Her music brimmed with the suggestion-albeit a conflicted one-to wait for it. The tracks she was laying down extended what had quickly become her trademark vibe: that of deep-groove tarrying, wrestling with time, pushing up against and pulling at the beat but also lingering in the pocket while delivering pithy observations about temporal lag and the will to move. When she stepped into New York’s historic Electric Lady studios in 1999 and began recording her much-anticipated sophomore album, Erykah Badu had her finger to the wind. Long spells of anxiety and watchfulness would punctuate the year 2000, a pivotal period that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle when trying to pinpoint the origins of new millennium unrest and epic uncertainty.
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But the phenomenon of collective waiting-to see whether the recent impeachment of a president would lead to the end of the Clinton good-times era, to see whether the courts would order the family of six-year-old Elian Gonzalez to return him to Cuba across the Cold War divide, to see whether the officers who fired 41 shots into unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo would do any time at all, to see whether hanging chads would tip the balance of a presidential election-all that waiting would roll out across the entire year in waves of succession. That the calamity didn’t drop in the form of a Roland Emmerich summer blockbuster sparked an initial sigh of relief.
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They were waiting in the wee moments of the new year for ominous, Y2K catastrophe to hit, for worldwide web grids to collapse, for large scale chaos of another order to afflict the globe. From the moment Prince’s party ran out of time and the ball dropped in Times Square to signal a new millennium, people were waiting.