Me and Badu: The Secret Connection

Music journalists sometimes get identified over time with certain subjects (i.e., Raquel Cepeda with Common, or Kevin Powell with 2Pac) and I think if this ever applied to me, then it’s Erykah Badu. I wrote the first published interview with Erykah in The Source the summer before her début smash Baduizm came out; editor-in-chief Adario Strange gave her a break because they’d gone to high school together in Dallas. My first assignment for Rolling Stone was reviewing Baduizm; I was the rare hiphop writer to get put on by RS before Vibe. And I’ve covered her a few times since: a cover story for Russell Simmons’s Oneworld, a concert review for Russell’s long-gone 360hiphop.com. Her latest, New Amerykah Pt. 1 (4th World War), is the first great album of 2008 and I said my piece recently in The Village Voice here. But I’d met Erykah even before that Source jawn introduced her to the world.

Like a lot of next-gen scribblers, I moved to Brooklyn in 1996, my first New York City apartment, to Clinton Hill two streets from where Biggie Smalls grew up. My closest homeboy at the time (late of Morris Brown College in the ATL), Mark Darkfeather, was living blocks away in Fort Greene, in a spacious loft with about four other people. One of the people was a Clark-Atlanta University grad named Shani, sister to an aspiring Dallas singer with a huge Afro named N’Dambi. No sooner had I read about a neo-soul signee to record exec Kedar Massenberg’s new label in Billboard than she walked through the door to borrow a cup of sugar from her buddies Shani and N’Dambi, so to speak.

We were all glad for this Texan transplant to get her shine once her album was done, watching her perform at Mark Darkfeather’s Crash House, at the old Brooklyn Tea Party, and other local spots over homegrown DATs. (Quietly, the Brooklyn Moon café on Fulton Street in 1996 was like the black boho version of the 1980s Danceteria back in the days. If people like Madonna, LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, etc. were trolling the Danceteria before “making it,” the same could be said of Mos Def, Erykah Badu, Saul Williams, N’Bushe Wright, Mums, Sarah Jones and assorted hiphop writers turned authors at the Brooklyn Moon. That’s a book and/or documentary right there.) ?uestlove said something once about everybody Erykah met in Philly falling in love with her for 15 minutes, and that was true of us Brooklynites too under the gaze of those green eyes.

And so anyway, yeah, there was plenty of hanging around that Brooklyn loft, puffing doobies and dancing to Marley’s “No More Trouble” and stuff. One day I needed a pick for my Afro and Erykah started improvising “Afro (Freestyle Skit)” (“Pick yo’ Afro, daddy…”) but I asked her about it later on and, no, I wasn’t the inspiration. But she said I could tell people it was. I recounted most of this in Joel McIver’s Erykah Badu: The First Lady of Neo-Soul, but you know, I ain’t tell him everythang. She’ll be in Paris at the Palais des Congrès on June 28.