Erykah Badu

At the Commodore Ballroom on Friday, June 6

Prior to this year, Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill, arguably their generation’s most compelling female pop stars, had released just one full-length album between them this decade. In their absence, urban pop has rested largely in the hands of coquettish schoolgirls and ringtone beatmakers who think R & B stands for robotic and bland.

Although there’s no end in sight to Hill’s bizarre hiatus, Badu has returned in all her glory with New Amerykah Part One (4th World War), a candlelit tour through her labyrinthine inner world. Where the singer-producer debuted, with 1997’s Baduizm, as a kind of new-age high priestess, she’s returned this year as a revolutionary mystic, with New Amerykah documenting her tangled theses on genetic mapping, Louis Farrakhan, and the very nature of God.

When she strode on-stage for the first of two performances last Friday at the Commodore Ballroom, Badu had ditched the regal African gowns and brilliant headwraps of her Baduizm phase for an outfit inspired by both the Black Panthers and the Union of Used Car Salesmen. Wearing a black-and-red-checked blazer, a crimson shirt, and a black tie, Badu was a comical but strangely radiant vision, her ensemble capped off by an enormous Afro wig that almost doubled her height.

Backed by a competent-but-unspectacular six-piece band and four hot-as-hell singers in stylized Aunt Jemima outfits, the singer kicked off with “My People”, a minor-key, two-chord vamp from New Amerykah, during which she leaned over a synthesizer and traced out a constellation of lustrous tones. From there she segued into “The Healer”, the dark heart of her new album, not so much a fully formed song as a sparse, rhythmic basis for her sung-spoken observations about rap, religion, and rap-as-religion—all punctuated by Badu’s dramatically clapping together a set of tuning forks at song’s end.

New Amerykah is a daring achievement, but its creeping formlessness and claustrophobic atmospheres will likely tire all but the most devoted of Badu’s admirers. Sensing this, the singer leavened the new material by scattering her past triumphs throughout the 90-minute set, acing the flinty Billie Holiday–isms of “On & On” and turning 1997’s boy-you-done-me-wrong anthem “Tyrone” into a full-throated sing-along for all the ladies in the house.

By the show’s midpoint, Badu had succeeded in turning the Commodore into Vancouver’s premier juke joint. After airing a ’50s-era Bo Diddley song from her laptop (and pouring out a sip from her teacup for the recently departed bluesman), she fastforwarded to the 1980s, pounding out beats on her drum machine and offering an impression of what Donna Summer might have sounded like as produced by Afrika Bambaataa.

Badu is calling this her Vortex tour, and it’s an appropriate name; by the time she concluded with the vinyl-crackling retro-funk of New Amerykah’s “Honey”, the Texan had succeeded in synthesizing just about every strain of African-American music into a single whirling whole, making it impossible to pick out the rhythm & blues from all the genres that have sprung up in its wake. This, perhaps, is how Badu defines 21st-century R & B: as the grand, churning conflation of every musical impulse she’s ever had.