She has the almost-universal esteem of everyone who pays any attention to music, and so she’s got the artistic capital to make something as slight and, in its way, friendly as this. Badu has made titanic album-length statements before, and she has nothing left to prove. In a way, it’s great to hear her use that voice for something as focused and single-minded as this tape. Instead, she tiptoes around her beats, pinched and nasal, saying as much with a silent pause as another singer would with a huge gospel-style run. She’s a hell of a singer, but she never shows off her voice in any pyrotechnic way. Instead, they’re meditations on the theme - in that case, that Badu’s sex is so good that it can force you to stop looking at your phone and thus forsake the ultimate distraction of our historical moment.īadu’s voice is such a sly, slithering thing that she gets away with these incomplete songs, these insinuating sketches. Even the most complete tracks, like “ Phone Down,” aren’t fully constructed tracks. She builds an entire old-school electro-funk track out of what sounds like the Midnight Marauders robot-lady host’s voice. She takes sounds we haven’t heard in a while - the busy signal, the boo-doo-deet number-disconnected tone - and works them into her music.
The whole thing feels like an organic outgrowth of that one track, continuing its mission of dancing around the idea of telephones and what they mean. It’s like the experience of recording that got her thinking about phones, about outmoded technology and the constant human need for connection.
The whole tape feels like an outgrowth of the gender-inverted “Hotline Bling” freestyle/cover that she posted on SoundCloud last month. But for Badu, it works, since Badu is the type of artist who seems to communicate mostly via private joke. In almost anyone else’s hands, the whole concept would seem slight, hackneyed, undercooked. So: This isn’t some moment-defining masterpiece, and it has no aims at becoming one. (It is, to be fair, a remarkable Drake impression.) I’m fairly certain that Badu brought him in as some sort of private Drake-based joke. The rapper in question is ItsRoutine, from Atlanta, and he seems to have built an entire mini-career from sounding exactly like Drake. Badu even gets some guy who sounds so much like Drake that I thought it was Drake at first to rap over those drums. Telephone Man,” the Isley Brothers’ “Hello,” Todd Rundgren’s “Hello, It’s Me,” her own “Tyrone.” The “Hotline Bling” drums - those weird sad empty mechanized salsa blips that Drake sampled from Timmy Thomas’ “Why Can’t We Live Together” - return again and again, a mournful theme. Badu incorporates bits and pieces of “Hotline Bling” and a handful of other phone-themed hits: Usher’s “U Don’t Have To Call,” New Edition’s “Mr. The songs here mostly aren’t full-fledged songs they’re sketches, or allusions. “Mixtape” is just the word that best describes what this is: A loose collection of thoughts, built around the same theme but not really organized. It’s not really a mixtape, either, at least in the way that we usually use the term. It’s still her last album, since But You Caint Use My Phone isn’t really an album.
But we’ll never know, exactly, since Badu is way too slippery of an artist to ever come out and tell us.īadu’s last album was New Amerykah Part Two (Return Of The Ankh), the second in a sprawling and ambitious two-album avant-funk project, one that refracted the entire history of American soul music through a strange and intensely personal prism. Maybe that’s what Erykah Badu was thinking about when she made But You Caint Use My Phone, her new mixtape. Even as we’ve stopped using our phones as phones, we’ve got this increasingly tortured and needy relationship with them. Watching my kids chase each other around a playground is one of life’s primal pleasures, and yet I have to keep reminding myself to not look at my phone while I’m doing it.
Now, the lazy joke is that teenagers, and parents, and everyone else, are constantly staring, unblinking at their phones. What does that mean? And what does it mean that all of us are now walking around with access to the complete history of human knowledge in our pockets? Only a decade or two ago, the lazy joke about teenagers was that they were always talking on their phones kids today would seem like charming retro anachronisms if they did that. Two of the biggest songs of the last few months - Adele’s “Hello” and Drake’s “Hotline Bling” - are about, among other things, calling people on the telephone, which is something that almost nobody does anymore.
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