Album Review: Erykah Badu-New Amerykah Part 2: Return of the Ankh

Posted On: March 29, 2010
Posted By: odeisel
Comments: 3

By Odeisel

The beauty of art is that your limitations can lift the limits of others’ experiences. Erykah Badu has always been an artist acutely aware of her identity musically. While her melody has evolved musically over the decade since her debut, she is rarely, if ever, outside herself vocally. She doesn’t venture outside of her range unless it’s for specific effect. Her choruses and vocal runs don’t really deviate from what you’ve always gotten from her. The difference comes with the lyrical depth and whatever aspect of her personality she wants to share.

On New Amerykah Part 2: Return of the Ankh, the rhythm is there in spades. The album is rich and layered with piano/key structure, guitar/bass pacing and loose vocal construction on the wings that snake in and out of the music. The songs alternate from verses that feel like extended chorus style runs like those present in “Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long,” to “Love,” which features a robotic intro that relents to a more traditional bassline-paced track buttressed by the same “Funky” sample from “Just Rhyming With Biz,” continues that style. The vocals are delivered in short, consistent bursts that don’t really piece together like a traditional song but it works.

The album opens with “20 Feet Tall” which finds her recovering from a breakup and regaining her confidence and self-worth. The title refers to the height of the walls her ex lover put up to keep her out as she questions what she did to push him away. As she gathers herself she rebuilds her self-esteem and that at her true height, she was tall enough to see over those walls.

The funky single “Window Seat” furthers her attempts to hurt in peace without the “how are yous” and annoying sympathy people give you when you hurt. “Agitation” opens with a Broadway style piano run but shortly opens up to grand, yet disjointed construction reflecting her addled mind state; her repeated “I’m bout to pull this thang out” opening the window to her anger.

“Umm Hmm” features a plunking key on the periphery of a robust bass and a majestic bridge that breaks the song up emotionally. Keyboard punctuation /pacing continues on “You Loving Me” which whimsically plays on the foolish blindness of love, particularly when the joke’s on someone else. Erykah teases :

You Lovin me…and I’m drivin your Benz/You lovin’ me…and I’m spendin’ your ends

You Lovin’ me…and I’m drinking your gin/ You loving me…and I’m fucking your friends

Similar in theme is “Get Money” which playfully apes the classic Junior Mafia track and ads some dope instrumentation, including lowering the key range for a measure to throw you off. The song is about those women on the paper chase, unbeknownst to the target _____(ball player, musician, drug dealer, dude with cheddar). With all the saccharine smoothness of a serpeant, Badu explains that she’ll “look like a model…do what she gotta do” to get up under you and get that bread. It’s chillingly honest to hear particularly from a woman’s prospective.

Ms. Badu bares her fangs on “Fall In Love (Your Funeral)” expressing what we all saw after her very public turnouts of Mr. 3 Stacks, and Mr. Lynn: falling in love with me will fuck your world up. “You’re gonna change jobs and change gods.” Her words not mine.

“Incense” opens with the plunking of strings and ambient space noises, giving that drifting on a cloud feeling associated with things you use incense to cover the scent of. Very amorphous, and not as fun or funky as the rest of the album.

“Out Of My Mind, Just In Time” finds Badu perhaps facing a moment of clarity as she embraces the emptiness of the impending breakup of one of those non relationship relationships. “I’m a recovering undercover/over lover recovering from a lover I can’t get over… and now my common law lover thinks he wants another” she laments over a bare piano about how much she would have given to him at his whim; a stark contrast to the minx present on a few of the earlier tracks. It just proves that no matter which side of the fence you stand, no one is immune to the heartbreak.

Art allows for personal interpretation. New Amerykah Part 2: Return of the Ankh is the narrative of a woman out of a relationship trying to be strong in the wrong ways to mend the hurt and trying to become predator rather than prey but realizing in the end that there is no escape from pain when you choose to put your heart on the line. Maybe you’ll hear something else, but this album is brilliant no matter how you take it.

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