The Assassination of Erykah Badu

It's not just a video. It's art.

The Assassination of Erykah Badu
by Rebecca Walker

The frenzy over the latest Erykah Badu video, "Window Seat," has been fascinating to watch--a cultural phenom in itself. Folks in the blogosphere have been grasping for answers, for the magic decoder to come down from on high. What on earth is Erykah trying to say? Is it a publicity stunt? Is being shot on the grassy knoll another portrait of a tragic artist? Has the black, female president of the United States of Amerykah just been assassinated? Or, if she staged the "shoot" herself, is it a suicide?

I had some of the same questions, but was more struck by the prevailing need to pin down an ultimate truth, or at least a definitive opinion. It made me think about great artists--not de facto including Erykah in this category--and how they often have their own, sometimes incomprehensible, language. Davinci's Mona Lisa is still indecipherable, for example, and if it were not, its power would be lost. Modern art itself would be dead, or at least returned to its vainglorious Medici roots.

Because doesn't art too easily understood cease to be art? It becomes a simple product for easy consumption, and robs the viewer of the right to their own experience, all the while upholding values possibly not even in their own best interest. In that other world--the world, perhaps, of entertainment--each painting, video, and piece of music, is a piece of propaganda for those who control its production; an opportunist vehicle to affirm someone else's way of looking at the world.

Like Roy DeCarava and Charlie Mingus, Eva Hesse and Ana Mendieta, Erykah Badu, aka @fatbellybella, strikes me as someone who lives in a sealed world of her own linguistic creation. She absorbs the bits that speak to her and runs it through the sieve of her own sensibility--an extremely specific (and ultimately proprietary) way of seeing. As Erykah's tattoo acknowledges, her alchemical interface with the world is ever changing, but her commitment to her inner truth, accessibility be damned, is where her process of transforming the ordinary into the transcendent begins.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root