Erykah Badu commands your undivided attention
The Godmother of Soul evoked the power of ritual and stillness in a private music ceremony
Words by Whitney Wei
Erykah Badu sat in the centre of a wire web, twenty-five of us radiating outward with headphones on, when she gave us the concluding orders. "Focus, she said. "For the rest of the way." Badu, aka Badulla Oblongata, aka Sara Bellum, aka Analogue Girl in a Digital World, aka SHE ILL, is the queen of alter egos and godmother of soul who has collected accolades and commanded stadiums throughout the course of her three-decade career. In the middle of the cavernous room was a steel cube, where she played on her laptop as we laid on black tatami mats around her and became immersed in her world.
This bespoke ceremony in Berlin, with its twenty-five participants, commemorated twenty-five years of Electronic Beats and twenty-five years since the release of Mama's Gun. It occurred on the eve of her European tour and ahead of her highly anticipated work, Abi and Alan.
This is Badu's first album in ten-plus years, which was delayed from its original August release date and produced in collaboration with The Alchemist, who she describes as "a great revelator," someone who finishes her "musical sentences" and "wakes artists from the dead." As a certified birth doula, Badu seems to be allowing Abi and Alan to reach its full gestation. But in the meantime, she's bringing other forms of creation to life—this modern ritual being one of them.
"I like my clothes to make music."
This ceremony of improvisational music was the third in a global series that first took place in London for SXSW. In that set, people sat in chairs with blindfolds on, depriving their sight to concentrate their sense of sound.
"People were quite happy to be able to see again after the session and see each other," she reported. The one in Japan was even smaller, only six people per session for eight rounds. "We were on a roof, under the sun, under the sky," she remembered. "That was different. There was a rainbow that appeared right over us on a sunny day. I believe that was because of the frequency and vibration of all of our hearts, magnetically sending something together." She paused, coming back down to earth briefly, "—or it was just a rainbow."
But for Berlin, it wasn't only the placid evening conditions and the waxing moon that distinguished this ritual from the others. "I felt very emotional today," Badu confessed to us in the room. Today was her first day, she told us, of quitting substances.
As her pre-stage ritual, smoking weed was damaging her vocal cords. She noticed how the high notes struggled to climb up her throat. Before the listening session, she felt fear. "This one was different because I did it sober," she reflected in our interview. "Wasn't as hard as I thought. I wanted to numb everything. Who doesn't, in this time? It let me know that, as an artist, no matter what's going into my body, nothing can stop the force coming out of it."
As she played for us, she mourned the death of that part of herself. "What am I gonna do now?" She later asked. "Well, what we're gonna do first, we're gonna grieve. Because that's what we're trying to avoid, isn't it? We're gonna grieve, and then I'll see what happens after that." Turns out, she felt the same as she always does after performing. "I was scared for nothing. Fear, conquered," she told me.
It's easy to forget that the world isn't in my phone. It's all around me, out here.
In exchange for such careful intimacy with Badu, we gave her our undivided attention. "We live in such a state of overstimulation. It's easy to forget that the world isn't in my phone. It's all around me, out here," she said when the doors remained sealed, gesturing to the space around her. What she speaks of is how technology has domesticated us. Through its polished indispensability, it's somehow taken the simplicity of unmediated stillness and turned it into an impossible feat. What used to come in abundance—slowness and deliberation, connection and authenticity—has waned to the point of deprivation. Badu, in a sense, is giving back to us the luxury of time.
"Once I started doing [these silent music sessions], I started seeing how penetrating it can be after the people take off the headset and sit up to assess how they feel," she said. "I think it peels back a layer of something because it's very difficult to lay down and do anything, let alone listen to someone else's art."
Attention is a gift—even a sign of love. In an age of distraction, active presence is a gentle yet radical form of sovereignty and resistance. It is certainly an artist's greatest asset.
British philosopher Iain McGilchrist argues that attention is a moral act that shapes reality. The act of focusing on something gives it importance, enlarging its presence in our lives until it becomes a dominant perspective. In the case of Badu's ceremony, our awareness connected us to her consciousness and to each other's, which swept us through the emotional registers of her musical arrangement. Our curiosity and anticipation shapeshifted her apprehension into a meditation on acceptance, all threaded through with a sense of longing.
Badu assumes many extracurricular roles and talents, including that of being a midwife, death doula, third-degree Reiki master, and holistic health practitioner. But perhaps her most underrated one is that of a philosopher.
"To me, I learned that the most important ceremonies in this life are birth and death."
During our interview, she spoke deliberately, methodically, as if to emphasize the weight of every word. "To me, I learned that the most important ceremonies in this life are birth and death," she said. "Being able to sit at the seat of people who are coming into the earth and sit at the side of people who are going the other way. I felt like [this session] was kind of that, especially for me, so I can imagine that the people receiving what I was doing also [felt that way]—symbolically, emotionally, spiritually. They had no choice but to eat what I was cooking."
Her amber eyes shone. "This is a ceremony of surrender, especially for us humans, today," she said. "We did not have phones or any of those other distractions. I think we took away one message: focus for the rest of the way." At the listening event's conclusion, she told us that these were words originally spoken by Seven, her twenty-seven-year-old son, who offered her a few words of encouragement before she embarked on tour. She's since integrated it into her way of life.
"And I guess what that means is, focus for the rest of the way, the rest of the journey. It's a reminder. Music can do that."
