Erykah Badu: "Trill Friends"
On “Trill Friends,” Erykah Badu takes an impossibly broad idea and cooks it down to its core ingredients. Lifting the beat from Kanye‘s “Real Friends,” she traces that record back to its spiritual successor: Whodini’s 1984 classic “Friends.” Rap doesn’t have standards that are covered by each new generation, but that Larry Smith-produced single has resonated then and now for its bitter, coming-of-age disillusionment, and has been sampled or otherwise repurposed by artists from Nas to Doom, from Dre to Pac, from B.G. to KRS. Badu’s dispatch from Dallas is one of the most hypnotic takes on those themes to date.
Apparently slated for a tape called THIS $h!t TOO EASY, “Trill Friends” builds on a couplet from “Friends,” repeated often enough for all its various meanings to settle in. “Homeboys, and some of them we wish we never knew at all” is slower, more languid than in the ’84 version—Erykah’s is a sage approach from someone who has seen more than one Rolodex disintegrate. (The stretching of that line is at odds with one of several competing vocal tracks, in which she speeds up the cadence from Post Malone’s breakout hit “White Iverson” with lyrics she used on But You Caint Use My Phone‘s “I’ll Call U Back.”) Badu shirks the family reunion tales of West’s take, instead crooning over and over the same few phrases, articulating exactly the dull rage you must feel paying your cousin $250,000 for a laptop. That Erykah can cut through a din is hardly a surprise. If only we all had friends like her.
Recent Comments