Erykah Badu: C /D, S&D

i imagine ppl had no idea who she was, & she got outta there quickly enough that the popo didnt catch on, so some folks were just like "lol some crazy naked lady in the park lol"

also i definitely prefer this record to 4th world war but then i find the idea of referring to an album's unique aesthetic as 'advances' like its working in some linear pattern that this is not to be kinda annoying so

Someone who preferred Ankh to War would think that.

< / tease >

Totally digging this album. Loved part 1 too, it's weird hearing this and thinking of them as companions, this certainly has a more "slender" aesthetic bandwidth (to be pretentious about it), i.e. more stripped down, more focused on sex, love and intimacy, but then there's still some sharp satirical digs in the lyrics. I kinda dig that strange text/manifesto that accompanies the album too.

I'm happy with this album and enjoy it but I'm not in love with it.

that's kinda where i'm at too, but it's growing on me

the 'advances' thing just doesn't really make sense since hasn't the line always been that most of these albums were recorded during the same period before first was released?

not quite sure how sex love & intimacy add up to a narrower aesthetic bandwidth than underwater stovetops but ok

Its highs aren't as high as its predecessor's, but I think it flows better as an album.

I dunno, I get kind of bored during parts of it

I'm happy with this album and enjoy it but I'm not in love with it.

this is where i'm at too. i like that it feels casual and not too labored-over though, and i'm digging get munny, gone baby, and incense a lot. window seat & agitation too, but i've heard window seat a lot and agitation is so short (although so is incense, and that one feels like it could go on way longer).

for an album where the flow initially seems so important, i get the feeling that i'll be cherrypicking favourites a lot more than listening to it ~as a work~ in the future (in terms of how it works as an album it reminds me more of worldwide underground than anything else: that had the feeling of a band jamming away with erykah wandering occasionally through to pick up and drop threads of songs, this is sparer but you get what i mean i think).

^^^both those posts cataloguing my exact reactions

I'd like to put in words for "20 Feet Tall" and "Out of My Mind, Just in Time" tho. I have a feeling those are joints I'll be chewing on for a while

looking at the track listing it's only "umm hmm", "love" and "incense" that strike me as remotely skippable, actually

I'd subtract "Incense" and add "Fall in Love", but yeah

"Love" is skippable; "Umm Hmm" is not.

yeah, maybe those will be growers but the middle chunk (umm hmm through fall in love) blends together for me in a mush of dilla-ish drums and love lyrics. i still like it but i've been skipping to the last two tracks.

This isn't an immediate "HOLY SHIT PAY ATTENTION TO ME" album in the vein of 4WW but I've noticed that when I start playing it, I always want to listen to the entire thing; I've had zero desire to cherrypick songs from it, whereas with 4WW I almost immediately zeroed in on "The Healer", "Cell", "Master Teacher" and "My People" and skipped over the other tracks.

yeah, that's my experience.

there is some good spring time shit on here

Pitchfork: Prince and Rick James seem risqué for a 10 year old...

That was my taste. My family had a very open relationship about music and art. Nothing was taboo and everything was up for discussion-- by the time I was 10, I was a genius. I take the same approach with my son now. He listens to King Crimson, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix.

Pitchfork: Prince and Rick James seem risqué for a 10 year old...

okay what kind of puritanical nonsense is this

signed, a dude who first heard Prince at age 8

Also Prince was kind of a big deal when Erykah was a kid in the early '80s! It would've been pretty hard to avoid him.

(OK, maybe in '81 he wasn't quite a superstar yet.)

"I Wanna Be Your Lover" was #1 on the R&B charts and just missed the Billboard top 10 in 1978 and "Let's Work" was a #1 club hit in 1980; he wasn't an ubiquitous superstar but it also wasn't like no one knew who he was, and if Badu's parents were already bumping Rick James, they were almost certainly bumping Prince.

that mid-section is kinda like a lot of the jams on WWU. I might feel like listening to them sometimes, but I don't have to listen to them, nawmean?

wwu hits way harder imo

and if Badu's parents were already bumping Rick James, they were almost certainly bumping Prince.

Yeah -- they even toured together in 1980.

signed, a dude whose first 45 was "Let's Go Crazy."

Don't be silly. If she was listening to the albums and not just the singles then, yeah, who wouldn't consider LPs like "Dirty Mind" or "Controversy" to be risque, especially by 1981 standards? I doubt there were lots of pre-teens singing along to "Sexuality?" "Jack U Off" back then. I mean, Prince became PMRC persona non grata long after the peak of his freakiness.

I doubt there were lots of pre-teens singing along to "Sexuality?"

There was at least one in my home growing up. I had no real idea of what the lyrics meant wrt to sex because it just was not on my radar/in my worldview; songs like "Ronnie Talk To Russia" and "Annie Christian" made a lot more sense to me at the time. (I never played "Jack U Off" because I knew it was dirty and I was convinced my parents would stop letting me play the album if I played it within earshot of them.)

"Annie Christian" still doesn't make sense to me

I didn't say it actually MADE sense, just that it made MORE sense than "Sexuality"

Prince's rant at the end of that one is kind of on the o_O side anyway

"love" : me :: "window seat" : everybody else

Saddened to hear everyone is skipping the hardest and best track on the album.

I haven't skipped it -- I listened to it hard. Now I skip it.

Your ears went flaccid.

The first casualties of living in the new amerykah.

Just because:

The Cell
Soldier
Love
The Healer
Master Teacher
Out My Mind, Just In Time
My People
Gone Baby, Don't Be Long
That Hump
Twinkle
20 Feet Tall
Honey
Agitation
Turn Me Away (Get MuNNY)
Jump Up in the Air (Stay There)
Window Seat
Telephone
Me
You Loving Me
Fall in Love (Your Funeral)
Amerykah Promise
Incense
Umm Hmm

Meh, switch "Incense" and "Umm Hmm" around.

hmmm, wonder what happened to the highlighted tracks

Here is the track list for "Nu AmErykah":

"American Promise"
"The Healer"
"Me"
"My People"
"Speech"
"Soldier 7"
"The Cell"
"Twinkle"
"Love Me"
"Honey"
"Emotions"
"Don't Be Long"
"YPOM"
"Hot Slow Jam"
"Jump Up in the Air"
"Loretta Brown"
"Dirty Dirty"
"The Healer Outro"

"Loretta Brown" is surely slated for volume three. Probably some of the others too, and (finally) "Annie."

wait... there is a part 3?

!!!

Can never keep track of whether the Lowdown Loretta Brown album is going to be part three or is just unrelated.

she says in new york magazine that maybe pt iii's coming together right now. the next one was going to be the loretta brown soul production one i believe. some playback reviews said that it was mostly in the can but i can't imagine hearing that and assuming that it'll be out real soon.

Not when Ankh was originally "supposed to" be released in July 2008.

haha I already wrote in the SOTT book about how I used to run around in my Superman Underoos pretending I was on the cover of Dirty Mind when I was six.

I used to wear old hose as detachable sleeves and pretend I was Ruth Pointer.

Can never keep track of whether the Lowdown Loretta Brown album is going to be part three or is just unrelated.

Unrelated, from what she said at the listening party.