It was the year 2000 and the new millennium seemed promising. In that electric air Erykah Badu published Mama's Gun: a seminal, feverish album, capable of redefining the language of soul with the grace of those who invent a possible future. After Baduizmthat second act sanctioned its definitive consecration.
Twenty-five years later, Mama's Gun comes back to vibrate live. The celebratory tour arrives in Milan bringing with it the same mix of elegance and vertigo: soul, R&B and jazz that intertwine in a fluid neo-soul, still impossible to pigeonhole today.
The Milanese audience – heterogeneous, made up of young and old – welcomes the priestess of groove with quiet devotion and sincere curiosity.
The band opens, with a long instrumental jam weaving a carpet of dense bass, syncopated rhythms and flashes of funk: a hypnotic prelude that prepares for Badu's entrance.
When it arrives, the time compacts: the groove takes shape, the laser lights merge with the chromatic projections, and the musical flow becomes physical, almost visceral.
The sound is chiseled, modern, still imbued with that alchemy that it rendered Mama's Gun a breakup album. In the first part the show flows powerfully: the music pulsates, the audience reacts, the energy is tangible.
Then, in the central part, the concert becomes more abstract. The vocals expand, the experiments prevail over the song, and the groove becomes thinner. The enchantment is broken at times, and the initial tension gives way to a more mental, almost mystical but irregular drift.
Only in the finale does the flow burn again. The rhythm picks up, the band finds its body, and Badu reignites the scene with his magnetic and controlled presence. In the studio Mama's Gun it is intimate and calibrated; live it becomes a field of forces, where rationality challenges emotion.
Erykah's voice remains the catalyst: precise, deep, mutant. Even when the concert gets lost in abstractions, his voice keeps everything suspended.
After exactly an hour and a half (the right time for this type of concert) the closing is an elegant and elusive farewell, with the audience divided, some enraptured, some confused, but all aware of having witnessed something alive, imperfect and unrepeatable.
On November 10th Erykah arrives in Rome, the last Italian stage of this secular rite of sound. The alchemy continues to pulsate!
THE LADDER
Jam
Penitentiary Philosophy
Didn't Cha Know
… & Hon
Cleva
It's Gonna Be Alright
Hey Sugah
Kiss Me On My Neck
Black Box
Booty
Annie (Don't Wear No Panties)
Cleva (Remix) or No ID or I just play a part
AD 2000
In Love With You
Orange Moon
Bag Lady
Jam + preach
Time's a Wastin
Green Eyes
Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine
THE TOUR
10 NOVEMBER – ROME – PARCO DELLA MUSICA AUDITORIUM
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