20YAT #7 Erykah Badu – Baduizm
UK album chart peak: #17
In case evidence were needed for how overwhelmingly British, white and male the UK musical landscape had become in the preceding years, and how potentially unwelcoming to newcomers who didn’t fit that template, here’s a sobering fact from 1997: when Baduizm crept up the album charts in the early months of that year, it became the first debut by a black American woman to enter the UK top 40 since Aaliyah’s was released in 1994. What’s more, in those intervening three years, only eight further black American women had any sort of top 40 album – and three of them were in TLC. (The others were Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Toni Braxton, Janet Jackson, and Lauryn Hill, then still part of the Fugees).
In that company, too, Baduizm’s moderate success seems even more exceptional. After all, Badu was part of neither a great musical dynasty nor a hip-hop group, but simply an upcoming solo artist with a particularly inventive mix of jazz, soul and new jack swing as her weapon of choice.
Timing undeniably played a part in Baduizm’s impact, in the sense that the British public by now felt ready for something new. Had it been released a couple of years earlier, it would almost certainly have sunk as quickly as Brandy’s debut, cut from similar (if not quite as refined) cloth. But the album also benefits from being invitingly timeless: Badu’s constant quotations from classic 1970s soul range from fleeting (there’s a hint, on Drama, of Marvin Gaye’s melancholic protest style) to respectfully reverential (Sometime’s bass line leaves the track one Walrus of Love short of a Barry White number) to glorious theft (Kool & the Gang’s iconic synth swoons from Summer Madness are reprised on Certainly), and her sweet, Billy Holiday vocal inflections sprinkle a jazz-age nostalgia over the whole record.
Meanwhile, contemporary hip-hop is present in virtually every song’s loud, snapping snare hit and heavy bass (Four-Leaf Clover could almost be a G-funk song), a skit in which Badu prepares for a Wu-Tang gig, and an over-dubbed vinyl crackle on No Love. The ensuing combination – elements of contemporary and classic black American culture blended together – is the album’s key and, in a way, not so far, at least methodologically, from the meshing of late-60s British psychedelia with lyrics about current UK life that characterised many of the time’s most popular records.
In the same way that the Eels’ unexpected success with Beautiful Freak appears now to be a mini emancipation of the UK music scene from the shackles of its own reflection, it’s tempting to think of Baduizm as another small shaft of light coming through Britpop’s slowly disintegrating walls. But instead of tweaking the already familiar, Baduizm presented the polar opposite: this was the language of refinement and grown-up listening, of sit-down jazz-club gigs and earnest social conscience. It was lightyears from pogoing and foppish smirk. That the indie music press embraced it, meaning write-ups for Baduizm ran somewhere between Ash and Blur in their alphabetised reviews sections, perhaps marks a infinitesimal, at the time undetectable, turning of the tide.
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Also out this week:
Blur – Blur (Food). Chart peak #1
Pavement – Brighten The Corners (Domino). Chart peak #27
The Divine Comedy – A Short Album About Love (Setanta). Chart peak #13
