Badu had come of age in the late nineteen-eighties, in Dallas’s embryonic hip-hop scene two decades later, as Witness nursed his own obsession with hip-hop, he tried to live up to her example. No doubt many Nickelodeon viewers were confused, but Witness was converted, especially once he discovered that the singer was also a local. Oh, my, my, my, I’m feeling high My money’s gone, I’m all alone Too much to see The world keeps turning Oh, what a day, what a day, what a day She was impossibly elegant, intoning lyrics that sounded like a dreamy distant cousin of the blues: “This woman came on with incense, a head wrap, and tea,” he remembers. Witness is twenty-three, and he had been a fan of Badu ever since he was five years old, when he saw her surreal appearance on “All That,” a comedy show on the kids’ channel Nickelodeon. The word people used back then was “neo-soul,” but nowadays it seems appropriate to omit the “neo”-not because her music has grown more old-fashioned but because it has grown harder to categorize, and maybe even easier to enjoy. But she spends a considerable part of every year on the road, as has been her custom since 1997, when she released her début album, “Baduizm,” which sold millions of copies, earned her a pair of Grammys, and made her one of the most celebrated soul singers of the modern era. Badu, who is forty-five, has lived in Dallas all her life. When Erykah Badu told Zach Witness, an unheralded producer from East Dallas, that she might like to come to his home studio and work on some music, he didn’t dare believe her. Photograph by Amanda Demme for The New Yorker
Badu calls herself “super mutable,” and, as a musician, she sometimes seems to be aging in reverse.
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