Give that woman a TED talk.
The divine Ms Erykah Badu certainly left a lasting impression after her Good Vibes set in Sydney yesterday. It’s been a long time coming for the freak-soul queen of a myriad names and multiple reinventions, who touched down in Australia this week for the first time ever in her fifteen-year career. Intent on making the most of her clearly enraptured audience, Badu not only hit the stage late but stayed on way past her scheduled time, throwing organisers into chaos when she decided, impromptu, to make a lengthy political speech about occupation in the middle of her last song.
Referencing dispossesed peoples all over the globe, Badu took the crowd on a long and somewhat bewildering journey through her vision of the world, (“Occupation is when people come on your land, the land that you’ve been born on, worked on, lived on, made love on, married on…and say ‘Fuck you, your mother and anyone who looks like you, this land ain’t yours anymore.’”) including a historical lesson about the left-wing Zapatista Revolution of 1994.
“And the funny thing about that, was that the soldiers looked exactly like the people,” she wrapped, preaching freedom, love and unity while completely ignoring Good Vibes organisers and launching back into the second verse – which went for another ten minutes. But with a voice like that, it didn’t seem like anybody at the packed-out stage seemed to mind, especially given that Good Vibes lived up to it’s reputation of being the most consistently rained-out festival in Sydney’s history.
Badu was pulled back on stage for a dance during Nas and Damian Marley‘s equally politically-inspired set, which featured a bit too much of Bob’s son and not enough of God’s son. They too decided to go into overtime, with a cracking rendition of Marley Snr’s classic ‘Could You Be Loved.’
In case you were wondering, there were also probably some drug arrests, too.
(Photo credit: Gavriel Maynard)
