In 2000, the high priestess of neo-soul followed up the Grammy-winning Baduizm with a more ambitious, conceptual & confident LP that I believe deserves as much (if not more) acclaim as her debut. Blame it on the singles ("Bag Lady" was big, but "On & On" & "Next Lifetime" were bigger), or speculate that the more overt feminist themes scared male listeners away, but back-to-back listens should make clear to everybody that there's no reason Mama's Gun should have underperformed by any measure compared to its predecessor.
I have the first pressing of Mama's Gun on Motown records. The track listing on the back & in the liner notes is incorrect, & there's even a song listed ("Props to the Lonely People") that isn't included on the album. The correct order is printed on the CD itself, along with the message "i changed the sequence at the last minute. peace, e. badu". The liner notes are full of such asides: "Didn't Cha Know" bears a note saying, "Peace my beloved people, check website for the rest of these lyrics--ain't finished yet." The album has only been reissued on CD once in the US, also by Motown in 2009, & the reissue kept this inconsistency. It's understandable--there's a casual charm to the little messages from Erykah, as if they are handwritten annotations from a friend in the margins. In the original pressing, I'm sure they really did run out of time to make their release date, but the warts & all presentation has the effect of an intimate, authentic experience. The fact that it's been made into an affectation on the reissue is, I'm sure, the label's fault & not Erykah's.
Mama's Gun opens with a statement of purpose to make a hard left from Baduizm in the form of "Penitentiary Philosophy," a song that's as far from the tone of its predecessor as possible while still being identifiable as the same artist. A more aggressive, almost rock-influenced arrangement with Questlove's pugnacious drums front & center in the mix. One of the key reasons for the sound of Mama's Gun is that Erykah was by now fully integrated into the Soulquarians crew. Soulquarians main man James Poyser & Questlove had their hands in Baduizm here & there, but on Mama's Gun Poyser has writing &/or producing credits on 8 of the album's 14 songs, & Quest plays on half the album. "My Life" is another early-album example of this musical combo's power: Poyser's prominent piano bangs out chunky chords while, instead of Quest's snappy drums, we get a drum machine programmed by none other than J Dilla (yes, that one, credited here as Jay Dee, who takes over the controls for the album's 2nd single "Didn't Cha Know?") Another intriguing element in "My Life" is the string arrangement by Larry Gold. Gold's strings also pop up later on in "Time's a Wastin'," where they come close to dominating the track with an atonal counterpoint to the jazzy main groove.
Pretty much all the songs on Mama's Gun are musical triumphs, not just for Erykah's cool yet emotive vocals, but also as examples of songwriting that is tricky & twisty while still remaining catchy. Sure, there are some verse-chorus-verse structures, but there's also stuff like "Kiss Me On My Neck," which has a huge bridge that enters halfway through & dominates the song from there on out, flipping the relationship between chorus & bridge. Then there's the Stephen Marley collaboration "In Love With You," recorded in Jamaica, a roots reggae feel with a sparse arrangement: just layered guitars & bass played by Dready--no drums, no skanking, still 100% reggae.
The lyrics on Baduizm were fine & all, but here Erykah digs deep into introspective, autobiographical, & sociopolitical terrain, a lot of it at the intersection of society's policing of women's bodies. "Cleva" is a body-positive women empowerment song over Latin percussion & vibraphone played by the legendary Roy Ayers. "Booty" is an ahead-of-its-time song about rejecting the idea that other women are her competition, promising another woman that she won't allow her man to cheat with her: "I don't want him 'cause of what he doin' to you/& you don't need him cause he ain't ready [...] I hope you would've done the same thing for me too."
Erykah herself plays acoustic guitar on "A.D. 2000," a collaboration with Betty Wright that was written in the aftermath of Amadou Diallo's murder at the hands of 4 NYPD officers. The sentiment--the futility of lip-service monuments & memorials to the dead in the absence of any substantive change--could have easily been written in 2020.
Mama's Gun closes with "Green Eyes," a 10-minute multi-part suite that sums up everything the album wants to do. It starts with a degraded, Billie Holiday-esque jazz sound that recalls Baduizm's "Afro (Freestyle Skit)" in its homage to bygone eras of Black music. It then explodes into a showcase for Roy Hargrove's burly horn arrangement (last heard in "Booty") & ends with the lyric "y'all just listen" repeated who knows how many times. Both tracklists (the one on the booklet & the one on the CD) end with this song, so it's clear Erykah knew this is how she wanted to close. A psychologically dense epic of ambitious songwriting & impeccable musicianship. Whether that last sentence describes "Green Eyes," the whole album, or both is open to your interpretation.
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