The Badu-Print: Erykah Badu’s Baduizm at 25

Let’s get the hottest take out of the way right off the top. Erykah Badu’s 1997 debut, Baduizm, is arguably the least of her studio albums. Yes, even though it effortlessly, singularly defined her improvisational, free-spirited BoHo style in one fell swoop. Even though it helped to outline the parameters of what would eventually be tagged the “neo-soul” movement. And even though the mystic “On & On,” the lovelorn “Next Lifetime,” and a few of the album’s deep cuts were collectively sturdy enough to justify the still-baller choice to follow up her debut with a live album consisting of almost exactly the same tracklist.

Much like Nietzsche declaring that identifying Wagner’s flaws doesn’t alter the composer’s position of total supremacy, calling Baduizm a better blueprint than it is an album isn’t meant to diminish its impact, which, as its position as the highest ranking of Badu’s too few entries on Rolling Stone’s recent list of the 500 greatest albums ever proves, is self-evident. Right from the first “Rimshot” that opens the album, Baduizm is a fully formed, confident fork in the road for the fine-EQ’d mid-’90s R&B production style to unmoor itself from the mainstream’s increasingly stale and unadventurous songwriting (think Babyface, Boyz II Men, Tony Rich).

Badu’s double-reed voice immediately called to mind, for many, the yawing croon of Billie Holliday, but the grooves that she was singing ringlets around seemed to emerge from some subterranean pit—or more accurately, the subterranean pit next door, since the album’s most immediate impression comes in the form of that insistent bass whomp.

“On & On” is, in practice, little more than a dinosaur heartbeat synchronized with that low-end-theory bassline, were it not for Badu’s minor-key epigrams drifting like stray gauze throughout. “Sometimes,” for which Badu enlisted the assistance of the Roots, is built around a Rhodes-dominant disco-jazz sample from Donald Byrd, but you’d be forgiven for not even hearing it beyond the intro, when the root note starts droning in what feels like at least nine octaves below Badu’s vocals. Meanwhile, keyboardist James Poyser’s oft-recruited hands may be all over the album, but rarely have his contributions felt so much like a supporting role.

Though Badu was all of 25 when she recorded Baduizm, she tranquilly asks for a cup of tea like she’s someone’s great grandmother, and lets a prospective lover whose timeline ain’t aligning with hers know that there’s always next lifetime. “I can’t control the soul flowing in me,” she sings on “Appletree,” and leaves no room for doubt. All the while, she’s prepared to spend a couple of minutes impishly digressing to mentions of her beau: “You need to pick yo’ Afro, daddy, because it’s flat on one side.”

Yes, as a mission statement, Baduizm checks all the boxes. You emerge from the first listen knowing exactly who Badu is and what she stands for. But it wasn’t until the release of Live, with the singer’s crowd-courting digressions left gloriously intact, and 2000’s Mama’s Gun, with its liner notes reflecting a last-minute tracklist seemingly still in flux, that it became clear just how all-in Badu was when it came to embodying the freedom of improvisation, and the level of communication and continuity she felt with her musical elders.

Much like 2008’s New AmErykah Part One (4th World War), Mama’s Gun tackled the larger themes that kept things cohesive for the critics: heartbreak, poverty, sisterhood, and infidelity. But from that point on, Badu crafted rich, experimental, perfect albums that also felt paradoxically made up on the spot. Arguably, 2003’s Worldwide Underground came to be under those specific conditions, and in the last dozen years her only contribution to the world has been a solitary mixtape structured thematically around her larkish cover-cum-reconstruction of Drake’s “Hotline Bling.” Why? Because Badu.

It’s really only in that sense that Baduizm represents more of a stepping stone, if not an outright half-measure. In the years since the album’s release, Badu has only dropped music whenever her green-fairy muse awakens from its daze; as a result, she has probably the most unimpeachable run of albums this side of fellow Soulquarian D’Angelo.

Only on Baduizm does she (very occasionally) lapse into what’s hard not to call filler, songs that exist sonically within the album’s groove, but very much outside of Badu’s wavelength. The run of “4 Leaf Clover” into “No Love” into “Drama” halts the album in its tracks for well over a quarter-hour, a regrettable remnant of the decade’s tendency toward jamming as much material as could be held by the space available on CD.

In giving the album a fresh listen after finally seeing Badu in concert for the first time during her characteristically tardy 2021 Badubotron tour in support of 2015’s But You Cain’t Use My Phone, I’m still amazed at just how many of Baduizm’s, well, Badu-isms are still floating potently throughout her musiquarium. She’s still stormy-night philosophizing some of her artsy friends in “Appletree,” and giving unequivocal non-permission to anyone trying to rearrange her in “Certainly.” “I was born underwater, with three dollars and six times/Yeah, you might laugh, ‘cause you did not do your math,” she teases in “On & On.” But the full-circle $3.60 she had in her pocket from the get-go has proven worth more than most artists have on offer in the entirety of their Rolling Stone-canonized greatest hits.