The crowd at King’s Theatre, in Brooklyn, took some prodding to get on its feet. The venue’s maroon seats were cozy, and a sweeping, gold-trimmed interior welcomed attendees to sit back and look up, absorbing a space that had recently been restored to its pre-Depression opulence. Erykah Badu was performing, and she nudged the audience a few times throughout her set, which was now deep in its second hour and fresh off an encore: “I don’t know about all this sitting, Brooklyn,” she said, and, later, “Y’all some high motherfuckers or what?” When an extended rendition of her 2003 single “Back In The Day” stirred a few on the balcony to their feet, she smiled. “Come on, let’s go back. That’s what y’all want, right?”
But most of the fans at this concert would be moved more by issues of the day. During a lengthy interlude, Badu’s monologue turned toward the justice movements that swept America’s cities and campuses last year. “To the folks on the picket line, don’t stop till you change their mind,” she said. At last, the crowd rose, standing hushed under the deep red light, with palms held up toward the stage at her command. “We’re in a really crucial time in human history,” Badu said, her four-piece band humming along behind her, her subjects entranced. “What we’re experiencing right now is labor pains.”
The forty-four-year-old Grammy winner would know how to spot the signs; for nearly five years, Badu has worked as a doula, also known as a birth companion, assisting women through pregnancy, natural childbirth, and follow-ups during the first years of motherhood. Doulas are growing in popularity and represent a maternity philosophy that shies away from numbing medications and overly medicalized deliveries. “Birth is ninety per cent the mother,” Badu explained, sipping from a bowl of dewy soup while sitting cross-legged and compact on the living-room floor of her small Fort Greene one-bedroom on the evening after her Brooklyn show. “We just do the catching or the coaching.”
Badu frequently alters her schedule to assist the handful of women whom she calls her mothers—one recent flight to Dallas, rerouted from a business trip to L.A., proved to be a false alarm, but when the mother actually went into labor, two weeks later, Badu flew back immediately. When recounting her first time assisting in a birth, Badu scoots across the rug and leans toward a photo of Afya Ibomu, the wife of the rapper stic.man, of the group Dead Prez. Ibomu’s delivery took fifty-four hours. “If you can imagine lying on a railroad track, and a train is running over your body…” Badu says, with a soft grin and piercing green eyes that seem to know that I cannot. “Every six minutes, another train would come.”
The spectacles of our culture wars can certainly feel laborious, so Badu’s theory makes for an enticing metaphor. But are the mass violence, the racial unrest, the economic inequality, the cacophonic politics all part of some sort of huge global contraction? “It just feels like that to me,” Badu says. “All these things are coming out, and coming to a head, because of the age of technology that we’re in. Astrologists call it the Age of Aquarius—the age when we can see everything unfiltered. That’s a part of labor as well: when you’re feeling all of these things, there’s nothing that can numb this pain, this excruciating frequency that’s coming through your body. But you have to know that in the back of your spine, there is actually a new life coming through.”
Technology is a recent fixation and muse for Badu, one that she playfully examines throughout her latest release, “But You Caint Use My Phone.” She describes how technology democratizes information but also seems to rip information naked. The Web is a writhing, convulsing sea of media with no discernable shape or direction. We gorge on information about the world, about each other, about ourselves, without the guiding bias of a teacher, the narrative structure of a book, or the affirming repetition of experience that turns raw information into useful knowledge. “But You Caint Use My Phone,” in its free-flowing, hyper-referential structure, seems to re-create the experience of the Web: interpolations and references whisk by, stripped of context and credit. Badu seems to suggest that we, in this age of information, know too much—as a child is said to have grown up too fast.
Erykah Badu’s first child, Seven Benjamin, turned eighteen last November. Badu released her second album, “Live!,” in 1997, on the day that Seven was born. The album contained her signature song, “Tyrone,” which is also the song from which her latest release takes its name; the recording was improvised live at a concert in Maryland while she was pregnant with him. On “A Day In The Life of Benjamin Andre,” from 2003, Seven’s father, Andre 3000, puts a time stamp on Seven’s conception with a loving wink: “No regrets, no abortion, had a son / by the name of Seven, and he’s five / by the time I do this mix, he’ll probably be six.” Today, Badu describes her son’s seemingly preordained path toward music with quiet affection and slight awe, outlining his contributions to “But You Caint Use My Phone,” including writing lyrics and arranging song structures—he was present at nearly every recording session.
Badu and Andre are hands-on as parents, she says. They hold weekly family meetings as Seven prepares to close out his senior year of high school, in Dallas. And, as Seven steps into adulthood (and, at least through his musical teasings, into the public eye), Badu is markedly aware of what she can and cannot protect him from. “I’m super honest with [him], I don’t want to sugarcoat anything, but I want to keep it age appropriate,” she explains. “You can’t really shelter kids today from anything, because they’re seeing everything right in front of them.”
His father’s influence, Badu says, is pervasive. “Everything. Body type, the way he walks, talks. Gestures, movement. Compassion. Patience. What do you call it? Resilience. Kindness. Same smile. He is him. He’s him again.” Does Seven face the problems of an average teen-ager? Has he had his heart broken? “He’s really advanced, and so are his friends,” she says. “They are just really mature. If they’re hurting, they have these interesting ways of just saying the right things, or talking themselves down from the ledge. Not needing the same kind of guidance—still needing it, but not the same kind that we needed when we were younger. They’re picking it up through the air, how to solve problems.”
Through her life as a mother and her work as a doula, Badu has seen how mothers cannot afford to navel-gaze: they must look forward, living every day for a life other than their own, one that will hopefully carry on longer than they will. This is what Badu asks of the world around her at this crucial moment she describes—when even she admits to uncertainty. But looking at Seven, she says, it doesn’t seem that he’s uncertain. “His perspective is super interesting,” she says. “Different from mine. I thought I had this super seat in the observation deck, and the ability to look upon things without judging them, or myself. But he had a higher seat. His point of view is advanced. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
