Pages

Sunday 12 June 2011

Random Review #69 Erykah Badu - Mama's Gun


C8S1CD10 The last pick before I move from my current apartment and re-shuffle and re-sort a la High Fidelity into a new home. A couple of more columns to house my expanding CD and DVD collections and a change around of where the genre’s sit are the only real changes but it kept me happy for a few hours.

So on to my pick Erykah Badu and Mama’s Gun, Badu’s second studio  and third album over all, I have all of her albums (6 In total)  but suspect if you played any other than her debut Baduizm, I couldn’t tell you which one it was. This isn’t bad thing all are of a certain quality, what it means is I guess I haven’t played them enough so the chance to listen to this album has been hugely enjoyable.

Around the time of this albums release (2000) I was lucky enough to be in Florida and discover that Erykah Badu was playing in The House of Blues in Orlando, now living in Newcastle upon Tyne I can safely say the only way I would been able to see Badu live in the UK, would be to travel to London or maybe Manchester to see her, so I took the opportunity to see her in America and it was as fascinating to see a slice of America youth culture as it was to see the Badu live.

For those who don’t know Badu’s music she fits uncomfortably into the ‘Nu Soul’ genre, but her music is in a world of her own. It is laid back soul, old in origin but new in style. There is nothing here that is fast paced and you can’t imagine Badu, works to timetables! She was late on stage when I saw her and I CD booklet, has an apology where the lyrics to the first song should be, “dearest folks I didn’t have the lyrics in enough time to get them in the booklet”. So you can see Badu does things her own way.

It’s a perfect album to read the Sunday papers to whilst drink good coffee and dream of warmer places, with Didn’t Cha Know being the track that stands out, (it’s still spinning round inside my head).

From her appearance, to her music Badu is one of a kind, she is still pushing the boundaries, recently being fined for a video in which she walked through the streets stripping off before lying down naked in the spot Martin Luther King was assassinated.

Mark 8/10




No comments:

Post a Comment