Amerykah coffee
Festival Couleur Café 2012
The beautifully talented Erykah Badu appeared on the Couleur Café Festival stage with the air of a true queen. The audience were waiting for her during more than forty minutes but when she finally started to sing all the bad thoughts disappeared. Her latest album New Amerykah Part Two: Return Of The Ankh shows her so creative and sensual as ever, and the audience was expecting for experiencing live all that sensuality.
The album was released in 2010 counting in the production tasks with talented people like J Dilla, Questlove, James Poyser, Madlib, 9th Wonder, Sa-Ra, Georgia Anne Muldrow and Karriem Riggins besides Erykah Badu who is also the co-writer of all the album tracks. It’s a piece deeply linked to her love relationships so far from its more social predecessor New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) released in 2008. The main musical aspect is its analogue recording process, giving it a non-temporal sound, with some reminiscing details from the seventies. Time goes by but creativity achieves an everlasting destination when one is able to rescue from the past things that viewed from the present eyes become newer than ever. And she did, using some analogue instruments like harps, piano, drums and even a theremin. The result is simply wonderful. Window seat and Turn me away (get MuNNY), the promo singles, are powerful, and themes like Gone Baby, Don't Be Long, including a sample from Paul McCartney’s Arrow Through Me from 1979, is sensual to delight.
Her Couleur Café show started with a long delay and she looked really tired, but the band was so great that their magnificent sound and the party spirit of the audience turn her up achieving finally a really intense performance. Songs like Love of my life show her in a slow rhythm but it didn’t sound as sensual as the audience could expect. Fortunately, when songs like Danger and Glock arrived, full of energy and hard lyrics, Erykah demonstrated she’s a real queen on stage. Her voice got into the mind of the audience and they danced along completely seduced under the Brussels sky.
Photo courtesy of Couleur Café Festival www.couleurcafe.be
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