Erykah Badu’s Spaceship is Black on Both Sides: The Unfollow Me Tour Lands at TD Garden.
Spirits beyond comprehension but within belief were present in abundance in the West End on July 7th; a holy Friday (following Eid Al-Adha the preceding week) reined supreme within TD Garden, as Yasiin Bey and Erykah Badu graced the stage, alighting from physical and metaphysical planes alike.
Before their arrival on Planet Earth (decamping, of course, from Afrika Bambataa’s Planet Rock), the Unfollow Me Tour’s DJ readied the landing stage; mixing records from ‘80s luminaries like Chaka Khan (“Ain’t Nobody”) and Roxbury’s own New Edition (“If It Isn’t Love”) set the temporal grounds for the 90s and 2000s records to follow.
Arena lights lowered slowly as an unidentified lanky, spry figure moved weightlessly over the stage spreading flower petals and performing bird calls in a naturalistic routine that felt like a calling card. He tagged ‘Oyster’ in handstyled graffiti lettering on the DJ’s set-up; the black-clad white-booted hero then lifted the microphone, his voice as easily identifiable as ever, and introduced himself in the fullness of his many names: Yasiin Dante Terrell Bey Smith (whose aforementioned calling card echos across records like ‘Peppas’, featuring Talib Kweli and Westside Gunn). Fittingly, he opened with ‘Auditorium’, from his 2009 album The Ecstatic, before communing with us re: peace, love, God, and reality’s primacy on ‘Priority’; at this moment, a bespectacled and sharply dressed man beside me, following a hushed conversation with his partner, leaned over to me to ask who was rapping.
Ever the understated, yet masterful, showman, Yasiin (fka Mos Def) was playful and motive through his entire set, breezing through a casual uprock and some easy house footwork while returning periodically to an almost childlike motif: spinning, with his arms askew, face up to the sky, as if soaking in the moment.
Bey enjoyed toying with our musical expectations; the Aretha Franklin sample that undergirds ‘Ms. Fat Booty’s score tickled and teased us, before Yasiin performed the lyrics of the record over Slum Village’s Fan-Tas-Tic Vol. 2 singles, ‘Fall In Love’ and ‘Players’. Backpacker fan-favorite and Chappelle Show-debuted ‘Close Edge’ came in via its main reference point, The Furious Five’s ‘The Message’ (a State of the Union concerned with the urban neglect facing Black cities and boroughs), before digging into his own ‘Hip Hop’ (a State of the Union concerned with the emotional neglect facing rap itself) — the concert would return to this point during Erykah’s set, bringing Yasiin back out to perform a medley of classics, amongst them The Message, interwoven with her love letter to Hip Hop (‘Love of My Life’).
Before departing us (briefly), Bey sang an unreleased, maternally dedicated record named ‘Kijani’ (a Swahili word which translates as ‘greenery’); we participated with him in performing the melody of his beautifully written call-and-response hook, questioning the value of beauty when considered against longevity, and against death. Offering a prayer to the most high, Yasiin closed on ‘UMI Says’: a doubling down on the motherly presence and a connection to the divine.
Stepping out for the intermission felt like both pause and play, a stay and a motion for continuance; paisley floral patterns, home-made knits, and earth tones abounded, concertgoers all attired in their versions and visions of Black comfortwear and milling about to buy Ho-Stopper sunglasses and hurriedly fill-up at concessions before the show resumed.
Erykah’s full live band, sans Erykah herself, re-opened the space with a directed jam session and played with a distinct P-funk feeling, as 3-dimensional projections of stars and circular geometries adorned the screen behind the band (the visualizations an evocation of 2000: A Space Odyssey, and Parliament’s Mothership Connection LP cover simultaneously). This gave way to a Fela Kuti-style Afrobeat portion, with African polyrhythm at play in the percussive work before the instrumentalists quieted and allowed the two percussionists to fill the arena with an almost discursive or conversational duet (one on hand drums, the other on a drum kit).
Erykah herself finally arrived 30 minutes later, from below, in a steam/cyber/diesel punk afro-retrofuturist attitude apparent in her witch-doctored outfit… as if she was visiting from a space and time beyond us as a practitioner of 31st century hoodoo; her opening track, my personal favorite from Baduizm, brought us to our feet to deliver “On&On,” before flowing naturally into “&On”, the reprise featured on Mama’s Gun.
Here, Badu officially welcomed us into the Unfollow Me tour with an encantation, serving as a reminder and an urging: “You don’t know what’s right for me, I don’t know what’s right for you”; “Mind ya business”; and “Leave that man’s bitch alone” were repeated ad redux as if attempting to bring these phrases into being.
Throughout the show, beginning with “&On” and especially including a Shalamar-esque rendition of “Other Side of the Game”, Badu’s performance pulled itself backwards towards 80’s mixes, a sense of polish added to the rougher, ‘soul’-ier recorded versions. Spacy swinging, grooves slowing and smoothing, echoing snaps, bouncy, shallow but voluminous bass playing, and big drum filling characterized much of the sonics.
Speaking of sonics, or maybe supersonics: space travel and technology became throughlines of the hour-and-a-half long set, from Erykah demonstrating her technical prowess with live programming of a drum machine, to the GPT-generated imagery which flanked Badu and depicted alienated Black women of the technically advanced future.
Erykah’s performance of “Window Seat” brought the show to one of its many climaxes; singing out her lines, “If anybody speak to Scotty, Tell him beam me up (beam me up)”, a whole laser array formed a conoid enclosure around Badu as a clear visual homage to Star Trek’s famed method of transporting people across boundless distances at the behest of a simple command. Celestiality as imagined in the context of love informed Badu’s delivery of Mama’s Gun standout track “Orange Moon”; the serendipity of the tawny gibbous lunar orbiter that would hang after the show in our night sky felt too on-the-nose.
Afro-indigenous spiritualities surfaced within the show as key touchpoints as well: Badu shook and twisted in movements approximating Yoruban river tributes or Cherokee rain dances, and made lyrical and visualization references to principles espoused by the Nation of Gods and Earths. As she performed AD 2000 towards the end of her show, before closing with Tyrone, a projection filled the space behind her illustrating towers being erected and demolished, (or built and destroyed, one of many phrases and concepts associated with the Nation’s Supreme Mathematics), while “On&On” at the start was filled with allusions to the Nation’s vision of the Black man and woman as God and Earth incarnate.
What really struck me in the daze of the concert’s let-out was the rootedness of Erykah’s performance; she was so in-tune that her aura conducted the entire space easefully, guiding not just the musical elements (e.g. directing a drummer’s solo via vocalizations, the rhythm imitating Erykah’s scats), but maybe even conversing with the heavens, urging them to manifest that orange moon.
Listen to Erykah Badu here!
Listen to Yasiin Bey here!
