for a while, so I need to go and get a copy as soon as possible. It is one of my favourite albums from the 1990s; one that I bring to mind quite often.
I want to source from another article that reflected on Baduizm twenty years after its release. When Stereogum explored a truly captivating album, they made some interesting observations:
“But Badu had something that would last a whole lot longer than that neo-soul wave. She was not, after all, the first major-label singer to make mainstream R&B that nodded back to jazz and ’70s auteurist soul. Before her, there were plenty of others: Groove Theory’s Amel Larrieux, the Brand New Heavies’ N’Dea Davenport, Des’ree. But Badu came across as being both harder and spacier than any of them. She could imply hip-hop and jazz at the same time without committing to either of them. She did not, for instance, have to throw a rapper on her tracks to make them feel, at least on some level, connected to rap. There were sounds in her music, like the faraway trumpet-moan on “Sometimes,” that could’ve come from a DJ Premier track, or from Portishead’s Dummy. And while every critic at the time compared her to Billie Holiday, she never let herself come off as a revivalist, either. The tone of her voice — that tough-but-soft nasal purr — had plenty in common with Holiday. But she used that voice to sink deep into types of groove that simply didn’t exist during Holiday’s era. Badu was very much a creature of her time — and, miraculously enough, she still is.
Looking back, it’s pretty amazing how an album of miasmic old-school soul music and exquisite, unhurried phrasings could be as huge as this one was. Baduizm might’ve had love songs, but it didn’t do anything to meet the mainstream halfway. But even at the height of the Bad Boy era, it sold three million copies in the US and topped out at #2 on the Billboard 200. Badu arrived as a fully formed artist, and she still emerged as a massive pop success. In the years that followed, Badu would become a thornier artist, chasing her muse to deeper places. Her masterpiece, the sophomore album Mama’s Gun, would come out three years later, and she would slowly recede from the mainstream while maintaining an absolutely singular presence in the music universe. But while Baduizm might not be as heavy as some of what Badu would go on to do, it’s still a stunning piece of work, one that’s aged as well as nearly any album of its era. I imagine it’ll still sound amazing in another 20 years”.
I shall leave it there but, like I say in all these features, go and stream the album at the very least, though consider getting the vinyl copy if you like what you hear. One can hear the influence and impact of Baduizm in quite a few modern artists – from Solange through to Jorja Smith. I think that Baduizm will continue to inspire artists and stun the senses because, the more you listen, the more you realise what…
A breathtaking album it is.