Erykah Badu: "Hello" [ft. André 3000] (The Isley Brothers Cover)
What the hell does “telephone” mean in 2015? Think about how old that word makes you sound for a moment. And yet what would pop music be without telephones? These are some of the ideas that Erykah Badu‘s loose and inquisitive new mixtape You Caint Use My Phone pokes at. Missed connections, call waiting, answering machines—thanks to pop music, these are enshrined anachronisms (kinda like “mixtape”), and we will always understand that the phone was once a stationary thing, something you had to sit near to use.
The project started with a rewrite of Drake’s “Hotline Bling”, posted to Soundcloud, that stretched his version out until a wormhole opened inside of it and ghosts starting emerging from it. It snowballed into a Statement, a full-length project capped off by “Hello”, which reunites her with André 3000. The song operates on so many different joy centers simultaneously: 1) It opens with André clearing his throat with “Ok, challenge,” evoking memories of his glorious faux-bashful turn on “International Player’s Anthem”; 2) It reunites a couple that has maintained a public dialogue for years (“The best thing about my ex André 3000 is that his checks never bounce,” she told US Weekly wryly); 3) It joins them in an Isley Bros. cover that is also a cover of Todd Rundgren’s “Hello, It’s Me”, a luxurious sunbeam of a ballad in any form. It’s a spiritual conference call, the capper to a series of covers, reinterpretations, and covers of covers of reinterpretations—a game of, well, you know.
[Listen at Apple Music]
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