Erykah Badu feat. Questlove: "Window Seat"

Single bullet theory meets single take theory. Erykah Badu tweets, "[S]hot guerilla style, no crew, one take, no closed set, no warning, two minutes, in downtown Dallas, then ran like hell... I was afraid. But I was ready.'"

@Questlove adds, "People were so stunned they forgot to break out camera phones."

I love it, and I love her. Brava. Pure punk rock. The blue text that oozes out of her head at the end reads GROUPTHINK. If anyone involved is reading, I'd love to hear what y'all shot on.

The album on which this track appears, New Amerykah Part II: Return of the Ankh, is out this Tuesday.

Erykah Badu - Window Seat
(YouTube via Okayplayer / Directed by Erykah Badu, Coodie and Chike / Song produced by the Soulquarians.)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Anonymous

Anybody remember the superbowl where a black woman had her breast exposed by her fellow performer causing all kinds of controversy?

Erykah strips off and then gets shot down. I think it is a comment on America’s reaction to public nudity.
Anonymous

Can anyone remember a female singer who did a similar video in the 90s without taking her clothes off, walking through a city?
Anonymous

Just speculation here…but it’s probably shot on a Canon 5d Mark II
Anonymous

Down the street, and right on the fucking grassy knoll! Amazing act.
bornonbord

@4:11 Haha! I wonder how that man explained that to his kid.
Anonymous

Nobody thinks this is weird considering Universal/Motown’s stance on copyright infringement? Would universal reversely accept infringement on their intellectual property just as long as Erykah Badu was mentioned as ‘inspiration’ for a video? The concept is almost exactly the same as Matt & Kim’s video.

-Ernesto
Anonymous

The Matt and Kim video this was inspired by can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJkymylTNU4

Great songs and great videos, both of them.
- ab5tract
  
  Can this inspiration be verified, and thusly credited on boingboing’s post?
  
  I’m having snarkasms tonight, so apologies for the second postings (and congrats to bb for catching unsigned-in anon’s and cross-ref’ing to to later logins).
  
  But honestly, if the Badu clip is in response, her statement is firm. The gravity of the two videos is completely different. And Badu’s video seems to actually have a point to the gimmick. Then again, it’s acceptable to not appreciate (or even understand) political messages in music. Badu is connecting to a whole different beast than ‘lol i’m naked in NYC LOLLL! hope i don’t get arrested cuz cell bunks are cold on bare cheeks’. In fact, she might not even know that Kennedy died because he was ready to take LSD-derived revelations seriously (see: Mondo 2000, issue 6 (iirc). But that just makes her statement stronger.
Anonymous

Honestly, with all the people going back and forth and being so polarized over this video, on every level, I’m going to say this IS art.

Thanks Erykah, you’ve got people thinking, which I’m guessing was your point.
- soubriquet
  
  If polarising opinion, and setting people talking is all that’s required for this to be ‘Art’, wow!
  I’d never thought about it that way… So the shooting of Kennedy was art too? And the invasion of Iraq?
  Wow.
Razzabeth

That’s pretty sweet! What a nice booty. Can has uncensored version?
Anonymous

that is just beautiful
icky2000

Pulling up in a 61 Lincoln was an interesting touch.
Anonymous

The live Baduizm album (and Daftpunk!) helped me through a long cold winter in Sweden in the late 90′s

Fast forward through a few years in South Africa and on a return to the UK I went to see her live in Manchester in maybe 2002/3 – can’t really remember.

She more or less wafted on stage in a full length pure white obi-wan-kenobi robe a couple of minutes after her band had established a groove and… you could hear a pin drop.

I’ve never seen such a demure/powerful figure transfix so many people just by her presence… let alone before she started to entertain everyone. Awesome.

She has a touch of the Khoikhoi about her. Damn, my love is rekindled.
JohnnyOC

Damn, that takes guts. I’ve only heard about her in the background noise of my life (too busy being group think myself, I guess). I’m going to have to start paying more attention to her music from now on.
Anonymous

WoW, all the way around.

I like the message.
I admire the guts it took to accomplish this.
I cheer for people wanting to make a statement, enough to not conform in doing so.
Art Carnage

That sets a new low for bad taste. If she had actually lived through the Kennedy assassination, she wouldn’t be so cavalier about it.
bkad

WoW, all the way around.
I like the message.

Maybe you could help me with this. I didn’t catch what the message was.
- Anonymous
  
  Listen again to the end – after the song.
  
  Don’t be quick to kill/destroy ideas because they don’t mesh with what you’re working with right now. Things change. Evolution happens.
Anonymous

Here’s another music video from the same genre, this one from the French electro group Make the Girl Dance. It’s the reactions of the passers-by which makes these work.
Wingo

This one’s cool enough, but I prefer the trippy kaleidoscope-y vid she made recently with Lil Wayne.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvjx0luTUoI
Anonymous

Holy shit, this is so awesome. A truly beautiful woman- just oozes confidence. Extremely great. Kind of inspiring… That tattoo is excellent, also.
Gilbert Wham

If you’re rolling in a white Conti with suicide doors, you don’t need to be feeding no parking meters…
loopfiend

I found it gimmicky and disrespectful.
Would she do the same publicity stunt at the Memphis motel where MLK was shot?
Also all her songs sound the same.
Anonymous

I accidentally opened this song in 2 windows with one starting about a second later, it made the song super trippy sounding and I loooved it. Then I realized my mistake and tried listening to it regularly and it was a bit boring. The video is amazing though.
soubriquet

As Tallulah Bankhead once said “There’s less to this than meets the eye”

I really can’t find anything in this to enthuse about. Girl walk, dropping clothes. Distant guy follows picking them up, whilst monotonous song plays. Bang!

Yawn.
- Anonymous
  
  I’m inclined to agree. I think what a lot of people see here they’re just making up for themselves, which is fine I guess, but I don’t think you should give so much credit to something that is abstract and meant for an open interpretation.
PeaceLove

Badu & Questlove have a long creative history together. I heartily recommend Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, a fantastic documentary by Michael Gondry in which a bunch of the top Hip Hop stars, including Badu, come together for a block party/concert in Brooklyn. Not only is Chappelle a wonderfully funny and appealing host, but you really get to see how tight and beautiful the Hip Hop community is.
christopher

@ 8&9: i think the message could be interpreted partly as a response to the matt & kim video. she’s clearly acknowledging that m & k’s stunt was ballsy and difficult, but she’s pushing it further by going it alone, in dallas.

that is, i think the m & k video remains more lighthearted because they’re there to defend each other (even though matt’s a skinny dude, you get the feeling that he has kim’s back, and vice versa), and because they’re a couple of b-burg hipsters having a fling in times square (home of the naked cowboy and commercial exhibitionism in general).

in this case, badu is a solitary black woman stripping down on the historically charged block in dallas where kennedy was shot (an evocatively if not literally dangerous place). the mock assassination at the end acknowledges her vulnerability, and the finality of real subjugation (contrast with kim getting goofily hit by a bus, for no apparent reason).

brava. for those that are just picking up her music, youtube the slick earlier stuff, but fucking *buy* “new amerykah” 1 & 2. badu kind of disappeared for the first half of the 00s, but the break apparently gave her time to let some seriously brilliant stuff develop.

@ loopfiend: that’s like saying that anyone who derives art from the zapruder film is being “gimmicky” (or that don dilillo is disrespectful for writing “libra”). the JFK assassination is an essential meme for anyone who wants to comment on the 60s and what happened to us then (e.g. drugs, race, feminism, conspiracy, insanity, violence, revolution).
soubriquet

Because of all the discussion and points raised, I watched and listened again, the music still does nothing for me but a mild annoyance, and the video?
It may speak more strongly to americans with their greater taboos attached to nudity, but I still fail to discern any deeper message. It’s surface level, trivial, look-at-me-ism.

The Mel and Kim video did it so much better.

Evolve? in what direction, Erykah? give us a clue? sprout wings? learn to metabolise cardboard?
RikF

And here comes the prosecution…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8601479.stm
Anonymous

Erykah is performing her new album in Miami on April 8th, 2010 http://www.kineticelementz.com/clients/erykah/erykah-evite2.html
max

I can’t understand why she’s naked. or what the video is about. the m&k video was exciting and funny. this was just pseudo intellectualism at best, perhaps a sex crime at worst?
imnothere

Badu, badu….to the people that can’t appreciate her…evolve. But tisn’t punk at all, she’s urth mutha fukah….
- AirPillo
  
  Differing tastes are not the same as a need to evolve one’s tastes. That mindset is the express train to snobtown (“oh, you’re not enlightened enough to like what I like…” *GAG!*).
  
  The video is a lot better than the samey music (what sets this song apart from any other pop R&B single you hear playing in an elevator or waiting room?) but even it isn’t all that groundbreaking. Interesting abstract message, fun to discuss if you want to risk sounding pompous (like I usually do anyways), but if I was going to heap praise on her it’d only be for being bold enough to walk about naked in the middle of Dallas in the name of her work.
Doran

Yea #10, Make the Girl Dance was the first thing I thought of. More fun, less heavy.
ab5tract

Ummm, who the eff is Matt & Kim?

Two white people in a redundant indie band does not an Erykah Badu naked in Texas make.
- Uncle_Max
  
  ummm they’re the band whose video Erykah found interesting enough to specifically credit and take an idea from. Just because they’re white and not in your musical spectrum does not make them “redundant” or not worth knowing.
  
  And as for “a point to the gimmick”, I think you’re reading into these videos what you want to read into them. White people naked in times square = lol attention-seekers! Black woman naked in dealey plaza = important political statement. You could just as easily point to how the director of the Matt & Kim video thought the nudity in one of the most public locations available was a statement about innocence and being liberated and free from the constraints of society, and the bus at the end is the risk that comes with fighting the authorities for that freedom and innocence. And then Erykah would just be using nudity and a historically important area for shock value.
  
  Art is all in the eye of the beholder, but it would be nice if artistic intent wasn’t judged by how much you like the artist’s music.
  - ab5tract
    
    Isn’t it true that everyone reads into a piece of art what they will?
    
    The process of making the art, in this case public nudity, involves elements other than intent. Location, for one, is a factor. Structural discrimination (that is, the variable difficulty, based on physical markers, facing an individual aiming to be ‘liberated and free from the constraints of society’) also plays a role. Intent isn’t everything in art—it certainly shapes perception of a piece (as in your elaboration on the director’s intent, which changed my view of the video slightly), but all the intent in the world cannot necessarily change an effect.
    
    And I’m sorry again for the snark, there’s no need to talk trash about m&k’s music. I see it as ultimately redundant (ahh, more happy electro pop indie musicz), but then again, so is life in many ways. And Badu’s song does sound a lot like all her others, so its not like the same adjective cannot be aimed at her as well.
- Anonymous
  
  who is Matt and kim?
  
  obviously a respectable art collective if their idea had to be re-created by another even more respectable artist erykah badu
Powerphail

What good do your words do
When they can’t understand you?
alphagirl

love the guerilla video, love the concept and the message, and am very impressed with this woman’s talent and courage. Kudos.
elemming

The French do it better – Make the Girl Dance Baby Baby Baby

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQGhq0IlVok
Anonymous

Kudos to Badu, but contrary to what some of the commenters have said about the music, I dig it. Window seat is the definition of a slow burner. Turn up the bass with your lover close, and watch what happens.
JoshP

I don’t watch many videos anymore, so maybe I can be more of a control on this. If she(you) was nervous during the shoot, then it didn’t show. I thought it was pretty ballsy(feminine centric ballsy of course). The subject matter of the piece was pretty deep. If you look back at american history, that little stretch of Dallas is almost a sacred area. And she she approaches it sorta like the oracle of Delphi, but with a soundtrack and on live film.
What it means??? Eh, perhaps america lost its innocence that day. But I wouldn’t know. I didn’t grow up innocent :) I can still mourn it though.
Anonymous

did anyone listen to her words at the end? doesn’t anyone get the symbolism? this is about ‘groupthink’ – her actions symbolise the difficulty + risks of being totally true to oneself in this society. she reveals her ‘true self’ with the judgemental eyes of strangers all around. she don’t give a fuck. but most people would rather hang with the flock, + agree with group consensus just to fit in.

hats (+ other items) off to you, ms badu.
duncano

Oh fer chrissakes who was pulling focus on this thing! Either theres a ton of diffusion on, vaseline on the lens, or the focus puller was still loaded from the night before.
Brutal . . .
- Anonymous
  
  It’s a lens baby or an effect added in post. It is impossible to shoot as wide as it is and not have more depth of field. So I’m gonna guess the operator was let’n the video cam auto-focus and get what they got!
- foxvolpon
  
  What you’re noticing is the look of a 35mm lens strapped onto a ‘prosumer’ digicam in order to achieve depth of field.
  
  The primary lens of the digicam is focused on a small screen hidden inside an adapter onto which the 35mm lens is attached. The 35mm lens projects an image onto the screen… It’s tricky to create precise focus this way, is what I’m trying to say, and it’s an effect that’s very familiar to people who make or watch a lot of independent/low-budget video work.
- Anonymous
  
  Tilt shift maybe? Its as played out as the video.
ackpht

A camera doesn’t achieve depth of field, it has depth of field- it’s a matter of how much you have vs. how much you want.
Terry

Of course, the message COULD just be “I’m a badass naked black chick walking down the street in Dallas.” And there wouldn’t be anything wrong with such a message. We ARE talking punk here, right?
Antinous / Moderator

Can this inspiration be verified, and thusly credited on boingboing’s post?

Do we need to post a screenshot? The first frame of the video says, “Inspired by Matt and Kim.”
- ab5tract
  
  sorry about that. must have been one of the frames my ancient eee dropped when watching. i’m lucky if it displays half..
sing it, baby

At the 2010 MTV music video awards, the green room crabcakes better be in the shape of Erykah’s booty.
jasonq

Interesting. Oddly, I was in that very spot in Dallas just a week ago. I’m guessing they didn’t film it that day, though – it was windy, cold and snowing.
Anonymous

To those over-analyzing: The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs.
Anonymous

freedom!
omnichordman

Duncano, no one I guess. Looks like just one guy with a Canon 5DMKII and a Lensbaby which makes the additional blurr in the lower part of the frame. I like the dreamlike look…
- tobergill
  
  You did read the part about “no crew, right? The focus is a feature, not a bug. It keeps the background action from detracting from Erika. Looks to me like it was done in post?
sing it, baby

PROPS to Madlib’s smooth loops!
Celestyna

Thank you BoingBoing for showcasing a piece by the woman that changed my – and many other womens’ back in the late 90′s – lives. She’s a true revolutionary in every sense of the word. Lives and breathes activism, was touting natural hair and beauty in a time when it wasn’t as prevalent and understood as it is now (especially not by performers), focused on homebrew and panafrican spiritualism, helping artists escape the major label system, all while bringing back that much-needed 70′s lounge groove soul vibe.

She was the figurehead of the modern neo-soul movement and helped give voice and promotion to a lifestyle that to many of us, evolved us permanently. Much like the earlier punk scene, it was a movement in which its performers were not just living it onstage and off, but were inspiring and mobilizing their audiences & fans to through grassroots activism.
cstatman

love it! thank you! wonderful things!
senorglory

Poor Dallas.
Anonymous

FYI I get a message (Chrome, in Japan) in Japanese on a black background instead of the video. It says, this video includes content of UMG’s and due to copyright issues is being blocked.
OoOoOo

What’s striking is the difference between the public / public reaction captured in this video v. the Make the Girl Dance video. In Paris, people turn to look at the naked women, they laugh and smile, even the old people get a kick out of it. In Dallas apparently people think they will catch a disease if they look at a naked person walking down the street. Like God will smite them or something. They are ashamed because another person is naked.

Yet in Paris, people are well dressed and in Dallas they are dressed like slobs. You would think that people so afraid of the human body would be more inclined to cover it up with something nice, but apparently that’s not how it works.
Anonymous

I’m amazed that no-one commenting here has raised the obvious parallels to the situation today. I felt immediately upon watching this video that it was a comment on overheated Republican/Tea Party rhetoric as an incitement to violence against President Obama. She was saying it happened in Dealey Plaza and it can happen again and her nudity was a metaphor for our own vulnerability to this horror. I found it terrifically upsetting, powerful and bold.
yoshua

I love Badu. Her soulful music and thoughtful message is a breath of fresh air. I’m sure looking forward to the new album.
max

can someone explain what she’s talking about? there’s subtlety and the absence of concept and they’re totally different.
John Gomas

Brilliant artist!
technogeek

Ignoring the song — which, frankly, didn’t grab my attention enough that I noticed the lyrics — I like the video as a piece of performance art.

Art comes from the controlled construction and breaking of expectations; good art presents us with unexpected but not unreasonable transitions. I think this one succeeds in that regard.

As to whether it’s successful at carrying the burden it sets out for itself by picking that specific location… Not quite; it’s using the location to drive itself rather than commenting upon the location, and that strikes me as the lazy way out. Also, I think it would work better if the final “groupthink” wasn’t stylized almost into illegibility.

So: Art. Not bad at all. Not great art either, for my tastes. I’d give it a B+ to A-.
Anonymous

Oh my god! I can totally see her pixels!
Anonymous

It clearly looks like some post manipulation (certainly they had to do slo-mo in post) to de-focus the bystanders so they are not recognizable. Otherwise they would have a lot of ‘splainin and payin’ to buy them all out.
Anonymous

I grew up in Dallas, and whether she meant to or not, this video perfectly captured what Dallas is like. Naked woman walking down the street, DO NOT pay attention. Live and let live unless you belong to the following groups…

Just don’t cause, or notice, any trouble.
technogeek

BTW, re “forgot to break out camera phones” — Y’know, if a naked lady walked by _me_ in public, I might admire but I might well decide that taking pictures without explicit permission would be disrespectful. If she hung around for a while, I might re-evaluate that decision; then it becomes a matter of “it’s happening in a public place, standard photo rules apply” — which would permit pics but limit what I could do with them unless she was willing to sign a model release.

Those reactions may be colored by the fact that I’ve had friends who were willing to change clothes (or, later, nurse) around friends of either gender and assume we wouldn’t misunderstand.

Unclothed, nude, and naked can carry different connotations for the same denotation, and in fact can provoke different responses. Consider that the same amount of skin which would be decorious on a beach can be startling in situations where it’s unexpected.

(I’m not a nude-beach type myself; too selfconscious around strangers. But I do feel, generally, that Americans are oversensitive to skin and undersensitive to violence.)
- Anonymous
  
  In regards to Technogeek’s thoughts on public nudity with location and context, the best guide via New Zealand advertising:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-Lx2ihpGbc
No Imagination

More interesting when I watched the vid w/sound off, playing Procol Harum’s Salty Dog. She co-incidentally stepped in perfect time with the music.
semiotix

I was trying to think of the absolute opposite musician/activist/message-haver/physical-human-being to Erykah Badu, and I came up with Ted Nugent, which I think is pretty accurate. I think if the Nuge had pulled this stunt, the debate would be about whether it was purely pathological, purely mercenary, or some blend of the two.

There’s a fine line between “Look at me, because my message is important” and “My message is that it’s important that you look at me.” I want to say she’s on the right side of that line, but honestly I can’t even convince myself she can see it from where she’s standing.
Artimus Mangilord

Bummer, I’m late to the game… vid pulled down by “UMG on copyright grounds”. Ugh.
Anonymous

How many other naked black females are left for dead on the streets of evolution while passersby ignore their demise and their vulnerability? Contrast it with the hallowed ground of a rich white power progeny whose own death still echoes with horror and respect…the true symbol of a terror victim even if done in by his own government.

If this performance by Badu is not true art and activism…there is no hope for evolution, just social darwinism ironically practiced by the creationists. Hats off to Erika for a timely and brave statement. How come she did not take her hat off?
Trotsky

Beautiful naked woman. Great. Swell. Keen.

But it’s sort of sad that this is the best she could come up with. I streaked in college. Public nudity is the lowest and lamest form of performance. Not because it’s obscene, but because it’s unimaginative, dull. Fun for pranking and giggles, but… as art? “Look at my boobies!” Titillating and scandalous when I was 16. Now, it’s just: “Yeah, boobies. I got some too.”

Music was nice though.
tw15

Maybe it’s the American view towards nudity, but from my European perspective it’s not punk or much of a big deal.I thought the shot at the end was bad taste.

Walk around Leicester Square in London enough times and you’ll see some bloke or other walking around naked, as a result of a stag night.

I prefer Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy or The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony, where the singers walk (clothed) around a city.
thequickbrownfox

It’s lame.

Santi White (Santigold) and others just shade this lady away, and they don’t need to strip to gain attention.
bkad

She was the figurehead of the modern neo-soul movement and helped give voice and promotion to a lifestyle that to many of us, evolved us permanently. Much like the earlier punk scene, it was a movement in which its performers were not just living it onstage and off, but were inspiring and mobilizing their audiences & fans to through grassroots activism.

Really. I’ll accept that, ok, maybe because I’ve neither heard of her or Matt and Kim before I might be missing out on part of the significance, but if this is an activist piece, it leaves some unanswered questions. For example: What lifestyle are you talking about? The ‘people who listen to down-tempo soul music lifestyle’? Is that really a lifestyle? What is the activism toward? What action am I encouraged to do as a result of watching this?

I think you’d be better served by calling it ‘art’. And on that topic:

Isn’t it true that everyone reads into a piece of art what they will?

Well, yeah. But if an artist wants to claim the art has a message or is meaningful to anyone other than themselves (especially if it is an activist message), the art has to communicate. The message has to make it into not just the eye/ear of the beholder, but the brain of the beholder. Regular art can’t be good or bad in any objective sense. Activist art can fail. If you send a message people don’t understand, whatever you did didn’t work. It can still be great art — it’s just not art with a message.

lol, I guess one takeaway is that I’m not in the target audience, so the woman isn’t even trying to communicate with me. But I’d like to think I’m not so culturally illiterate that I couldn’t pick out the message if in fact there was a message to be picked out. So I’m skeptical. It’s an interesting piece, and she’s to be commended for her self confidence. But isn’t this just artists behaving like artists?
HowardsGrl

She is awesome. This proves it even more.
3x10p8

YAAAWWN, nothing new here folks, if you need to sell something – use nudity. She should have tattooed the album drop date on her ass.
KanedaJones

It’s not so much that Badu’s video is any more or any less as entertaining as any others it is that as soon as you see something once all others are the second attempt at it as far as your subconscious thinks.

OK off topic but I wonder how much the baby,baby,baby peoples

http://yacast.dailymotion.com/video/x99ein_make-the-girl-dance-baby-baby-baby_music

made for it being turned into this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrTiKP84kAA&feature=player_embedded

blech.. currently registered as done to death.
ab5tract

Sorry about the confusion. I didn’t see the crediting at the beginning of the video. I’d like to say thank you for being patient and sharing some insight.
Anonymous

Woah, that’s, really cool. Even angry anti-unnecessary- T&A-feminist me loves it. <3