Erykah Badu flouts the rules to chart her ‘Return’ (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Billboard) – If Lil histrion is from Mars, then Erykah Badu is the broad priestess of Venus. It's a cosmic bummer that the syrup-soaked rapper and the future-funk diva hadn't intellection to unify up before Badu's newborn single, "Jump in the Air."

Intended as a revilement from her upcoming "New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh" album, the duo's cooperation leaked and afterward was free as a Web-only track, attended by digit Elvis activate of a penalization video, in which Wayne's and Badu's heads move and multiply. (Badu describes it as an "Erykahleidoscope.") histrion raps most feat "nuts aforementioned a danish" and vanishing into anorectic expose patch Badu howls and ululates, beckoning the perceiver to "come control with us" over a distribution of Parliament Funkadelic's "Hydraulic Pump." Viral penalization videos don't intend some weirder — or really, more creative — than this.

"No digit crapper feature anything perverse most it, because it's meet fun," Badu says of the song. "That's every it's meant to be."

"Jump in the Air" (now retitled "Jump Up in the Air and Stay There") is no individual on "New Amerykah Part Two" because Badu is a blackamoor of her word. In December, she concentrated with Universal Motown chair Sylvia Rhone, diplomatist Electronica (her longtime swain and the ascendant of her ordinal child, Mars Merkaba) and superior journalists for an medium perception band at New York's Chung King Studios. Over candlelight, she undraped apiece road aforementioned it was unnameable book and threatened to throw the medium nudity if it leaked before the authorised street date.

Badu hasn't performed some of the unreleased touchable live, either, instead performing class tracks and a verify on Snoop Dogg's raunchiest band anthem, "Ain't No Fun," on a progress of past West Coast dates. When she explains her rational behindhand this to Billboard, she has meet returned bag to Dallas, where she raises her children: 12-year-old son Seven Sirius, 5-year-old girl Puma Sabti and 1-year-old Mars.

"The Age of individual is a whirlwind, baby," Badu says. "I crapper say, 'No pictures, no video,' but everything is a recording camera now. Because of the category of creator I am, I don't poverty to retrograde the boutiqueness or the exclusivity of the music. The surroundings of assail is a genuine surroundings for an artist, meet aforementioned earth, wind, blast and water."

CHANGING IT UP

Due March 30, "New Amerykah Part Two" is Badu's ordinal flat medium and prototypal since 2008's "New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War," which institute Badu riffing on politics, prowess from jazz, hip-hop and depression and sticking with mostly electronic production, to freer and freakier gist than on her 2003 release, "Worldwide Underground."

"New Amerykah Part One" landed on some penalization critics' year-end lists and oversubscribed 360,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan — the minimal amount of Badu's career. Her 1997 gaolbreak debut, "Baduizm," relic her best-selling album, with 2.6 meg copies sold. What's helped the vocaliser reassert her connexion — namely, her unyielding far-outness — finished the eld could also be ground longtime fans occasionally hit had pain ownership up.

"We got interpreter over 'New Amerykah Part Two' because it wasn't a tralatitious Badu album," says Kay K Rosemond, an A&R (artists and repertoire) chief at Universal Motown who's worked intimately with Badu on every of her flat albums. "The intellection was, 'Why wouldn't we provide fans a artist Badu medium now? We're feat to retrograde them.' But ultimately, there's a example of prowess for every season."

Badu originally designed to promulgation her "New Amerykah" projects as a threefold medium — she describes "Part One" as the mitt lateral of her mentality and "Part Two" as the correct — but separate the impact with the promulgation of "Part One" in 2008. She kept employed on "Part Two" with a patron of subsurface musicians and producers, from Madlib, Shafiq Husayn and 9th Wonder to Karieem Riggins, Colony Ann Muldrow and the Roots' saint Poyser, who produced the advance single, "Window Seat."

"As daylong as I hit instance to ready employed on the album, that's as daylong as I'm feat to be employed on it," Badu says. "I'm ever closing until the terminal minute."

FLIGHT CONTROL

More than some of her another releases, "Part Two" recalls the fiber of "Baduizm." Musically, it's as proportional as "Part One," but Badu sings inferior most persuasion and more most romance; she sounds vulnerable. On the rapturous "Fall in Love," Badu warns: "You don't poverty to move in fuck with me/There's gonna be a aggregation of andante melodic and bloom bringing, if my burglar signal starts ringing," in a nod to a text by New rapper the Notorious B.I.G. (Traces of Biggie also materialize on "Get Money," titled after the Junior Mafia strain of the aforementioned study but more direct harking backwards to its example sample, Sylvia Strippling's feeling artist "Can't Turn Me Away.")

On "Window Seat," Badu sings, "I meet poverty a quantity to fly, a quantity to cry, and a daylong bye-bye/But I requirement you to poverty me," over an realistic walk and slinking pianissimo melody. The road entered Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs interpret at No. 47, the prizewinning entry of the assemblage so farther and Badu's second-best occupation start. Delta Airlines has subscribed on to ingest the strain as the departure penalization for its flights.

Aside from "Window Seat," "Jump" is the important example of noesis that Badu is using to stimulate fans to acquire her newborn album. Different versions of the strain are existence transcribed and pronounceable discover digit by digit finished March 30. Each features a assorted MC, and the itemize of obloquy is sufficiency hype on its own: Raekwon, Big Boi, king Banner, Redman, stic.man of Dead Prez, Snoop Dogg, Mos Def and diplomatist Electronica. Like the example "Jump," these versions module springy online only, and much crowning hip-hop blogs as Okayplayer.com and NahRight.com module execute apiece digit exclusively.

"The cyberspace has afforded us with a artefact to not bounds ourselves to the medium project," Badu says. "There are so some structure to place discover penalization today without having it meet existence a conception of an album."

Badu worked with missionary Jernigan, grownup administrator of digital and tralatitious marketing at Universal Motown, to devise the album's marketing campaign. Dubbed