In early 1997, a 25-year-old Erykah Badu glided onto the set of BET talk show “Planet Groove” flanked by her backup singers and immediately started lighting incense. “Planet Groove” had attracted some of the era’s biggest hip-hop and R&B stars, from Missy Elliott to Mariah Carey, but none had done it quite like Badu. She hadn’t yet released her debut, but sitting on the show’s couch sipping a cup of tea, the Dallas native’s vision seemed fully formed. This image of her—a Nag-Champa-burning, herbal-brew-sipping free spirit in a goldenrod head scarf—is the definitive one, an avatar for her artistry.
“It’s an expression of me and the way I feel,” she told “Planet Groove” host Rachel Stuart of her forthcoming album. “Badu is my last name, ‘izm’ is what should get you high and Baduizm [is] the things that get me high. Lighting a candle, loving life, knowing myself, knowing my creator, loving them both ... Using my melanin. Using my power, to get to where I need to go to do the creator’s work—that’s what I’m here for. And I’m still fly.”
When Baduizm debuted on February 11, 1997, it was just as she had described, jam-packed with concepts that spoke to a higher consciousness. Lead single “On & On,” the song that first brought her to wider public attention, makes several references to the teachings of the Five Percent Nation, a cultural movement grounded in the belief that all black people are divine. A core part of the Five-Percenter doctrine revolves around the idea of the black man as God. But Baduizm was more concerned with the empowered black woman, putting her work, relationships, family values, and quest for knowledge under the lens.
The album’s melodies and instrumentation reflected a range of influences, most notably jazz, soul, hip-hop, and R&B. Blended as they were on Baduizm, the result was branded as neo-soul, a concept attributed to record exec and D’Angelo manager William “Kedar” Massenburg. He signed Badu to her first label deal and released Baduizm on Kedar Entertainment, his imprint via Universal Records. Massenburg was already marketing D’Angelo as an alternative R&B artist when an early Badu demo landed in his lap, and “Erykah [was] a natural for me to follow that blueprint,” he boasted to Billboard.
Ostensibly, the neo-soul tag was little more than an exercise in branding: take something that already exists, dress up the packaging, and sell it as a new idea. The lines between jazz, soul, R&B, and hip-hop have always been blurred, so Baduizm could be indebted as much to Roy Ayers as to Brandy (an artist that Badu herself called an inspiration for her debut). But neo-soul came to represent a higher-minded alternative to the R&B ruling the airwaves in 1997, led by the likes of Toni Braxton, En Vogue, BLACKstreet, and Keith Sweat. Taking notes from the smooth soul singers of the ’70s and ’80s, neo-soul artists homed in on instrumentation and narrative construction, typified on albums like Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite or Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. 1.
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, dedicated music scholar and multi-instrumentalist, expressed skepticism about neo-soul’s angle early on. Thompson, who did production and session work on Baduizm with his band the Roots, recalled his hesitation to Touré in Vibe: “The last thing I said to Erykah when we finished her album was, ‘Don’t you wanna sell any units? You got a chance: You sing. Stop tryin’ to be so artsy.’ I said, ‘It’s brilliant, but it’s not gonna do anything.’ I thought the marketplace wasn’t ready.” To which Badu apparently retorted: “Watch. You’ll See.”
Baduizm debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart to widespread critical acclaim. It went triple platinum, achieving a million sales within two months of its original release. Badu breached music’s mainstream arena and emerged victorious, walking away from the 1998 Grammys with trophies for Best R&B Female Vocal Performance (“On & On”) and Best R&B Album. For the latter award, she beat out Mary J. Blige, Babyface, and even Whitney Houston—all stalwarts of “conventional” R&B up to that point.
The album’s success was a boon for neo-soul, which Massenburg capitalized on by retrofitting earlier works (D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar; Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite) with his label and guiding the careers of future stars like India.Arie. If there was ever a chance that neo-soul would truly outpace traditional R&B, Baduizm made the case for it as a critically and commercially viable entity, not a niche genre, before blockbuster works like The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and D’Angelo’s Voodoo blew the roof off the discourse. For several years after Baduizm’s release, the Grammys’ R&B performance categories were flooded with neo-soul nominees, even after the genre’s mainstream apex.
The album’s success also presaged some difficult questions around the issue of categorization. The idea of genres in music lies at the heart of a perennial battle between artists and critics. At its best, categorization can help to inform interpretation of a work by placing it among both aesthetic predecessors and contemporaries. At its worst, it can limit critical discussion in such a way that denies an artist credit for their own intentions.
In the summer of 1997, when Badu visited “Later… With Jools Holland,” she explained how soul and hip-hop were the predominant sounds of her childhood, before emphatically describing hip-hop as “the culture that [she is] from.” In the two decades since her debut, a substantial part of the Badu narrative has revolved around her romantic involvement with some of hip-hop’s most notable stars, like André 3000 and Common. But her early work in particular is rarely celebrated for exemplifying rap’s essence in the vocal styling and cadence (“Appletree”), and for influencing rappers like Mos Def (who sampled Badu on Black on Both Sides). One can’t help but wonder if this has to do with a marketing ploy that, while intended to support and contextualize Badu’s music, came to define her beyond her control.
When a trend grows old, it’s easy to dismiss the concept for reasons unrelated to quality. In neo-soul’s case, it’s more that the mainstream moved towards pop-tinged R&B hybrids in the early 2000s—music that was more concerned with carefree exuberance than social consciousness. Several neo-soul devotees got knocked off course when the tide turned, but this liberated artists like Badu to establish themselves as creative forces separate from the genre they once represented. She may at one point have been taken with the neo-soul association, but has since claimed that she was never a big fan of the term itself. “Nowadays it seems appropriate to omit the ‘neo,’” wrote Kelefa Sanneh in his 2016 New Yorker profile of Badu, “not because her music has grown more old-fashioned but because it has grown harder to categorize, and maybe even easier to enjoy.”
Erykah Badu’s role in neo-soul made her a visionary of the modern soul revival, and it’s an influence that reverberates still through Janelle Monàe, Solange, D.R.A.M., and many more. But more than just representing a moment in time, Badu emerged from the neo-soul haze unscathed, with a classic debut firmly in her pocket and an unwavering drive to inspire and create. That’s what she’s here for. And she’s still fly.