20/Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh)
If it is alright with you, Erykah Badu would like a moment to herself. A “ticket out of town” to look around and see where she stands in this world, in HER world, with her music, lover, and her babies. She already spoke for the people, seizing our attention by grabbing a mirror and saying, “America, LOOK! Do you see what I see?” with her magnificently rhapsodic disc from 2008, New Amerykah Part One (4th World War). With New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh), she turns insular, “in her mind tusslin’”, focusing on those “only two emotions that humankind experience: fear and love”, and how they are currently being applied in this thing she calls life. From the album’s early centerpiece forward, Badu sits in her window seat, holding a mirror up to herself and her love life, traversing thru numerous moments of clarity over a constant stream of soulfully smooth, and patented funk laced grooves. The Erykah we see here may be, in her words, “outta sight and outta mind”, but she’s never too far gone, making our connection to the emotional vibratory frequencies on display here that much easier to latch onto.
KEY TRACKS: Window Seat/Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long/Umm Hmm
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