Be warned--this album is
dense. It wasn't until well into my fifth listen when I was able to start to unpack it, to understand it, and I'm still not sure whether what you get is worth all that time you have to put into it. Certain tracks ("The Healer" in particular--listen to that cymbal sound!) create a mood that to the best of my knowledge little other funk/R&B has been able to do, while other tracks ("That Hump"; "Twinkle") are just generic slinky R&B. It's all about the groove here, and the album cover itself sets this record up as a throwback to the great funk protest records of the 70s, like
The Payback and
Superfly. Certainly this isn't as good as either of those, but it is remarkable how little "modern" production intrudes on the dense mood. The opening track isn't able to transcend its impression as a blacksploitation music pastiche, but "The Cell" fares much better, the groove produced within so powerful that Badu is able to drop out the music entirely for an entire minute near the end of the track, leaving nothing but a single repetitive chant, and the track doesn't lose one bit of its power and the effect doesn't seem like showboating. So what we've got here, in the end, is an incredibly ambitious funk record, and I'm inclined to give the album more points for its sheer ambition (even though the album would be outstripped, both conceptually and musically, by Janelle Monae's
The ArchAndroid two years later). Funk records of this overall quality don't come around often, so just ignore the weak stuff and focus on what's good.
MY RATING:
7.8
Erykah Badu - "The Healer"
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