Top 100 Erykah Badu Quotes
#1. I can be Erykah the human being more than the celebrity.
Erykah Badu
#2. Whereas I want everything to be peaceful during a birth, I take the total opposite approach when I'm helping someone come to terms with leaving this place - I play Richard Pryor records.
Erykah Badu
#3. I don't think it matters what school you go to, but I think it's important for parents to be involved. And to know that when school stops, learning continues, and to continue teaching at home.
Erykah Badu
#4. I trust the political system to be what it is. It's a structure to keep the country running, a boat to get us [citizens] from one side to the other, and it has the country's best interests at heart. Not the people's.
Erykah Badu
#5. When it come to da: " What it do?! I don't fall for da: "Woop- TeE- WoOoo!
Erykah Badu
#6. Well, if you look at all of the cultures in America, this is a great opportunity for us to really get acquainted with the rest of the world. America is the only place you can do that, but we don't have sense enough to take advantage of that.
Erykah Badu
#7. I'm a performance artist first; I'm a recording artist second.
Erykah Badu
#8. My style is a little masculine, and what I loved about Pyer Moss was how well he can make a blazer, the looseness of those pants, or color palette that he chooses from season to season.
Erykah Badu
#9. We're all friends, inside the music and outside the music. I mean, we don't sound anything alike, we don't approach our music anything alike, but we come from the same genuine place. We want our music to be real and we don't want to compromise our art.
Erykah Badu
#10. They usually have a piano in every nursing home, and I always wanted to perform for whoever would listen when I learned something. I grew to understand very early that a lot of these people who are in nursing homes are elderly and don't have a lot of things that give them joy from day to day.
Erykah Badu
#11. I consider my musical ability to be a gift from the Creator. It's not that I try to work hard or nothing like that, it's a gift, it was given to me, and I appreciate it.
Erykah Badu
#12. Never knew what a friendship was, Never knew how to really love, You can't be what I need you to, & I don't know why I fuck with you
Erykah Badu
#13. I believed in myself, and I've always worked very, very hard as an artist, and I am an artist in every sense of the word.
Erykah Badu
#14. What I work hard at doing is staying on a path of being kind and showing and proving that I'm a good person to society. That's hard. The talent, that's a gift. I just came here like that.
Erykah Badu
#15. I know that I want to concentrate more on my inside-pretty than my outside-pretty, because thats gonna go away. But if your inside is beautiful, it never wears away. The light always shows on the outside if you are striving to be good inside.
Erykah Badu
#16. My hair is an aesthetic choice ... At the same time, how you wear your hair is a political statement as well.
Erykah Badu
#18. As Erykah Badu, it has nothing to do with me, the way I look, my hair wrap, my style, it's about you and what you feel for my music. If I can make you feel like the way that people who influenced me made me feel, that's completion.
Erykah Badu
#19. I'd rather see a person with a natural mind and processed mind than a processed mind and a natural head.
Erykah Badu
#20. My truth is relevant and my songs are relevant, but I have to recalibrate myself and speed up my vibrations so that I can communicate with the voice of this generation.
Erykah Badu
#21. Music and the music business are two different things.
Erykah Badu
#22. I'm in training to become a midwife. I'm almost there and before I know it I'll be able to open my own practice, if that's what I desire.
Erykah Badu
#23. I love to leave the interpretation of my music up to the listener. It's fun to see what they'll say it is.
Erykah Badu
#24. I mean thats a big part of our existence here on earth, the personal relationship we have with the person that we love, with the person that we make love to, with the person that we share our lives with. We expect a lot of things back from our loved one, and the lesson is to accept and not expect.
Erykah Badu
#25. I view my hair and clothes as functional art ...
Erykah Badu
#26. I have advice for people - period - who are in unhealthy relationships: Follow your heart. It will get you to where you need to be. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's easy, the places that your heart takes you. But continue to follow it. Where the train leads you - you'll get there.
Erykah Badu
#27. I have a master plan as an artist. I've always said I'm not going to be punching nobody's clock. I will work as an artist to survive in this world.
Erykah Badu
#28. Hip-Hop is bigger than the government.
Erykah Badu
#29. What a frequency What a voice. I love Bilal. I couldn't imagine a music world without his voice.
Erykah Badu
#30. I'm free. I just do what I want, say what I want, say how I feel, and I don't try to hurt nobody. I just try to make sure that I don't compromise my art in any kind of way, and I think people respect that.
Erykah Badu
#31. I love being an entertainer - not really fond of being a celebrity.
Erykah Badu
#32. What singing means to me, I never did consider myself a singer, I just let people watch me feel music and how it comes through me. I've worked on it and practiced a lot. I mean, music, I dance to it, and singing is just one way of getting it out of me.
Erykah Badu
#33. What makes me furious, not just because we're in an interview, but I don't like when writers take your words and put them somewhere else, in the wrong context in their own article about you.
Erykah Badu
#34. I live in a queendom, ruled by a womb-iverse,
Erykah Badu
#35. I think people who vibrate at the same frequency, vibrate toward each other. They call it - in science - sympathetic vibrations.
Erykah Badu
#36. A home birth is about being able to create exactly what you want, because it's such a violent moment inside of the body that you want everything else to be as beautiful as it can be.
Erykah Badu
#37. I love putting the music together. It's like art.
Erykah Badu
#38. I grew up with all mothers, all women. I come from a long line of matriarchs, very strong women.
Erykah Badu
#39. Following your heart also means eliminating the things that no longer evolve you.
Erykah Badu
#40. I'll dabble here and there in different forms of the art, but the label has me locked down like a slave so, of course, I'll be doing albums during this time.
Erykah Badu
#41. Time to eliminate things that no longer evolve me.
Erykah Badu
#42. Hip-hop was created out of necessity. We needed to create some digitized things to help us understand what we were feeling.
Erykah Badu
#43. I am not systematic at all when it comes to religion. I just love life. And I'm not judgmental. And I'm a vegetarian.
Erykah Badu
#44. I don't plan how many people I work with. I don't charge anything. It's for my own learning, and I just enjoy being the welcoming committee. I became a doula by default.
Erykah Badu
#45. I'm not trying to win an award for being the best vegetarian, just want to be healthy. Take a salt bath. Do things that my parents were never able to do. I'm blessed to do anything I want, so I decide to take the best care of my body and my family in the same way. Holistically. Vitally.
Erykah Badu
#46. Even if the project requires you to have all the ducks in a line, I can't do that. I don't create way.
Erykah Badu
#47. He definitely does what a partner is supposed to do, that is, evolve you.
Erykah Badu
#48. I don't read music or anything, so when I produce, I go basically by ear.
Erykah Badu
#49. So the most natural thing to me is to stay as pure to or real to or close to who I am as possible.
Erykah Badu
#50. There are millions and billions of atoms of memory of all kinds of musical themes in me.
Erykah Badu
#51. We were all born, and we all came to the music business with everything we had. Some of us just don't get a chance. Now there's a lot of other people like myself, indeed, who are getting heard worldwide. That gives other artists a chance.
Erykah Badu
#52. Hip-hop is not something we do, it's something we live. It's the way we dress, the way we talk ... everybody bobbing to the same beat. It's a culture, and you have to find your own place in that culture. Top 10 or Top 40 can't dictate that. They can only dictate what's marketable.
Erykah Badu
#53. I'm pretty mutable as a human being, period - if you put me on Pluto, I can figure it out.
Erykah Badu
#54. I don't want to think too much about how I'm carving and what I'm carving - you are just carving away the excess clay and there's a piece underneath there. And it's kind of like getting out of the way. Maybe that's what the commonality is: It's getting out of the way so that the art can speak.
Erykah Badu
#55. What opens my heart is when my son wakes me up in the morning, nudging me and saying, 'Mommy, mommy!'
Erykah Badu
#56. What does music mean to me? I don't think I would really be much without it, without it coming through me. It's my means of communication, my means of growth, my means of transportation from one point in my life to another.
Erykah Badu
#57. I'm a complete human being. I'm very emotional and loving. I feel, I hurt, I give, I take, and also I think. I analyze. I'm a sociologist, anthropologist.
Erykah Badu
#58. What draws me to a project is how sympathetic I am toward it, so that I can relax into it and give up myself.
Erykah Badu
#59. Anything that had to do with art I been doing all my life. It was a gift. It's nothing I work real hard at doing.
Erykah Badu
#60. I'm more like an oven than a microwave,
Erykah Badu
#61. I'm a product of its [american] teaching, of its thinking, of its -isms, of its religion, of its education. I am conditioned, raised and developed by America; I am America. And as it changes, my thoughts also change. Because no matter what I believe, what the powers-that-be believe will affect me.
Erykah Badu
#62. We literally just finished making this gown 20 minutes ago. I love it. It's my favorite color.
Erykah Badu
#63. Man, I don't want to have nothing to do with computers. I don't want the government in my business.
Erykah Badu
#64. During childbirth and hospice I'll sing gospel songs that my grandma taught me when I was younger, or something I've made up, or I'll hum. I just play things that I think the audience will like.
Erykah Badu
#65. Breathing becomes really easy when you're laughing. It kick starts that feeling of joy.
Erykah Badu
#66. We lock ourselves into our own philosophies, our own religions, our own walks of life, and if we fail, we condemn ourselves and then we get sick.
Erykah Badu
#67. Don't let anybody infiltrate your dream
Erykah Badu
#68. I encourage breaking free of self inflicted holding pens. I encourage the use of intelligence in every decision. I encourage creating.
Erykah Badu
#69. I think what makes people think that is because of things people write. It really doesn't have anything to do with the artist.
Erykah Badu
#70. Oh, yeah, I see the world differently now. Actually, when I first had the baby, I was breast-feeding him for two years straight. So we were together for two years of his life, every single day, all hours of the day. So I was two people, and I eventually morphed back into one.
Erykah Badu
#71. Im a hip-hopper, and its something you live and do. It makes me angry that were misrepresented, that were being killed every day by one another, by the government, by the food we eat, the choices we make. It makes me angry because it doesnt have to be that way and it is.
Erykah Badu
#72. I'm a recovering undercover over-lover.
Erykah Badu
#73. From then on, I realized this is what I want to do, what I'm supposed to do: Giving energy and receiving it back through applause. I love it. That's my world. I love it. I enjoy it. I live for it.
Erykah Badu
#74. I'm a woman who has gone through many heartaches, enough to dedicate my whole life to trying to figure them out.
Erykah Badu
#75. Marvin Gaye is one of my favorite revolutionaries. He spoke from his heart, his mind. That's what I want to do.
Erykah Badu
#76. I've had two children. I've had three boyfriends. I've had a lot of things happen that can change your opinions and values and philosophies.
Erykah Badu
#77. I don't sing melodically. Rhyme pattern is how I sing. I also write like a lyricist or an MC because that's what I was before I was a singer. I just took those elements and put them into music.
Erykah Badu
#78. Erykah Badu projects don't even sound like Erykah Badu projects. I don't even have one album that sounds like another one of my albums.
Erykah Badu
#79. The Man That Knowz Something Knowz That He Knowz Nothing At All.
Erykah Badu
#80. People are uncomfortable with sexuality that's not for male consumption.
Erykah Badu
#81. I have so much music that I do. Just like how a visual artist is always sketching something but they might not share it, I'm always writing songs or coming up with melodic lines on piano or guitar. It's therapy. It's always happening.
Erykah Badu
#82. A lot of people have dementia, which is great, because then they don't recognize me.
Erykah Badu
#83. Whenever I think about funk music, it has a look - and that's how it sounds.
Erykah Badu
#84. Society has a problem with female nudity when it is not ... " - Badu pauses to get her words together; she wants this point to be very clear - " ... when it is not packaged for the consumption of male entertainment. Then it becomes confusing.
Erykah Badu
#85. But now I realize that this record business really needs me. No one else is trying to take a chance or do something different.
Erykah Badu
#86. I think a lot of people have lost respect for the individual, you know, the individual, the person who doesn't conform.
Erykah Badu
#87. When people are going on to the next plateau of whatever this thing is called life, I also want them to breathe easily, even if it's the last one they take here with us. I guess I'm the welcoming committee and ushering committee.
Erykah Badu
#88. Hip-hop is the people. What the people are moving toward is what hip-hop is. I think people are moving toward a freer way of thinking. Openness.
Erykah Badu
#89. I really can't say what inspires me the most, because I'm inspired by just about everything. My feelings and relationships, my family, Scooby-Doo. Opinion of my work. Everything. Not just one thing.
Erykah Badu
#90. It's weird, but if I decide to do an album, then the ideas start fitting themselves together. I consider myself a nice, slow burn. Plus, it's not a race. And I have a lot to share.
Erykah Badu
#91. No one chooses to raise children alone.
Erykah Badu
#93. I have the ability to sing with emotion and feeling, but if you say I sound like Billie Holiday, that's cool. Let's look at who Billie was: she was this person, this singer, this beautiful diva who could move the audience with the slightest gesture of her hand.
Erykah Badu
#95. I actually started writing it because I was inspired by my own personal growth.
Erykah Badu
#96. And I figured out that the reason I couldn't get through the day as well as I can now is because I had too many things on my mind, on my plate, you know, for one person to have. So I started to eliminate some of the things that were too heavy to carry and unnecessary.
Erykah Badu
#97. I figure, if the mind just 'has' to be busy,why not make up happy shit?
Erykah Badu
#98. I don't feel like I need to preach to the world or nothing like that. I just feel like I share what I say, and if listeners get it, they get it. And I never underestimate the audience's ability to feel me.
Erykah Badu
#99. If you want to relate to a certain audience or generation, you have to speak their language. I truly believe that.
Erykah Badu
#100. I really enjoy being the child's 'welcoming committee' and to help someone usher his or her spirit into the world in a very peaceful way is very effortless to me.
Erykah Badu
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