But we’ll never know, exactly, since Badu is way too slippery of an artist to ever come out and tell us.īadu’s last album was New Amerykah Part Two (Return Of The Ankh), the second in a sprawling and ambitious two-album avant-funk project, one that refracted the entire history of American soul music through a strange and intensely personal prism. Maybe that’s what Erykah Badu was thinking about when she made But You Caint Use My Phone, her new mixtape. Even as we’ve stopped using our phones as phones, we’ve got this increasingly tortured and needy relationship with them. Watching my kids chase each other around a playground is one of life’s primal pleasures, and yet I have to keep reminding myself to not look at my phone while I’m doing it. Now, the lazy joke is that teenagers, and parents, and everyone else, are constantly staring, unblinking at their phones. What does that mean? And what does it mean that all of us are now walking around with access to the complete history of human knowledge in our pockets? Only a decade or two ago, the lazy joke about teenagers was that they were always talking on their phones kids today would seem like charming retro anachronisms if they did that. Two of the biggest songs of the last few months - Adele’s “Hello” and Drake’s “Hotline Bling” - are about, among other things, calling people on the telephone, which is something that almost nobody does anymore.
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