Erykah Badu and The Alchemist transform Before the World Blows into a sonic journey suspended between hip-hop, jazz, neo soul and funk. A visionary and sensual album, crossed by desire, identity and memory,
I’ve been waiting to listen to and review a Miss Badu album for a long time! I wanted to immerse myself again in its sonic jelly, the one in which underground hip-hop, jazz, neo soul and funk melt into each other without belonging to any of the four, leaving me swaying suspended.
“Before the World Blows: The Abi and Alan Experiment” is the joint album that Erykah Badu signs with The Alchemist, a musical alchemist in the true sense of the word: the extended title plays on the real names of the two, Erica Abi Wright, the registered Badu, and Alan Daniel Maman, the producer who the world knows by the pseudonym. Behind the artistic masks built over a thirty-year career, it is a record that presents itself from the frontispiece as a pact between two people rather than between two icons.
The result of the meeting is sixteen songs for just over an hour of music, the sum of eighteen months of work between Dallas and Los Angeles: the right time to let things settle. The result is one of the most visionary works of both of their careers, a record destined to evolve together with those who listen to it, over time. It’s an invitation to continue exploring yourself, to give yourself one more kiss, one more puff, one more dance, one more laugh, all before the world explodes.
The album sees Badu questioning which parts of ourselves and our stories, from love to innocence, from dreams to memories to being a woman, are worth protecting before the world breaks and fragments.
Meditative and fluid, the album unfolds in four movements, tracing the evolution of the self through the prisms of love, art and identity, and inviting us to confront difficult feelings. Passion is confused with desire, hope with pain; each song reveals another facet of Badu’s inner universe, the Baduverse.
The lyrical core of the album, as Badu clarified in an interview with Guardianis gender politics understood in the most literal sense: the way in which men and women seek and escape each other, desire and hurt each other. Many texts take the form of autobiographical lessons addressed to one’s daughters and, by declared extension, to “the daughters of the world”.
It is a system that could have slipped into the didactic, and it holds up because Badu never claims to possess the answer: in Crossfade seduction is already mourning; in I Know That Manwhere Earl Sweatshirt throws his most exposed verve onto an almost gospel carpet, the male archetype is dissected without summary trial.
The musical perimeter crosses ancient and modern black music without ever stopping long enough to allow itself to be labeled. Black Boxclosed by an intervention by Kamasi Washington that melts rather than explodes, is the point at which the album comes closest to chamber jazz; They Ain’t You, with Thundercat on bass, it is the rhythmic reverse, almost a nervous joke within an otherwise rarefied album.
Witch Doctor remains the most direct proof of how Badu knows how to make a whispered threat still hypnotic, without ever raising his voice.
As well as the sea of guests who wanted to participate in the sound sessions. The result resembles a conversation between similar sensibilities rather than an exchange of featuring: they pass through it Steve Lacy, Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, Earl Sweatshirt, Westside Gunn, Joi, DRAM and DJ Creole Princess, and everyone remains a guest, never a protagonist.
The only note to make is the effect of the filters on Badu’s voice. Sometimes, listen To The Moon as a basis for understanding what I mean or also Hot BiBithe voice sounds modified to the extreme, less dirty and passionate than usual. A ripple remains, not a crack. Maybe one alchemy too many.
Badu, fifty-five years old, has nothing to prove and in fact does not demonstrate: he shows, in real time, what it means to remain curious about one’s own desire while the world outside continues to creak.
In the end… Before the world explodes who would you kiss?
SCORE: 8.50
TO LISTEN NOW
Echos – Breezy – Black Box
TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY
An hour of suspension of the world. Impossible to skip!
