In the almost six years since her last release, Badu seems no less fascinated by technology and the role it plays in shaping our lives and our futures (“Dial’Afreaq” opens with another robot voice, this one explaining the theory that cell phone frequencies are responsible for bees dying), but she’s also interested in combining that interest with the organic warmth that’s always been one of the defining characteristics of her vocals and instrumentation.

What took her two albums worth of material to explore the last time she put out new music is repurposed on But You Cain’t Use My Phone in just 37 minutes, though. But it’s not a backward-looking career retrospective that spends too much time on “Tyrone.” Badu is too weird to stay that consistent.

That punchline (“you better call Tyrone/ but you can’t use my phone“) is right there in the name of her latest release. Badu. “Tyrone,” the definitive single from her seminal 1997 live album, was a break-up jam built around a phone-based punchline about a boyfriend who needs to call his buddy Tyrone to help him move out. Phones, of course, go back deep as an artistic inspiration for Ms. Apparently inspired by her reinterpretation, Badu created ten other phone-themed tracks and released a mixtape. Why not?īadu’s But You Cain’t Use My Phone, released over Thanksgiving holiday, was inspired by her seven-minute take on Drake’s current radio hit “Hotline Bling.” Badu swaps out the song’s earworm hook of “she used to call me on my cell phone” for “you used to call me on my cell-u-lar de-vice at night,” then spends over a minute doing a spoken breakdown while playing the part of an increasingly bizarre voice answering service, before jumping right back into what it would mean when that hotline would bling.

She runs around Dealey Plaza naked, she names her kids amazing things, she stands up for herself. In the most recent episode of freewheeling antics, Badu released an entire mixtape out of nowhere that’s all about phones.

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