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February will mark the ten-year anniversary of Erykah BadusNew Amerykah Part One.
The refrain revitalized the pro-black meaning of the wordwoke a usageintroduced in the mid-20th century for a new generation.
It wasclaimed by Black Lives Matter activistswhose prowess at organizing online sent it soaring around social media.
Among that cohort, wokeness has becomesomething to strive for and to perform.
But Badu puzzled many people last week by seeming not to get it.
Theres even a stump speech.
Its Howard Beales mad as hellspeech.
Badu updates it slightly, but the essence is unchanged.
The rant ends with an appeal to emotion:
I want you to get angry!
I dont want you to riot.
I dont want you to protest.
I dont know what to do about the recession and the inflation and the crime in the street.
All I know is, that youve got to get mad.
Youve got to say, Im a human being, damn it!
My life has value!
And, after shitting on other leaders, shes prone to positioning herself as one.
On the song Me, Badu disavows authority figures; on the track that immediately follows, My People.
she seizes the pulpit, calling her brothers and sisters to arms in the fight against inequality.
The albums popularity ensured that these messages were widely heard.
In hisFaderprofile, Cunningham noted Badus tendency to take what he characterized as surprisingly conservative positions.
Art, for Badu, begins with the individual voice, however heterodox.
Theology becomes a kind of Rosetta stone that allows us to understand the shared tendencies of all revolutionaries.
The Russian revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks, were avowed atheists.
And yet, it is easy for Nathans to draw links between their behavior and Christian practices.
The analogies apply just as well to the rituals and goals of wokeness.
The word itself suggests a religious awakening, a conversion from ignorance to wisdom.
Acknowledging ones privilege comes to sound like confession.
New Amerykah Part 2begins with a parable about a wall.
But its not a populist polemic.
The wall that Badu envisions herself overcoming has been erected by a single person.
The album continues in this vein: private, personal.
Badu described the record toThe New Yorkerwriter Kelefa Sanneh as creative, artistic, flowing, watery, feminine.
Theres that Pisces again.
It never devised resonant communist rituals to mark birth, marriage, and death.
Being woke is inherently public, inherently social.
We cannot ask our iconoclasts to be iconoclastic only when convenient for us.
