Mama’s Gun

From the moment Prince’s party ran out of time and the ball dropped in Times Square to signal a new millennium, people were waiting. They were waiting in the wee moments of the new year for ominous, Y2K catastrophe to hit, for worldwide web grids to collapse, for large scale chaos of another order to afflict the globe. That the calamity didn’t drop in the form of a Roland Emmerich summer blockbuster sparked an initial sigh of relief. But the phenomenon of collective waiting—to see whether the recent impeachment of a president would lead to the end of the Clinton good-times era, to see whether the courts would order the family of six-year-old Elian Gonzalez to return him to Cuba across the Cold War divide, to see whether the officers who fired 41 shots into unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo would do any time at all, to see whether hanging chads would tip the balance of a presidential election—all that waiting would roll out across the entire year in waves of succession. Long spells of anxiety and watchfulness would punctuate the year 2000, a pivotal period that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle when trying to pinpoint the origins of new millennium unrest and epic uncertainty.

When she stepped into New York’s historic Electric Lady studios in 1999 and began recording her much-anticipated sophomore album, Erykah Badu had her finger to the wind. The tracks she was laying down extended what had quickly become her trademark vibe: that of deep-groove tarrying, wrestling with time, pushing up against and pulling at the beat but also lingering in the pocket while delivering pithy observations about temporal lag and the will to move. Her music brimmed with the suggestion—albeit a conflicted one—to wait for it. “On & On,” Badu’s breakthrough single from her 1997 smash debut Baduizm, became an anthem for this kind of indelible, cool-breeze, fitfulness. “Oh my my my I’m feeling high,” she sings with the distinct horn-like phrasings that brought Billie Holiday comparisons, “my money’s gone, I’m all alone/The world keeps turning…” It all came together in Badu’s sound and style: the image of a sister who couldn’t be bothered, who couldn’t care less about the time (“I think I need a cup of tea…”), yet who simultaneously recognized and paid reverence to black time, that which is past and that which is still to come. Her many references to the Five Percent Nation and Afrocentric cosmologies on Baduizm announced the arrival of new black nationalist soul, steeped in astrologically configured wisdom (“My cypher keeps moving like a rolling stone”) and headed toward an Afrofuturist destination to be determined.

To be rooted in the here and now while also resolutely and speculatively elsewhere—this was Erykah Badu’s distinct gambit early in her career. But Mama’s Gun turned an important page as she set out to pair songs that evoked the art of exquisite and romantically-charged lingering and hanging (the “urban hang suite,” as Maxwell would call it on his own debut album from 1996) alongside songs about being fed up with stasis, isolation, restriction and aborted dreams. In contrast to Baduizm, Mama’s Gun offers a more pointed, sustained, and grounded statement about what it means to get tired of waiting out and wading through the wretchedness of urban blight, the perpetual threat of police brutality and lethal force, the baggage from bad relationships and the sometimes oppressive voices inside one’s own head.

Those voices open the record’s first side in a cacophony of whispers as Badu admonishes herself about a laundry-list of unfinished tasks, nagging fears, and floating enigmas swirling through her mind (“I have to write a song… I have to remember to turn on the oven… warm up the apartment… Malcolm… Malcolm… I need to take my vitamin”). What cuts through the noise is a burst of sonic muscle—pure soul energy compressed into 10 initial seconds: the joyful ensemble (Chinah Blac and YahZarah) bellowing in Rufus-meets-Brand New Heavies unison as longtime collaborators Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson on drums, James Poyser on piano, Pino Palladino on bass, and Jeff Lee Johnson on guitar lay down a robust opening riff that sounds definitive and defiant. The opening moments of Mama’s Gun sound much less like anything off of Badu’s first record and instead resonate unmistakably in the vein of two other releases from earlier that year, Common’s fourth studio album, Like Water for Chocolate, and D’Angelo’s game-changing Voodoo. All three albums were recorded simultaneously at Electric Lady. All three benefitted from the skilled hand of legendary engineer Russell Elevado, who mixed each LP and drew on vintage recording techniques to evoke the ghosts of venerable albums past. And most crucially, all three featured MVP player Questlove acting improvisationally at the center of an alternative black pop universe at the turn of the millennium, one with clearly nostalgic tenets that nonetheless held fast to present communal concerns and future Wonder-inflected aspirations.

This was neo soul at arguably its most prolific and thrilling moment of growth and possibility. Innovated by black Gen-Xers who ardently valued and sought to revive their parents’ and their older siblings’ music and the albums that soundtracked their childhood, neo soul runs best on a seductive combination of cultural nostalgia, black solidarity dreams, and the will to couple sensually with an ideal partner while paying attention (somewhat but not always) to the politics of gender equality. And the list of remarkable artists who broke onto the scene alongside of Badu working this sound in the year of and leading up to 2000 underscores what a busy, passionate, and productive time it was.

From 1993, when Me’shell NdegéOcello stepped out ahead of everyone with Plantation Lullabies on Madonna’s Maverick label to D’Angelo’s 1995 first effort Brown Sugar (often erroneously referred to as the first in the genre) a year later to Maxwell’s debut (Urban Hang Suite) to Lauryn Hill’s insta-classic Miseducation in ’98 to oddball soulster Macy Gray’s one-hit smash On How Life Is in ’99, to the year 2000 when Jill Scott made her first LP (Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Volume I), these were exciting times when black singer-songwriter musicians were referencing Black Panther memoirs, African-American Studies history books, and deep cuts from reluctant soul icons like Bill Withers. In the days after Voodoo dropped into the world, New York Times critic Ben Ratliff would famously describe the genre as “a mature music, and a family music, for living rooms, rather than for the streets.”

“Penitentiary Philosophy,” the charging, opening track on Mama’s Gun pulls all of these ambitions together. Bursting with the energy and the righteous discontent of King’s letter from a Birmingham jail (in which he declared to the world “why we can’t wait” for liberation), it recalls the sonic palette of Maggot Brain-era Funkadelic while venturing further down the road of trenchant social critique that Badu had already begun to walk on Baduizm’s “Other Side of the Game,” her third single off of that album and one that planted her firmly in the run of socially-conscious hip-hop culture. With its looped sample of Stevie’s “Ordinary Pain,” “Penitentiary Philosophy” stays focused on the perils and corrosive effects of streets that don’t love you, streets that can trap you. “Here’s my philosophy/Livin’ in a penitentiary…” she declares, dropping verses like Gil Scott-Heron, “Brothers all on the corner/Tryin’ to make believe/Turn around ain’t got no pot to pee/Make me mad when I see you sad… you can’t win when your will is weak/When you’re knocked on the ground….” In the same year that David Simon dropped “The Corner” and two years before his masterpiece “The Wire,” Badu was still singing about the effects of the game from a woman’s point of view (something Simon’s shows were often, at best, half-assed about doing). Still the caring sister who observes the ensuing crisis from the sidelines, Badu has morphed on this track out of the role of devoted bystander into full-scale Last Poet.

Badu gently admonishes her listeners to get to going, drawing on the Brixton trans-Atlantic migratory sound of Soul II Soul on “Time’s a Wastin,” a “Keep On Movin’”-style new-millennium anthem and something of a partner song to “Penitentiary Philosophy” that warns against drifting and advises listeners to “Make your money last/Learn from your past…. Don’t take your time, young man…” The brothers who are lost, the brothers who can’t find their way in an “oh-so-strange world” remain near and dear to Badu’s heart, and she offers them visions of the beautiful journey that awaits them, one that can change and restore their hope because “oh baby we need to smile…” Badu is no prophetess or preacher like her counterpart Hill, but she leans into this song’s alluring keyboard arrangement which, at the bridge, evokes the sound of the “incidental” church organ, what black studies critic Ashon Crawley brilliantly refers to as “nothing music,” the music of the organist doodling and improvising underneath the riffing of the deacon or the pastor or the volunteer bake sale representative. It’s the sound of sitting in the sanctuary together and having frank and easy conversations with one another as she wistfully warns of a future without a plan (“Ain’t no tellin where you’ll land…”).

The Badu of hope, headwraps, and incense is still very much present on this record, voicing anthems about correcting one’s path and questing on tracks like “Didn’t Cha Know” and the sequel jam, “… & On.” The former track wraps itself around a hypnotic sample from New York-based fusion jazz-funk ensemble Tarika Blue’s 1977 “Dreamflower” record, a Badu obsession that she discovered while crate-digging, at the behest of J Dilla, through his extraordinary collection. Badu rides the chillout vibe of this song in the face of despair (“Think I made a wrong turn back there somewhere/Didn’t cha know, didn’t cha know/Knew the toll, but I would not pay…”). In the Oprahfied age of black female self-help narratives led by Iyanla Vanzant and novelist Terry McMillan, she continued her rise as an icon of black bohemian positivity (“Free your mind and find your way/There will be a brighter day”). What set her apart from other neo-soul women of this era was her unabashedly quirky, black hippie stance which she kicks into high gear throughout “…& On,” spinning like the earth on its axis like a “Gypsy/Flippin’ life game from the right brain/Ascension maintained/Rolling through like a burning flame…” Badu’s rhymes summon the sound and feeling of late 1990s Nuyorican Café poetry slams and basement club, late night jazz improv.

For sure, some of the album’s metaphors flirt with cabaret cliché. Badu got flack from some critics for the beatnik flute and cosmic references on “Orange Moon.” But the thread that ties these tracks together is the flow that is freedom—freedom to pursue new love (on “In Love With You,” a birds-tweeting, Spanish-inflected guitar ballad that finds Badu doing her best Deniece Williams impression and in duet with Stephen Marley), freedom to pursue pleasure (“Kiss Me on My Neck (Hesi)”) for herself. It’s a distinct kind of liberation from that of Lauryn’s redemption song sermons, Me’shell’s brooding tales of struggle and conflict, and even Jill Scott’s earnest Black Arts era feminist poetry.

Ironically, it is Mary J to whom she most clearly pays homage on the aptly titled “My Life,” which swings with the hip-hop soul queen’s b-girl cadences. With its Puffy-designed excess and materialism, hip-hop soul was always at odds with the political earthiness of the neo bunch. Yet the bounce on this track clearly echoes that of the Yonkers R&B diva’s album of the same name. Here in Badu’s version of “My Life,” as on other tracks, she stalls to figure out a plan (“Standing downtown… tryin to figure out a way up out of this town”) and vows that “one day” she’ll be “flyin’ high.” Songs of strength and self-worth like her “Cleva” chronicle a moment when artists like India.Arie were using their music to reject Eurocentric beauty standards in pop (on 2000’s “Video Girl”) and megastars TLC were waxing contemplative about self love rather than outer beauty (on their 1999 track “Unpretty”).

But Badu would consistently put her own bold and wickedly sharp twist on such themes. “This is how I look without makeup/And with no bra my ninny’s sag down,” she sings on “Cleva,” sounding like a modern day Moms Mabley. Badu lifts the boast and braggadocio so clearly associated with hip-hop MCs of both genders and turns it into the language of the R&B goddess, a lesson that one Texas-bred superstar would follow and master as the ’00s would further unfold. Badu is by far the slyest and most playful wordsmith of the neosoulsters as is evident on her brilliant feminist critique, “Booty,” the fierce, signifying answer to NdegéOcello’s bellicose (and casually mean-spirited) “If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night).” Backed by a horn section doing its best take on the Quincy Jones-circa 1972-black sitcom theme song sound, “Booty”’s I don’t-want-to-fight-you resolve still stands out in a sea of pop songs across this (and last) century cataloguing lost-my-man, you-can’t-have-my-man, and give-me-back-my-man crises. It’s a song that also eschews woman vs. woman “bad blood” posturing in favor of extolling shrewd observations about the crazy things patriarchy makes women do to each other.

It’s a singular feminist statement on the album topped only by Mama’s Gun’s first single and accompanying video for the track “Bag Lady,” arguably the first pop song by an African-American musician to overtly engage tropes and images from a classic work of black women’s literature. In loving tribute to Ntozake Shange’s 1975 pathbreaking choreopoem drama For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, the video for “Bag Lady” re-stages signature scenes and images from the play as the song revisits its major themes of self-love, self-discovery, unrequited love, gender conflict and communication, emotional and psychological bruising, failure, redemption, and personal fulfillment for black women. Produced and directed by Badu, the clip, “a poemeography by Erykah Badu,” features five women (as opposed to seven in Shange’s play) who represent the colors of the rainbow. Badu, the Lady in Red, begins by literally breaking out of the wide-screen cinematic format and moves in the next scene with our five “colored” women, strolling the streets together before ending up in the enclosed space of the classroom, a constricted site in more ways than one since it’s here that, as Badu sings “I guess nobody every told you/All you must hold on to/Is you/Is you/Is you!”

The inadequacies of institutional education—it’s inability to address the specific needs and concerns of black women—are put on blast as each “colored woman” shrugs her shoulders to the beat of Elevado’s mix and Badu’s own deft production. To the church they head for a spiritual revival to “let it go, let it go, let it go.” Badu’s Red Lady advises her sisteren to “pack light”—let go of the harmful elements of the past--or else “you gon’ miss your bus.” It’s a song that contemplates how to not let the baggage weigh you down and make you wait, and it offers a way forward for women of color (many colors here) by way of a text from the bygone 1970s black feminist renaissance era.

Like Hill and her sometime Soulquarian sister Scott in particular, Erykah Badu was not willing, on Mama’s Gun, to sacrifice extolling narratives of black feminist self-care for ones that exposed black communal peril, trauma, and tragedy. “A.D. 2000,” her broken-hearted yet clear-eyed elegy for Amadou Diallo is, in fact, a song that weaves together the profound sadness arising out of the recognition about how little black life matters in American culture. In the wake of the acquittal of the four plain-clothed police officers who took Diallo’s life, Badu sings a song for him (A.D.) and for the after-death era, one in which no monuments will mark the passing of those who were killed by the hands of the state. Thirteen years before Bay Area community organizer Alicia Garza would lament the chronic disregard for the slaughter of black life and, with her fellow queer black feminist activists, create a hashtag that subsequently ignited a global movement, Badu recorded a dirge for the newly-woke age of no justice. That she did so while enlisting soul legend Betty “Clean Up Woman” Wright to contribute vocals drives home the ways that she yokes together gender solidarity and black uplift politics in the 2.0 version of her career.

At its core, Mama’s Gun is an album that understands just how essential black love is to any movement to fight the power, and it also recognizes just how expensive it is to lose it. Badu went through a high profile break-up with Outkast’s Andre “3000” Benjamin, the father of her first child, as she began to work on the album. In the wake of the split, she penned the aching, Chaka Khan-inflected epic that closes the record, the 10-minute “Green Eyes,” which moves through several different suites that capture the many moods of a relationship coming to an end. Opening with a nod to Lady Day-era jazz vocalizing, “Green Eyes” crackles with the sound of vinyl as Badu croons a torch song lament that rolls with fits and starts through jealousy, fear, resignation, regret, resolution. We move with her as she travels the abyss of her unbearable “growing pains.” It is a song that underscores the fact that, more than a decade before Queen Yoncé, Erykah Badu laid down the blueprint for a black feminist album that went well beyond documenting tales of heartbreak to address issues greater than the sum of any one relationship. She made a record that wore its awareness of the larger traumas and challenges that complicate human intimacy on its sleeves. It was music for the revolution that wasn’t televised.