#Erykah badu tyrone album cover series#

She’s able to sense the changes the world is making to hip-hop and align herself with it. And as an analog girl who is very mutable and can adapt to the digital world, I also have evolved with that too.” Their ears are calibrated for a certain frequency, digitally and sonically. And so are the children who come through. On “Live,” the album “Tyrone” was on, I said, “the atoms in the body rotate at the same rate on the same axis that the Earth rotates, giving us a direct connection with the place we call Earth.” Well since then the Earth has sped up - the rotation and the vibration. The album represents her empathetic qualities: Badu had played with the sounds of rap and R&B on albums beforehand, but this was her first foray into trap. She presents the album as “TRap & B,” a clever mixture of trap, rap, and R&B. The goal was to create “a sound that brings peace and tranquility to its listener.” While these strategies didn’t originate in Dallas, they represent an innovation from the more southern styles Badu was emulating on the album. Washington High School in Dallas, and the two created the mixtape in only 11 days with Badu performing all of the songs in only one take.Īccording to Consequence of Sound, the two used unconventional recording techniques to create the album: “Badu and Witness focused on creating “sympathetic vibrations” between the music’s frequency and vibration, even utilizing a tuning fork and Tibetan singing bowls to find the precise wavelengths.

She contacted producer Zach Witness, a fellow alum of Booker T. It’s the least conventional of her album covers and represents Badu at a point in her career where she’s so far ahead of social norms that she doesn’t have to pander to commercial audiences anymore. The cover comes off like an advertisement - perhaps a commentary on the commercialization of black bodies in the music industry. 2,, as her body is robot-ified with speakers and boomboxes all over herself. The cover art is comparable to The New Amerykah, Pt. īadu’s most recent project, But You Caint Use My Phone, is a fascinating case study and provides plenty to discuss from black feminist and afrofuturist perspectives.

#Erykah badu tyrone album cover series#

This is part four of a four-part series on Erykah Badu’s massive role in communicating and normalizing Black feminism in contemporary discourses.