#I GOT 2 PHONES ONE FOR THE BITCHES FULL#
#I GOT 2 PHONES ONE FOR THE BITCHES SERIES#

Well, “backbone” is too solid a metaphor-let’s say it snaked through the evening, producing both “Phone Down,” which promises physical pleasures even greater than doomscrolling or texting, and a take on New Edition’s “Mr. The way it drifts from familiar melody to dreamy reverie, blurring when one track ends and another begins, its title riffing off the punchline to Badu’s curb-kicking classic “Tyrone,” the melody of Drake’s then-chart-dominating “Hotline Bling” repeatedly recurring, is also the closest a Badu studio album has come to mirroring her concert performances, so that album provided a fitting backbone for her set.

(On a more serious tip, Badu met with George Floyd’s family after the show in honor of what would have been his 48th birthday.)īadu’s now gone a half-dozen years without releasing a new album: That was the odd, short, satisfying U Cain’t Use My Phone, a concept EP about our constant electronic pocket companions. Lots of musicians can aurally simulate the dazed wooziness of getting high, but Badu gives you the stoned giggles too. She presents herself less as a seeker of the truth than a dabbler in the arcane whose curiosity has provided her access to the cosmic joke she’d like to let us all in on. She’s funny as hell, and she understands the role of the performer as icebreaker (a gift rarer than you might think), that throwing a party isn’t just about providing a soundtrack but creating a sense of a shared event. Onstage though, Badu is a gregarious free-associator-even her rehearsed bits sound spontaneous. Yes, her albums percolate into a disorienting retro-futurist groove her well-tutored bands can’t always quite recapture in the moment, but they also lean heavily on mystique and vibe, casting her as an introspective spiritualist whose visions requires our assent. She’s never made a bad album-she’s even made a couple great ones-but the definitive Erykah Badu experience is live. There’s a reason Badu followed up her 1997 smash debut Baduizm with a concert recording 10 months later. (I am contractually allowed one obscure, dated reference per review), from Badulla Oblongata to Sara Bellum to her Twitter handle, Fat Belly Bella.

#I GOT 2 PHONES ONE FOR THE BITCHES SERIES#

She tapped a few beats on a drum pad and boasted her way through “Dial-Afreaq,” which pulsed into her dis- and reassembled version of Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me.” The self-dubbed “Nubian phenomenon” next introduced her selves, reeling off a longer series of alter egos and a.k.a.’s than Raymond J. The 50-year-old Texan was ensconced in the sort of glittery multicolored cape that Apollo Creed might have worn if he’d represented Earth in its first intergalactic boxing match, clashing perfectly with her baseball cap on top of a knotted bandana. (Though she did give us a great, if discursive, if brief, performance at Soundset in 2018.) What’s the rush?Īnd then: Badu. Well, we’d already waited 20 years since Badu’s last headlining show in the Twin Cities.

#I GOT 2 PHONES ONE FOR THE BITCHES FULL#

After a recorded Badu voiceover informed us how cellphone signals disorient bees, which convinced everyone in the room to stop filming and photographing the stage (haha, just kidding, of course not), a full band jam split the difference between hyping the star-to-come and vamping till she was ready. It was 9:15, more than an hour later than the visionary soul eccentric (or vice versa) was scheduled to appear onstage at the Armory, when her band members took their places and two drummers welcomed us with competing solos.

Erykah Badu will make you wait just to prove she’s worth it.

I got 2 phones one for the bitches