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A darkened stage, a cacophony of recorded whispers, and there, on an elevated platform, was Erykah Badu. Statuesque in a tall peaked black hat, her gold grillz glinting in the red then blue haze, a drum-pad to her left, her crack-team of six musicians and two backing vocalists positioned around her.
"I am a warrior princess," sang the Dallas native, 54. "I have come from the other sun. Gather all your members, unite them as one." In the first of two nights at the Royal Albert Hall, the five-time Grammy winner stepped into those words, presenting an Afrofuturistic universe of sci-fi graphics, computerised light shows and Badu-to-earth cosmic wisdom while rolling out tracks from her 2000 neo-soul classic Mama's Gun. "We love you," hollered someone, and the place erupted in cheers.
Badu tours eight months of each year, to which her mighty nasal-sweet voice is testament. Its range is astounding, moving from honeyed rasp on the mesmeric Didn't Cha Know, with its sample of a record by '70s New York jazzers Tarika Blue — which Badu discovered while crate-digging at the home of hip-hop producer J.Dilla — to head-thrown-back hollers so powerful they seem to almost knock her over.
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It's become a richer, stronger instrument than the one originally heard on Mama's Gun, an album she dedicated to her son Seven (whose father is rapper André 3000), or on her smash 1997 debut, Baduizm. Both records changed the musical landscape with their stylish genre-crossing and sly word play. But Mama's Gun was angrier, more political, than its predecessor, and retains its wallop.
The album's impact was heightened, too, by the presence the Soulquarians, a rotating collective of experimental Black music artists including Questlove of The Roots (and as of 2009, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon), who'd driven seminal album releases by Common and D'Angelo earlier the same year.
Badu has released just three albums since then, plus a 2015 mix tape and several singles. While she recently live previewed Abi & Alan, her forthcoming album with hip-hop producer Alchemist, this repurposing of Mama's Gun found the mother-of-three, who is also a birth-and-death doula, in her so-called Badubatron/Badu World element. After singalongs to My Life and the chilled... & On came Cleva, a paean to self-worth laced with the late Roy Ayers' original melodious vibraphone playing.
"Alright, alright, alright," she repeated, removing her tiger-striped fake fur jacket and taking off her hat to reveal a black skull cap. When a vast pyramid-shaped smokescreen appeared at the foot of stairs outlined in green neon, she descended (in spike heels and puffa-style leg warmers) to push theatrically through it, each attempt triggering loud whooshes, sending up red-and-blue sparks.
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A percussion solo by Cleon Edwards prefaced an improvised poem, Black Box. There was a mashup of the systa-fied Booty and the 2007 single Annie Don't Wear Panties ('ANNIE', flashed the words, then 'PANTIES'). Handed an acoustic guitar, Badu sat to play A.D 2000, a homage to Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant shot by NYPD officers in 1999, and as sadly timely as it ever was.
She turned her back to watch a huge orange moon, the subject of her next song, rise slowly, magnificently, on the screen. After a sing-along 'Bag Lady', she paused again. “Sh*t, damn, motherf****r," she wailed, paraphrasing a title of a song by D'Angelo, with whom she started her career, and who passed away earlier this month. "We're living in a world that's oh-so-strange," she sang, for him, on Time's A Wastin.
Green Eyes, her three-movement take on the stages of break-up grief, closed the show, during which a superfan named Owen had his own am-dram moment by dancing with and briefly straddling his prone idol. After crossing the stage to hug another fan, Badu walks away. "I can't stand these growing pains," she sings, disappearing back behind her forcefield.
