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Ask Erykah Badu to define Baduizm, the title of her debut album, and the 26-year-old R&B singer lifts her regal, turban-clad head and arranges her elegant features into a self-possessed smile. ''It's an expression of who I am as an artist and a being,'' she says. ''It's me singing from the abyss of my soul, sharing my energy and creativity. 'Izm' is slang in the ghetto for marijuana. So Baduizm is what gets me high -- and what should get you high.''

If record sales are any indication, there are a lot of folks trippin' out there. Two weeks ago, Baduizm entered the Billboard 200 chart at No. 2 -- an impressive position for even an established artist but an astonishing one for a music-industry virgin. The album was propelled, no doubt, by the sultry single ''On & On,'' a chart-topping R&B hit, and by the popular video for the single, a mini-drama inspired by the film The Color Purple, in which the striking Badu appears as both an Afrocentric entertainer in a juke joint and a poor, spirited woman with a fondness for mud baths.

Born Erica Wright, the Dallas native changed the spelling of what she calls her ''slave name'' in the late '80s, while majoring in theater studies at Louisiana's Grambling State University (she dropped out just before graduation), then later adopted the surname ''Badu,'' which, she says, means ''to manifest truth'' in Arabic. It is a search for truth that propels her songs, which are very much in the deeply sensual, nouvelle-soul tradition of post-hip-hop contemporaries like Maxwell and D'Angelo.

But the most distinctive aspect of Badu's music -- her lithe, tangy, sinuous voice -- bears an almost uncanny similarity to an artist of a bygone era: blues legend Billie Holiday. While Badu insists that Holiday wasn't a big influence, she accepts the comparison with typical grace and sass. ''Billie Holiday was able to touch listeners with a single note, a single phrase -- to make them feel her emotion from the inside out. If I'm doing that -- cool.''


Posted Mar 14, 1997 | Published in issue #370 Mar 14, 1997 | Order Article Reprints

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