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Erykah Badu Strips for Kennedy and King

The neo-soul artist's naked video was in the name of love, unlike the song.

Adrian Mack 15 Apr 2010TheTyee.ca

Adrian Mack contributes a regular music column to The Tyee and frequently sits behind Rich Hope.

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Erykah Badu ain't just blowing smoke.

Is there another popular song quite as fatuous as U2's "Pride (In the Name of Love)"? One wonders just how much money exactly Bono and his cohorts have made over the years passionately grunting about the assassination of Martin Luther King. "One man betrayed with a kiss"? No kidding.

The trouble with "Pride (In the Name of Love)" is that it offers no history, no context, no interpretation, nothing in the way of critique over a subject that desperately needs it. Instead, it's a vulgar appeal to the Disney region of our debased, collective emotional make-up. "Pride (In the Name of Love)" has become popular culture's ready shorthand for our routine misunderstanding of the death of King. What song do you inevitably hear every April when CNN rolls out its annual exercise in phony history? Exactly.

Which brings us to "Window Seat", the "controversial" video that landed righteous soul goddess Erykah Badu with a $500 fine for taking her clothes off in public. At the site of the Kennedy assassination in her hometown of Dallas, no less. Nice that the Dallas Police got the right person for once, I suppose, even if it's a bullshit charge. Disorderly conduct? For being naked? And gorgeous? What a world.

Badu's political and social concerns surfaced on her elliptical, 2008 concept album New Amerykah Part One (4th World War), where she copped a distended, modern What's Going On feel in the grooves, and an Angela Davis look on the cover. Davis was, of course, one of the lucky victims of COINTELPRO, the FBI's vicious and at times homicidal dirty war on so-called dissident groups. As was Martin Luther King. (And John Lennon.)

Did Badu time the March 27 premiere of the "Window Seat" video to coincide more-or-less with the April 4 anniversary of King's assassination? It's worth thinking about, especially in light of the predictable media reaction. If so, "Window Seat" becomes a brilliantly multi-faceted stunt, touching not just on the significance of two related and catastrophic killings, and how they inform the artist's intended statement on "groupthink", but also on the craven behaviour of the media ever since Kennedy's head was blown off from at least two angles.

Naturally, the 42nd anniversary of King's death passed without a single acknowledgement on your television or in your newspapers of the historic 1999 civil trial that exonerated the patsy James Earl Ray, and which identified a conspiracy behind the killing involving "governmental agencies." I'm sure U2 copped some hefty royalties two Sundays ago, though.

It was the King family who pursued the trial, for damages totaling 100 dollars. Presumably they felt that a holiday in his name and the odd hit single were piss-poor substitutes for justice or truth. The trial transcript can be read at the King Centre website, although this review by researcher James DiEugenio of the new book The 13th Juror is a brief but thorough overview of both the trial, and the way it was aggressively, some might say pathologically blackballed by the media.

As for Ms. Badu -- she's expressed her admiration for a president that was felled by the same sinister forces that worked so hard at taking out King. As a politically savvy black musician in Amerykah, she no doubt has accepted the reality of a murderous and self-preserving Deep State that most white musicians and listeners would prefer to think doesn't exist. Or who, if you like, find succor in sentimental and woolly-brained trash like that wretched U2 song.  [Tyee]

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