Erykah Badu's New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh)

Conceived and first composed on her laptop at home, with some vocals recorded in her bathroom, Erykah Badu's New Amerykah Part Two is lo-fi and highly sophisticated-exquisitely analog and experimentally techy.

Erykah Badu's New Amerykah Part Two is lofi and highly sophisticated-exquisitely analog and experimentally techy. It begins with a radio signal tuning in, and it asks its listener to participate in their own process of attunement, to listen to familiar sounds anew, and open ourselves to an alternate Amerykah. An organism at once cohesive and discordant, it flows, jams, grooves, bounces. It transforms.

Placing Badu in an intertextual constellation of artists and critics from Stevie Wonder, to Amiri Baraka, to Alice Coltrane, Kameryn Alexa Carter explores whether neo-soul is dead, acknowledges Baduizm as a potent form of Black female spirituality, and tunes into Badu's "freakquencies", taking the reader through a series of synesthetic dream sequences as she revisits the album again and again.

Acknowledgements
1. Postlapsarian Liner Notes
2. Live
3. Neo-Soul is Dead
4. Dream Sequence (Interlude)
5. Triptych
6. How Does a Harp Sound Like Incense Burning?
7. I Don't Wanna Time Travel No Mo'
8. Dream Sequence (for Moog theremini, in D sharp minor)
9. Field Notes
10. Time With Erykah Badu in it
11. Dream Sequence in Violet
12. Computer Love
13. Dream Sequence (for Fender Rhodes, in 6/4 time)
14. Cosmic Noise
15. Dream Sequence from a head wrapped in silk
16. Freakquency
17. "Out My Mind": A Sonata in Four Movements
18. Dream Sequence (Coda)
Notes