As their duet fades out here, both voices come together, and the conversation keeps going.Erykah Badu’s But You Caint Use My Phone mixtape is supposed to be on iTunes and Apple Music right now, but there seems to be some kind of technical glitch keeping the album off iTunes. Jackson", promising his commitment to fatherhood: "Know that everything's cool/ And yes, I will be present on the first day of school, and graduation." And as Seven turned 18 last month, his parents are still talking, still figuring things out, still collaborating on art. They broke up after a few years but remained close, and André famously apologized to Badu's mother on OutKast's "Ms. In the late '90s, Badu and Dre were a much-celebrated hip-hop couple, a model of black enlightenment and creativity. The mixtape's final track, a revamp of the Todd Rundgren/Isley Brothers '70s hit "Hello It's Me", features André 3000-aka the father of Badu's only son, Seven-leaving his phone on the table in an effort to find some clarity, and it works. "Phone Down" has Badu pleading for someone to disconnect from the grid and plug into real life, but the track's sinister synths and her melancholy delivery suggest that she knows it's probably too late.Īnd yet. It's a nostalgic stance from someone who became famous a decade before the introduction of the iPhone, but it can also be convincing. His two Drake-impersonating verses ("Erykah on my hotline," he misdirects) are bizarrely, well, phoney-annoying prank calls on what should be a highly protected line.īadu, a self-described "analog girl in a digital world," has a clear fondness for old-school, pre-cell models with buttons that pushed and dials that turned. Another relatively unknown new artist Badu brought on for the project, rapper ItsRoutine, doesn't come off as well. He first came to the singer's attention through his remix of "On & On", and he melds his star's offbeat spontaneity and cosmic funk with a sleek SoundCloud-ready sheen. The title of the tape and its blaring opening suite reference her 1997 kiss-off "Tyrone", and the playful "Dial’Afreaq", a remake of the early electro-rap hit "Dial-A-Freak" by Uncle Jamm's Army and the Egyptian Lover, offers a brief history of Baduizm: " 'On & On' and Mama's Gun/ Underwater ill motherfucker from the other sun." Further referential depth comes courtesy of producer Witness, a one-time child turntable prodigy who was a toddler when Badu started her career. and she began her musical career as a rapper known as MC Apples-Badu has always been ideally positioned between the reverence of classic soul and the irreverence of hip-hop. And on But You Caint Use My Phone she taps into her own language and influence along with everyone else's. As a kid who grew up listening to her family's Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Chaka Khan records before falling in love with hip-hop in the '80s-her first concert was Run-D.M.C. "Hotline Bling" is old and new, R&B and hip-hop, serious and fun-it's a song that might not exist without the pioneering work of Erykah Badu, so it only makes sense for her to reclaim it.īut rather than putting her stamp on a slew of 2015 hits, Badu reaches back across the last 40 years of phone-related pop, patching the Isley Brothers, Usher, Egyptian Lover, and New Edition through her own frequency.
This paradoxical quality can be found in much of Badu's work over the last two decades as well as on her initial inspiration for this tape, Drake's "Hotline Bling", the SoundCloud loosie-turned-smash about late-night buzzes with a beat taken from Timmy Thomas' 1972 anti-war plea "Why Can't We Live Together". Created alongside a young producer and fellow Dallas denizen named Zach Witness in just 12 days, the tape feels off-the-cuff, yet also steeped in history and wisdom. As an extension of ourselves, phones can be heartbreaking, lustful, smart, dumb, noisy, distracting, powerful.īut You Caint Use My Phone is a mixtape in the true hip-hop sense, as it largely finds Badu putting her spin on other artists' songs. According to Badu, phones can enhance our ability to communicate deep desires across oceans, but they can also jumble our meaning with static or frustrate with busy signals and voicemail. For the 44-year-old ankh-worshipping R&B iconoclast, phones aren't just emoji factories or Candy Crush receptacles-they're mystic devices that can span time and space, heaven and Earth. "Telephone" originally appeared on Badu's 2008 album New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) and it's reprised in chopped-and-screwed form as a tribute to another late rap producer, DJ Screw, on the singer's new mixtape, But You Caint Use My Phone.
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