Well, it’s been several weeks since this album came out to mostly positive or even glowing reactions. So in the place of focusing on the already well-covered arc of New Amerykah Pt. II, I will don my Girlpants Track Glasses™ – recently recovered from Jason’s dangerous clutches (I had to crawl through a really long tunnel to get them, which I hate, and which really flared up my mildew allergy, thanks) – and narrow in on a couple of songs in order to better illuminate.
“Turn Me Away (Get Munny)” is the album’s blithe six-minute persistence pastiche: the “can’t turn me away” refrain is the hook, and along with the wah bass, it comes from the 1980 Sylvia Striplin jam. Their voices may be similarly golden, but Badu’s remake is way less wistful, lyrically focusing on the materials of love’s clichés: “Can’t lie to you honey. I / just want your money”, and “I’ll cook like your mother” and “I’ll do what I gotta”. The song’s narrator may be a lover, but she’s not a fool. She is aware that swag is sexy – which is the reason the multiple nods to Notorious B.I.G and the obvious blip from Junior M.A.F.I.A’s Striplin-sampling hit “Get Money” work so well. The result is a layered, smooth, sexy song that feels all new despite its retro roots.
Immediately following that –and separated only by a bit of dialogue about phoning “that other bass player” – is “Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long,” the aforementioned song’s fraternal mood twin. Neither is the evil twin, exactly: the Baby in the song seems to be on his way somewhere, and the protagonist gets that it’s hustle– (and therefore money-) related, but acknowledges she will miss him. The songs are strikingly similar, and, along with the video single “Window Seat,” are the album’s most accessible song-wise, sprawling less laterally than the rest of the album.
Erykah Badu — “Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long”
These two songs mark the central part of the album – which is lyrically and sonically its most emblematic. Beyond this, the song structure changes, the songs lengthen (“Love” at six minutes) and lessen (“You Loving Me (Session)”, at one minute), but never fail to hover around the theme: love is kind of fucked up, but mostly pretty, but it’ll disillusion you, but you probably still can’t stay away because it’s chemically programmed within you.
And as in the controversial video for “Window Seat” (available on her website) in which Badu stoically strips naked in one long shot, this album is personal and bare. But unlike the video’s end, in which the nude protagonist is quickly and anticlimactically assassinated by an invisible threat, New Amerykah Pt. II keeps sending out gorgeous tendrils, never coming to a clear stop. The last track, “Out My Mind, Just In Time,” goes on for ten minutes; as such a long piece, it purposefully morphs in structure many times. This means that the last track is effectively a long hallway of peeks into the rooms of earlier songs in the sequence: idling meditations on the walls we build with our refusals to abandon identity as an “undercover over-lover.” Some reviewers have called this album scattered for the grandiose treatment it gives its most central theme. But this is a love album, and as such, it doesn’t really end. Instead, Badu gives us a somewhat melancholy but still Edenic outro: a pass through the back door, a final piano jingle like a wave of the fingers, unthreatening and subtle.
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