Erykah Badu will make her sophomore appearance on the cover of The FADER’s 103rd issue, the 2016 April/May Producers issue. Her first appearance was in 2001, where she shared the cover with Bjork.
For the cover story, Badu talked with writer Vinson Cunningham and photographer Jody Rogac on the eve of her 45th birthday at her home in Dallas, Texas. In their interview, Badu discusses The Black Lives Matter movement, Donald Trump, her journey toward becoming a midwife, co-parenting with André 3000, and her newly launched independent record label, Control FreaQ.
On anticipating social unrest and the Black Lives Matter movement, she says,“I felt it coming on,” she says…“I was really feeling a strong affinity toward writing about what was going on around me. And I actually wrote about what’s happening right now in [2008’s New Amerykah Part 1]. So I don’t feel the need to write it now, because I got it out…We can organize like a motherfucker when police beat us up. But can we organize to stop black-on-black crime, or poor-on-poor crime? Because, you know, poor is the new black. You don’t have to be black now.”
On her recent Twitter controversy and relationship with social media, she says, “I was reporting, I was not supporting. It’s possible to understand the psyche behind behavior without condoning the behavior. I don’t have anything to apologize for. I don’t mean to take anything back…Expressing our pain and anger for something can make us very delicate. I’m very sensitive about it now—more than before. My whole objective is to create a dialogue.”
On living in Dallas and the city’s blues scene, she explains, “That’s my roots. We have a part of Dallas called Deep Ellum. Deep Ellum was a deep, rich blues part of town. It’s a dying art,” she says, but not at all wistfully. “It’s fine. It’s the way things are, and you evolve or you die.”
Read the rest of the cover story HERE.
