Before the World Blows

After all this time, all that absence, all the struggles and feuds and signs of getting lost in the ether, Erykah Badu has a new album, and it’s bewildering. The idea of neo-soul’s definitive singer collabing with a hip-hop producer whose jet-set cratedigging skews towards international psychedelic obscurity as luxury good might seem like an odd fit, but this is a different kind of strangeness, and Alc’s playing on Badu’s terms in ways that fans of recent teamups like Armand Hammer’s Mercy or Freddie Gibbs’ Alfredo 2 might be surprised by. The sharp edges and prog-riff vapor-funk of his signature style recede and settle into a Badu-arranged atmosphere that, with the aid of DJ Quik on percussion, splits the difference with a familiar Soulquarian pulse and leaves the album bristling with a curious tension — or anti-tension. Badu’s sociopolitical messaging is that of someone who’s taken in an overdose of experience and information and is hellbent on sorting it all out so she can refocus her equilibrium. The Kamasi-laced cosmic jazz of “Black Box” is just the most immediate example of this — a diatribe against the mixed messages and reality distortion field of social media that also recognizes its lingering potential for connection — and it comes late in an album that raises more questions than it answers about the state of the American social tapestry. Part of that could be because the woman who popularized the term “woke,” only to see it reduced to a right-wing epithet, keeps her most explicit politics on the margins aside from the vivid pluralism of ancestor-strengthened opener “Echos” (which advocates for cross-cultural understanding with the Prince-esque sentiment “Ah, if we can’t agree on the God we pick/Then, my God/Let’s at least agree on this snare and kick”) and the media-skeptic “Witch Doctor” (with its infamous “And they bank on it/Anne Frank on it” rhyme and accompanying “cha-ching” — are “they” the ones hiding in the attic, or the ones ratting her out?) But her voice is another matter; with her songwriters’ mind leaning heavy on relationship dynamics, it’s her range as a singer that fills in the blunted songs’ negative spaces. When she spars with her doubt(er)s on the Westside Gunn-riddled slow-burn heater “I Just Play a Part” (“Do that shit to them, they can’t take it/Don’t give me your heart, I’m gon’ break it”) or acts as one towards a woman she sees right through on the Bennie-and-the-Jets bounce of “Breezy,” it’s easy to hear the long-since-planted roots of her demands for respect between the lines in the defiance of her lilting delivery. When she spits intricate internal-rhyme punchlines in the pitched-up quasi-Quasimoto “Hot BiBi (Apostle 2)” and flips the switch to languid sing-song beathead reverie on successive track “No I.D.,” she’s just showing off an absurd range of rap-rooted expression that can be as sharp or melodic as she wants. And when she’s yearning or swooning — the stoned-love “Next 2 U,” the high fidelity of Thundercat duet “They Ain’t You,” the reckless euphoria of Steve Lacy collab “To The Moon (Plan C)” — there’s nobody better at getting your empathy on her deeply expressive wavelength.