Aida lets Erykah Badu take her into meditative worlds and asks herself why the self-doubt never stops.
You can hear her before she comes into the hall. Dozens of small bells jingle on her feet, and small golden leaves also clink quietly on her headgear. “I am a small woman, but I have a heavy step,” says Erykah Badu, trudging through the room where irritated but happy fans, journalists and influencers are lying on Japanese mats and waiting for her.
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Erykah Badu is in town and, as she says, just stopped drinking and smoking today. So it’s fitting that on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of electronic beats, she’s organizing a sound meditation for a handful of lucky people – although meditation is a broad term for the sounds that she’ll mix together a little later. Yes, one or two bells and singing bowl samples appear, but otherwise at least three songs by herself, and by friends like Thundercat and other companions and it sounds as if you are floating on a spaceship through the endless expanses of space and looking for the right station on an old radio. And don’t we all kind of do that? Rush through space on a huge spaceship?
Erykah Badu is now 54 years old and is undisputedly a living legend of pop – and yet there she is, standing in front of around 20 strangers, talking about imposter syndrome and insecurity before her set. And I ask myself: Does it never end?
A world of self-doubt
We live in a world that promotes constant comparison: on social media anyway, at work, in private life, everywhere. And with comparing comes the feeling of not being enough. Not doing enough, just being an impostor, self-doubt that can consume a person if you don’t manage to overcome it.
An Erykah Badu certainly has the love of generations of music fans, but she too is only human and has doubts – and how not, in a music world that spins faster and faster every day? She released her last mixtape ten years ago, the last real album fifteen years ago. A new one is supposed to appear this year, but that too has been postponed indefinitely. Meanwhile, she appeared on features alongside Teyana Taylor and BTS star RM, trained as a birth attendant and founded a weed brand. But in the fast-moving music world, being a living legend is no longer the safe haven it once was – even if Erykah Badu is certainly doing a lot better than newcomers could ever hope for today.
Meditate with Erykah Badu, Alicia Keys and Pantha du Prince
But music alone isn’t enough, so artists have to think of more: Badu, who led a sound meditation in Berlin for the second time ever – the first took place on a roof in Tokyo – has already produced an instrumental piece for the meditation app Headspace, and Alicia Keys has produced a whole three-week “meditation experience” with the US alternative medicine specialist Deepak Chopra. In Europe, the Hessian producer Pantha du Prince organized a creative retreat somewhere in an English castle with his Swedish colleague Sebastian Mullaert. And somehow it all makes sense: music has healing power, we are all stressed, we want to be more creative, we are looking for freedom in a hyper-digitalized life full of pressure, comparisons and self-doubt. So why not bring one and the other together? But at the same time, it also reveals several things: For musicians, music is no longer enough to live – and perhaps something has changed in our consumption of music, which suddenly has to be meaningful and usable. As meditation, as medicine, and not just as a value in itself.
Of course, Erykah Badu lives in her very own world, somewhere in similar spheres to Björk, between space and life down here on earth. And she has achieved a status where she can probably freely choose to do only what she wants. But none of this is enough to live free from self-doubt. And if even Erykah Badu has to deal with imposter syndrome, what hope is there for the rest of us?