In addition to making music and writing books, I also spent fifteen years interviewing some of the world’s greatest artists for various publications. I’d like to share some of my favorite things they told me.
When I called Erykah Badu for our interview in 2010, no one answered. I was promised thirty minutes by phone, and I watched that time tick and tick and tick away, desperately trying to get ahold of her publicist. When Badu finally called me back, she said, “I have fifteen minutes.”
I was supposed to turn this into a cover feature for my favorite magazine, Wax Poetics. I was off to a terrible start.
But Badu is, after all, the woman who once said the concept of time is for white people. We ended up talking for forty-five minutes. She was charming, funny, and thoughtful. She teased me when she didn’t like my questions. It was one of my favorite moments as a journalist, because I love Erykah Badu.
There are artists I like, and artists I love, and artists I listen to and think, “Everyone in the world needs to hear this right now.” Badu is all three. It’s not just her music. It’s her whole thing. She’s too much of everything: too talented, too beautiful, too weird, too indefinable. She inspires me.
Not long after the magazine hit the stands, Wax Poetics hired Badu to DJ a party at Le Poisson Rouge on Bleecker St. in New York City. They invited me, and since I was researching my book on Curtis Mayfield at the time, I decided to fly from Florida to New York and kill two birds.
In the morning, I interviewed Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz, who threw the 1990 concert at which a freak gust of wind knocked a giant light tower right onto Curtis Mayfield’s head, paralyzing him from the neck down. In the evening, I went to LPR and watched Badu, aka DJ Lo Down Loretta Brown, spin for a few hours. And a few more. And a few more. By two in the morning, I couldn’t feel my feet. By two-thirty, I wanted to go home. But I had met WP’s head editor there, and he told me I might get to meet her after the set. By three, I wondered how long could a DJ set last. How much music is there?
Fifteen minutes later, she spun her last disc, and I was ushered into a small back room, where I gave Erykah Badu a copy of the cover feature I had written on her, and she gave me a hug, and I told her I thought New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh) was her best work yet. “I love it,” I said. “I love you too,” she said.
I know she misheard me, but that’s okay. I told you, I love Erykah Badu. And now I know she loves me too.
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