Erykah Badu
Fox Theater, Oakland
Better Than: Sex. Unless, with, well...
Erykah Badu is from Texas, so she can be forgiven for thinking she needed four layers in Northern California in February. And maybe it's just her
microphone skills, but was she really so cold she had to wear a sort of camouflage balaclava/aviator cap velcroed below her chin and a top hat? For an indoor show?
Badu began Friday's gig all bundled up, working warbled melodies from a theramin with the same hovering gestures you use to warm your hands by a fire. She was stiff and erect and, wrapped as she was, a little scary, like a mummy. But soon she lifted off her floor-length overcoat and began to move around the stage.
In front of lit velvet curtains, and in her spangled tights, top hat, and a double-breasted jacket with tails, Badu became an old ballroom show singer from the Tin Pan Alley days. All that was missing was the cane. But as she shed layer after layer (revealing next a grey Public Enemy hoody and at last a purple T-shirt repping Queens, N.Y.,'s DeVore Dance Academy) the singer also changed her stage personas. She shifted-shape from ragtime Hollywood tap dancer to drama queen performance artist to gangstress emcee almost leaning on her mic stand.
Often, Badu pushed her palms out to both sides, as if holding back collapsing walls or stumbling drunk down a hallway.
After a while she was no longer so precise with her movements. It seemed like she couldn't stop herself from dancing to her own music -- as affected as anyone entranced among the sold-out crowd. She started wiggling from the midpoints, with her knees together, going: "Back in the day when things were coo-ool ..."
"If you feel like I do, put your hands in the air and scream out your own damn name!" Badu hollered.
In the audience, the response came from from ladies in dashikis, old black guys in cowboy hats, hippie ravers, young California girls in sheepskin coats, men in blazers and white boaters, hopeful gangsters wearing embroidered jeans and (I'm not making this up) dozens of grannies in wheelchairs.
While snapping photos below the stage early on, I heard a shout from behind me. "Don't forget to take a picture of the chocolate honeys in the front row!" So I turned around and shot them too.
During a handful of songs, Badu turned impatient with the crowd response and shut down her backup. "No no no, you ain't b-boys and b-girls," she said. "They ain't ready to do that!" But during "Love of My Life" she focused on these same "chocolate honeys" at the right side of the stage who, apparently, were ready. She knelt in front of them and beckoned.
"Hey come here!" she said. "Freak y'all. And ya don't stop! And to the beat y'all, and ya don't quit!" Standing up again, Badu had to adjust her tights: "My ass is out y'all."
Between the voodoo-shaded lighting (purple-green-yellow), the wrought terra cotta latticework, and the Fox Theater's giant Egyptian Buddhas, the backdrop complimented the eerie mysticism that can color Badu's lyrics.
"Started with a rhyme from old ancient times/ Descendents of warlocks
witches with ill glitches/Children of the matrix be hittin' them car switches," she sang.
"They don't know their language/They don't know their God/They take what they're given/Even when it feels odd."
That was 2008's "Twinkle," the most recent song Badu gave us, which felt odd.
We might have gotten a preview of her coming album
New Amerykah Pt. 2: Return of the Ankh, dropping March 30. But Badu is greatly paranoid of her tracks l
eaking ahead of the scheduled release, and she drew heavily on hits from earlier records. In fact she played damn near her whole singles catalog, plus covers by Michael Jackson, N.W.A., blues legend Lightnin' Hopkins, and more.
She sang with a childlike lilt and the rasping smoothness of two pieces of paper brushing against one another, and jotted shuffling, snapping rhythms on a beat machine.
In the end, she bathed in the crowd's adoration, taking pictures with their cameras, handing her microphone to a couple fans (both of whom took the chance to say, "I love you Erykah"), and then getting back onstage to offer two parting words: "DAVE CHAPPELLE!"
Critic's Notebook
Personal Bias: If I can be an adolescent superfan for a minute... She played two of my favorite songs of all time! "Liberation" and "Humble Mumble" -- and they're not even her songs! Both are officially Outkast numbers, although she sings on each recording. In between, she shouted out her ex-boyfriend and first baby daddy: "André 3000, y'all!" There may have been teardrops on my notebook.
Random Detail: Is it really that hard to get the BART to run late on weekends? The Fox had to practically tear Badu from the stage so folks could get to the train before it closed. ("Somebody 'bout to get mad at me. Somebody 'bout to get really mad at me.") And even with some fans angling for exits, most of the crowd stayed chanting and clapping hoping for an old-school encore (you know, from when encores weren't routine charades) while the speakers blasted Dead Prez's "Hip Hop."
