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I wasn't actually a huge fan of Erykah Badu's 2008 album New Amerykah—but this track, "The Healer," was, to my mind, the single most invigorating piece of music the year had to offer. Badu's decision to marry the concepts of healing and pop music isn't in and of itself very interesting: any number of lesser talents could take those two ideas and emerge with a garden-variety homily about the enduring power of music. The greatness of this track comes from Badu's decision to use this framework as a structure into which to jam all sorts of left-field weirdness, ending up with a salvo that's a deeply compelling mish-mash of metaphysics, resistance politics, science fiction, and what may or may not be pure nonsense:
The lyrical content is a great fit with Madlib's stoned-sounding production, last appreciated on this blog here. Listen: Erykah Badu >> "The Healer" |
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
2008 : 20 "The Healer" by Erykah Badu
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
2004 : 18 "The Wrong Way" by TV on the Radio
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The Aughts turned out to be a pretty good decade for soul music, thanks in part to standard-bearers and retro-minded torch-carriers (Sharon Jones, Amy Winehouse, Jamie Lidell). But if you wanted to hear something that represented an approach to soul music that could be said to be "21st-century" in orientation, you could do a lot worse than to check out TV On The Radio, especially their first full-length studio album, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes. This album effectively takes an array of Black vocal stylings (given voice here by lead singer Tunde Adebimpe) and integrates it with the cluttered, loop-driven framework of post-Radiohead guitar rock. The fit isn't always clean, but having a few edges showing suits the band's millenial aesthetic, with its hints of neurosis and violence. Everything fits, even the parts that don't fit: what could be more twenty-first-century than that? Listen: TV On The Radio >> "The Wrong Way" |
