Analog Girl in a Digital World Erykah Badu’S Vocal Negotiations of the Human

ERIK STEINSKOG Analog Girl in a Digital World Erykah Badu’s Vocal Negotiations of the Human Introduction The lyrics to the song “… & On” from Erykah Badu’s 2000 album Mama’s Gun con- tains the line an “analog girl in a digital world,” a phrase Marlo David calls “the central metaphor with which to explore humanist and post-human subjectivities.”1 When Badu came on the music scene she was understood in relation to the subgenre of “neo-soul,” but, in understanding the analog girl in a digital world, a broader cultural context is important. Technological developments are an integrated dimension of the production of popular music and one key dimension of the discourse from the late 1980s on was the continual process of digitalization. What I mean by the use of the term digitalization is how the digital became ever-present, from the personal computer to the Internet and cell phones, but also as an important tool for the production of music, both with synthesizers and with production technology. In other words, the technological context of a musical artist is part of the background on which she is read and understood. Badu’s text-line, however, points to an inher- ent opposition within this fi eld. The world is a digital one, but the girl mentioned is still analog. What does such an opposition or dichotomy says about the relation between humans and their world in general? The digitalization going on in the world changes the world, and thus our relationship to it, and the interaction with technology also alters human beings’ possibilities of engagement on different levels. The ubiquity of technology, in different forms, can lead to us not paying attention to these changes, as they are gradual. As such, Badu’s statement points to what could be seen as an unsolved dilemma. If the analog is to be protected in the midst of digitalization, as could be one way of reading her musical statements, this leads to ques- tions of how we relate to technology, including how we resist technology in some determinist sense. In this article, I want to discuss what I will refer to as “the black posthuman” in African-American popular music, with a particular focus on Badu. Dealing with the posthuman, I will also bring in the discourse on afrofuturism as exemplifi ed by writ- ers and cultural critics Mark Dery and Kodwo Eshun. Particularly in Eshun’s version of afrofuturism there seems to be a focus on the posthuman as a way of being “post- 1 Marlo David, “Afrofuturism and Post-Soul Possibilities in Black Popular Music,” African American Re- view 41/4 (2007), 695-707, 697. DANISH MUSICOLOGY ONLINE SPECIAL EDITION, 2016 • ISSN 1904-237X SPECIAL EDITION · 2016 17TH NORDIC MUSICOLOGICAL CONGRESS 108 Erik Steinskog soul” and thus moving beyond – in some historical sense – the period of soul. Post- soul here could also be seen as being after the Civil Rights Movement, making it a generational marker. This way of being post-soul would include, then, attitudes of blacks born after the Civil Rights Movement, and in some ways also the attitudes of the hip hop generation.2 Such a generational view stands, in one sense, in contrast to the understanding of afrofuturism, as afrofuturism seems to want to break with linear time. At the same time, historical linearity is very much part of understanding of culture, and one can hardly manage to think without some kind of orientation in time and space. What could, perhaps, be done in relation to Badu, however, is to see the prefi xes “neo-“ and “post-“ as marking different ways of relating to the past, as repetition and moving beyond, or, perhaps even as repetition and difference, as a reiteration of what Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) called “the changing same.”3 Soul, Neo-soul, Post-soul When Erykah Badu made her recording debut, Baduizm, in 1997, she was immediately hailed as “the queen of neo-soul.” As a category, neo-soul obviously references soul, and thus records a kind of repetition. In many reviews, the sound of neo-soul was de- scribed as organic or through the use of other metaphors signifying life, and it could sound as if Badu – and others such as D’Angelo and Maxwell – reinstated life into a musical culture based on machines. That such an understanding is limited, however, almost goes without saying, as neo-soul obviously also related to hip hop, one of the musical styles/genres based, in one sense at least, on machines. From such a perspec- tive one could, perhaps, argue for a relation within neo-soul that is formed from a combination of the human and the machine, for some kind of merger between the two rather than continuing to see them in opposition. The notion of neo-soul is interesting for a number of reasons. The term is primarily associated to the end of the 20th century and there is a kind of millennial vibe in its reference. This also has to do with the history of black popular music and it is diffi cult not to hear the term as being in some kind of opposition to both the hip hop and the R&B heard around the same time. As a generational term, however, there are huge similarities between the artists understood as neo-soul and the hip hop generation, perhaps nowhere better shown than in the Soulquarians collective. These similarities are also heard in the music produced and, in that sense, neo-soul continues a tradi- tion found in the 1990s in hip hop and R&B where musical features moved between the two genres. A band like The Roots, for example, could easily be seen as related to the neo-soul movement, as is testifi ed way beyond the year 2000 with Questlove’s 2 Bertram Ashe, “Theorizing the Post-Soul Aesthetic: An Introduction,” African American Review 41/4 (2007), 609-623, Bakari Kitwana, The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African Amer- ican Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 3 LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music), in Black Music (New York: Akashic Books, 2010 (originally published in 1968)), 205-241. Cf. also Paul Gilroy, “Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity, and the Challenge of the Changing Same,” Black Music Research Journal 11/2 (1991), 111-136. SPECIAL EDITION – 17TH NORDIC MUSICOLOGICAL CONGRESS · 2016 Analog Girl in a Digital World – Erykah Badu’s Vocal Negotiations of the Human 109 presence on albums by both Badu and D’Angelo. Badu’s relationship with André 3000 from OutKast is not only a personal relationship but also points to musical collabora- tions and, it could be argued, shows one possible entry point to discussing Badu related to afrofuturism – where OutKast often is referenced.4 Neo-soul, however, and also, quite literally, references both a seemingly bygone age and its renaissance: “a new soul.” In that sense, the music refers back to the past, as if an important issue is to reinstate something found in soul that, one feels, is perceived as lost. In that sense, there is some kind of repetition at stake. With neo-soul understood as building on musical elements from R&B, hip hop, jazz, and other musical styles, there is an important dimension for interpretations in how aesthetic and cultural contexts seemingly exist beyond or before the different styles or genres. In other words, there is a generalized discourse on black music available. Similar elements are at stake within the afrofuturist discourse, even if there has been a tendency to focus upon a kind of avant- garde lineage of artists and styles. Much of this interpretation is about how to understand “soul.” Kodwo Eshun is probably the writer who is most “anti-soul,” seemingly eager to get beyond soul, or beyond anywhere where “soul” is valued above any other components. In this he uses the notion of “post-soul,” but he takes this notion even further than, for example, Nelson George does, where George primarily uses “post-soul” as a term for art and artists from the time after the Civil Rights Movement as well as, ar- guably, a particular black form of postmodernism.5 Such a particular black understanding also makes sense related to Alexander Weheliye’s interpretation of “the posthuman” within black popular music culture. Following Eshun, but also arguing against him, We- heliye claims that, for black artists, “the posthuman” can never mean quite the same as it could within the primarily white cybertheory of the 1980s and 1990s, and this has to do with the contested dimension of the category of “the human” within the history of blacks in the US.6 Eshun would not necessarily disagree, and also points to how blacks were understood as only 3/5 human, but his solution is different from Weheliye’s.7 For Eshun, and here he seems to be following Sun Ra, the solution is to bypass the very category of the human, to become superhuman or posthuman, preferably on another plan- et. Weheliye on the other hand argues that the presence of the human within the black posthuman is not simply nostalgia, but also an affi rmation of humanity. Weheliye’s examples are different than mine, but it makes sense to see Erykah Badu localized in the midst of this, as a singular negotiation between the past, the present, and the future, as claiming her musical and racial heritage while making up-to-date music, as constantly moving between the past and the possible future.

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