Erykah Badu, Oneworld 2001

The beige, nondescript couches at New York’s LaGuardia Airport are surprisingly comfortable. Seven Sirius Benjamin-the adorably precocious three-year-old son of Erykah Badu and André Benjamin of OutKast-loses himself in the folds of couch pillows as his mother tickles him.

The surrounding two dozen or so passengers for the shuttle flight to Boston remain oblivious to the star in the atmosphere, their attention undiverted by Seven’s uproarious laughter. He, in turn, is happily oblivious to his legacy as the Sean Lennon of the next hiphop generation, sticking the tip of the drawstring to his mother’s navy blue hoodie into her mouth. Outfitted in a colorfully striped shirt and orange overalls (think a funked up Ernie from Sesame Street with a Mr. Heatmiser hairdo), Seven resembles his mom. And his dad, mostly when he smiles. Erykah persuades him into a verse of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ and then starts speaking her mind. “I’m learning that a lot of people relate more to weakness than they do to strength,” she says, cutting to the quick of cynicism stemming from her overall vibe. “So sometimes you have to let them see that you are both. The most important thing is that you are brave.”

Dredlock extensions were the final straw. The first straw might have been her repetition of certain phrases during the media blitz for her 1997 debut Baduizm, which achieved the air of calculated canned responses: “I never learned jazz but I remember it…from somewhere” or “Music is experiencing a rebirth, and I’m the midwife” in various magazines and television shows. Another metaphysical demerit might have been her unrepentant unmarried pregnancy and motherhood. Somewhere along the line, rustles of disillusionment set in.

My first encounter with Erykah Badu was in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, during the spring of 1996, one full year before the release of Baduizm. My best friend’s roommate was a longtime Dallas buddy of hers, sister to her future backup singer N’Dambi. Having authored the first published feature on Erykah in The Source, I can testify that her high headwraps and incense affinity existed to Brooklyn from Texas, no tacked-on trappings of artifice. No different, really, than a half-dozen other sisters I knew in the community rocking theirs the same way.

The local embrace of Erykah Badu was immediate. Before radio programmers added her Grammy-winning first single ‘On & On’ to their playlists, she was a big hit singing over DATs and cassette tape backing tracks at Brooklyn haunts like the Crash House, Two Steps Down, and the Brooklyn Moon, as well as Alphabet City’s Nuyorican Poets Café. She sang a version of ‘Bag Lady’, her latest number one hit, even back then. At the time, her acceptance by the mainstream seemed questionable, indeed doubtful. Sharing her mélange of Yoruba/Five Percent Nation/Kemetic theology, wearing sky-high gelées, speaking the peace-and-blessings parlance of bohemian Brook-non, we loved her ankhtified ass. She was our little secret until the February 11, 1997 release of Baduizm.

“On her first album, she really explained herself. It wasn’t just a headwrap,” Bilal tells me the following day from the sidelines of a soundcheck at Boston’s Orpheum Theatre. “She brought everybody into her own world. She made music captivating again.”

Some explanations went over the heads of her audience. Most early concertgoers indoctrinated into Baduizm caught the Spirit. Many attendees at the Smoking Grooves tour of summer ’97 were roused by her enthused breakdowns of Kemetic symbolism, shouting out “teach!” At the same time, The Village Voice slyly derided her as the biggest contrivance since the Spice Girls. With Erykah, it seems there’s always been a disbelieving contingent to counterpoint her supporters. Gazing at Miss Badu, some see a defiant warrior; others claim to see the stark nudity of the empress’s new clothes.

“A great amount of people who pushed me forward began to probably doubt,” Erykah says, following a turbulent takeoff. Common, one of her closest confidantes and long-rumored paramour, is seated with Seven in the adjacent row. “Familiarity brings in contempt for a person. So the more they get familiar with me, the more they see I’m not a spiritual goddess leader without a flaw. That makes people doubt you because a lot of times people look at the messenger more than they wanna take the message.”

Erykah’s message is mostly that of a naturalist: she cheerleads adherence or attachment to what is natural in her appearance and her music. “I think a great deal of my following was journalists, media, and people in the culture who had positions that influenced the numbers, the masses,” she notes. “And when they become more familiar with you, they tend to forget about you. With the kind of energy I think I’m bringing, it doesn’t need any votes. I gotta just keep bringing it and do the best way I can. I can’t worry about it really. The more I’m understanding, the more I see that you have to command the attention of people in order to get the message to ‘em. I constantly reinvent myself so my audience can stay focused. I’m seeing that if they really wanna focus on me a lot, then I’m gonna have to give them something to see that takes their mind off of all of the negative things that come to them.”

Reinvention works for Erykah Badu. I’m getting’ tired of your shit, you don’t never buy me nothing. That first line to her Live album hit single, ‘Tyrone’, sealed the lid on her perfectionist image. Another change was her raves-worthy turn at acting in the Academy Award-nominated The Cider House Rules. On April 14 of last year, at the Radio City Music Hall taping of the 13th annual Essence Awards, Erykah performed ‘Bag Lady’ months its official release with a headful of dredlocks. This began to create a problem. Most who grow locks are aware of the connotation of consciousness it carries. On a completely different plane than mere extension braids or weaves, sewn-in locks just seem like a fundamental contradiction at play. Everyone expected Erykah, of all people, to know this. Though she vehemently defended her hairdo to the end, she soon emerged from the water of the video clip to ‘Didn’t Cha Know’ with an almost completely shorn head. (This was actually the third time in her life Erica Wright has cropped her hair that close, her first as Erykah Badu.)

Mama’s Gun was once tentatively titled The New Du. Presume for a moment that Erykah did this all on purpose. That she temporarily wore fake locks to provide naysayers a focal point for their fakeness theorems, to prove that she’s just as human and fallible as, say, Mary J. Blige. Presume she planned for a new ‘do from the very beginning, to symbolize a separation from any perceived pretension that’s dogged her. In a world where the media-manipulative Janet Jackson could be married for over nine years without anyone’s knowledge, it’s not beyond the realm of reason. Would this absolve her, or would such a scenario of precalculation merely prove the naysayers’ point?

Valentine’s Day 2001. Erykah Badu slips off her headwrap-at the start of ‘Cleva’, four songs into her Mama’s Gun-heavy set-on the same Radio City Music Hall stage she publicly premiered her dreadlocks last April. “This is how I look without makeup,” she sings, the next few lines drowned out by the overpowering applause from the sold-out audience of lovebirds. “My hair ain’t never hung down to my shoulders, and it might not grow. You never know.” Erykah commands her band with a seasoned, quick-whip precision. They respond to the whims of her hip movements on ‘Tyrone’, in addition to special code words and hand signals, even as she pours her all into highlights like ‘Orange Moon’ and the intimately confessional ‘Green Eyes’ (an ode to her severed relationship with André 3000).

“Just watching her last night has made me wanna step up my game tenfold,” Roots drummer and Mama’s Gun collaborator Ahmir Thompson says the following day. “Seriously, I’m trying to figure out, when was the last time the Roots went onstage without rehearsal and just winged something so convincingly? I think that one of the hardest things in the world is to go onstage and not know what you’re gonna do. I’ve not seen a female bandleader handle that, not really, and I’ve seen many a female bandleader: Sheila E., Meshell [Ndegéocello]. That’s a hard thing to do. Last night, she truly demonstrated that.”

Seven days following that performance is the 43rd annual Grammy Awards. (‘Bag Lady’ lost out to Destiny’s Child and Toni Braxton, but she already has three on her mantle in Dallas: for ‘On & On’, Baduizm, and the Roots’ ‘You Got Me’.) Erykah’s thirtieth birthday, February 26, steadily approaches. On the second floor to the Orpheum Theatre’s backstage dressing rooms, Erykah picks at her vegan plate, contemplating the onset of her thirties.

“When I was 25, I couldn’t wait to be 30,” she says. “I thought, I’m cold now, I’ma be real cold when I’m 30. No matter where you are in life, how much money you have, how much success you have, it’s always a scary thing because there’s this myth of the unknown. I suspect I won’t feel a day different than I did before, but I’m very grateful for all the lessons that I have carried with me to 30. Revolutions around the sun. And I’m growing younger and younger. From 30 on, you kinda regain your innocence, it seems like. Thirty’s nothing. You ain’t did nothing. You seen 30 summers. As far as youth is concerned, it’s the same mind, really.”

As Talib Kweli storms the stage out front, Erykah borrows my Nokia cellphone to coordinate food being taken to Common and baby boy Seven blocks away at the Wyndham hotel. “Are you where you expected to be when you were a teen, looking ahead to your thirties,” I ask.

“I just wanted to be alive,” she replies. “You a man, that’s different. We were raised playing with dolls and playing house and all that. So it’s a little scary. Women try to rush to have kids and get married and stuff because we’re competitive people. Because of how society sets it up, or just how nature is. It’s confusing because you try to be in a certain place by the time you’re 30-mentally and spiritually. We’re still babies, but you have this grownup body. You’re not mentally and spiritually where you would imagine a grownup should be, and are you ever? Are you ever?”

Erykah is a mother, a millionaire, an artiste with an accomplished lil’ body of work. The humility of her response belies the condescension and borderline arrogance she’s been accused of. “Saturn’s return was very hard,” she continues. “That’s the age from 27 to 29, Saturn’s return for most women. That’s when you are stuck between being a kid or taking grownup responsibility. Your youth, I guess in your mind, is leaving you. You on this conveyor belt of life going ‘no, no!’ You wanna be a kid, but you don’t. I’m out. I made it. And they say that if you make it, you made. If you don’t, the next lifetime. I made it. I made it out.”

Sitting in row G, the seventh row, of the Orpheum Theatre, I return to the same questions I’ve been pondering the past few days: Why do people feel Erykah is by turns both inspirational and contrived? Most important, the overarching question, who is Erykah Badu, really? I’m taken back to something she said earlier in the day, buying a toy airplane for Seven at Logan Airport: “Sometimes it seems like the more your light shines, the more people wanna condemn you. It’s frustrating but you have to keep on. You’re born with a conscience worrying about what others will think. I don’t think I’ve lost any audience at all. I feel like we’re just out of touch a little bit. Because of the words of others, they kinda misunderstand what I’m trying to say. But I understand what I’m trying to say. I never underestimate the audience’s ability to feel me. I never meant to share as a ploy to be seen as some great mystic.”

No more no less, Erykah Badu is a fallible human striving for balance. Reactions to her spiritual beliefs, her vegetarianism, her boho wardrobe, they all inevitably say more about the person critiquing Erykah than they do about Erykah herself. It’s disturbing to many, seeing this Southern girl’s very public, personal process of striving for her highest self.

The lights of the venue dim, and Erykah emerges dipped in white, a stick of incense clenched between her teeth like an extended cigarette holder. Her three female background singers begin to croon from stage right, their mantra providing an ideal conclusion to my musings:

“It’s Ba-du’s show. It’s not your show. It’s Ba-du’s show…”

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