When Erykah Badu found out that her friend and collaborator J Dilla passed away in February 2006, her mind reeled. The producer was just 32, felled by a rare blood disease that clogged his body with clots and a case of lupus that caused his immune system go haywire. Badu thought of a story Dilla's mother told her about her son's dying days, when she would find him having conversations with an unseen companion. One time, when she asked him who he was talking to, he said it was Ol' Dirty Bastard, who had died in 2004. As Badu recounted years later, Dilla explained to his mom: “He was telling me what bus to get on when I cross over. He said, ‘Don’t get on the red bus, get on the white bus. The red bus looks fun, but that’s not the one.’” That memory inspired Badu to write a song called "Telephone", which starts: "Telephone, it's Ol' Dirty/ He wants to give you directions home/ Said it won't be too long."
"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. 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. 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. As an extension of ourselves, phones can be heartbreaking, lustful, smart, dumb, noisy, distracting, powerful.
But 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. 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. 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". "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.
But 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. Another relatively unknown new artist Badu brought on for the project, rapper ItsRoutine, doesn't come off as well. 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.
Badu, 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. It's a nostalgic stance from someone who became famous a decade before the introduction of the iPhone, but it can also be convincing. "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.
And yet. 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. In the late '90s, Badu and Dre were a much-celebrated hip-hop couple, a model of black enlightenment and creativity. They broke up after a few years but remained close, and André famously apologized to Badu's mother on OutKast's "Ms. 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. As their duet fades out here, both voices come together, and the conversation keeps going.
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