Erykah badu can i get a window seat

It would be greatly appreciated if someone anyone explain it to me. I wonder if her mother and children are proud of her public display of nudity. The Bible say a woman should be modest in the way she dress. Lord have mercy. Hey I love woman and appreciate their body. Until my attempted assassins are arrested why try when they watch remotely? A non hack able WiFi then I can get on to this new career. She left a lot to the imagination coming into the game!

Evolution at its finest!! Hey let me get a thumbs up if you remember the original video without the pixels where they arrested her.

This was delivered properly though she reminds me of my wife's swagger and style. All these yrs of this being one of my favs and never noticed guy in background with red jacket picking up her clothing lol.

Old school and Miss Badu I think we need some shit like this more than ever in ! No race of women are more powerful than Black Women This song is a twisted masterpiece the lyrics epic. But you gotta admit it takes a bad MF to pull some shit like this lol I love it.

So, presently I'm standing here right now You're so demanding Tell me what you want from me. Mike's Night. Enki Merlin. SDS Overfiend. Sheldon Marbley. Heretwo Expose.

Keepitreal Ali. Henry Smith. Alyssa Boyett. Bernard Gaines. Artful Dodger. Wally Walker. Les Matthews. Frank Marley. Almost as soon as she is totally nude, Badu is shot in the head, falling near the same grassy knoll near where President Kennedy was shot in Instead of blood, animated words that spell out "groupthink" leak from her head on the sidewalk.

They feel more comfortable in groups, less guilt to swallow. They are us. This is what we have become, afraid to respect the individual.

On Sunday night, the singer was active on Twitter , explaining the video, which was directed by Coodie. Coodie and I just went raw dog. Too busy lookin for cops and being petrified. The singer also explained that the entire scene of her walking and stripping down took just a couple of minutes. They got their footage and ran like hell. He disappeared. Didn't have time to look for him or clothes. It is not exactly the abundance of "agendas," however, that makes protest-oriented civil disobedience an inappropriate model for this work.

The model is inapt primarily because Badu's performance of multiple desires does not appeal to authority for reform. Indeed, Badu co-opts the power of refusal by staging her own assassination and resurrection. Her self-fulfilling "come back" refrain is thus the lyrical counterpart to Badu's decision to assassinate herself in the video before anyone else can do it. Her refrain subverts petition; her self-assassination preempts refusal.

Uninterested in modes of appeal or resistive protest, the politics of "Window Seat" are not reactive or agonistic but projective. So while Greg Tate is right to say that the video resonates with "[recent] conversations about black female body image-ing that have arisen Badu uses the medium of the music video less to critique power than to democratize the power to project the not-yet-possible.

To see how Badu repurposes the music video to this effect, it's first important to note that there is a sense in which her video is as much about the media event of JFK's assassination as it is about JFK. I have proposed that we read Badu's association of herself with putatively transcendent presidentialist authority as the sign of her evasion of the discursive structures of formal politics in general and protest politics in particular.

Therefore, her citation of Kennedy's assassination actually serves to cast her own avoidance of s protest politics into relief. This evasion helps explain why Badu does not cite leaders in the struggle for black rights and self-determination such as Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. Another key facet of Badu's choice of Kennedy, however, is that, unlike these other leaders, JFK's assassination is captured on film. But by alluding to that film at the start of the video, Badu prioritizes that media event and encourages us to read her own bound-to-go-viral music video through the lens of the Zapruder phenomenon.

As Dana Nelson writes, "Kennedy offered himself to the U. Badu capitalizes on this irony. By re-enacting the moment when the TV-celebrity president became a televised martyr, she uses the very medium that has helped secure her own star status to advance a representation of herself that is empowered and empowering because profoundly vulnerable.

Here, the irony of the video--that Badu is not an elected national leader--becomes precisely the point. This is what enables Badu to redefine and redistribute "presidentialist" power as cultural power. As a form that has secured her own star status by showcasing her implausible beauty, the music video has served Badu well. However, rather than enforce Badu's glamorous neo-soul mystique, "Window Seat" reframes her as an ordinary woman among regular tourists--albeit one performing an extraordinary act of self-exposure.

This move has obvious implications with regard to pop music videos' racialized and gendered rules of representation, according to which women who possess what Mark Anthony Neal terms the "requisite 'lite, brite, and lean' physicality" are hypersexualized, and those who don't are rendered invisible.

As she has stated, "People are uncomfortable with sexuality that's not for male consumption. With regard to the second, what's most interesting to me about the Texas parents who accused Badu of "sexually assaulting" their children by exposing them to her body is how that charge reveals the parents' real anger and confusion at Badu's rejection of the mammy script.

This projective vision is inseparable from--it consists of--Badu's performance of vulnerability. Her resurrection suggests that this performance of vulnerability is what produces Badu's power, just as Zapruder's film helped produce Kennedy's iconic status.

The video instead indicates the reverse: that it is Badu's willingness to project that vision--to be vulnerable in public, to render herself painfully open to scorn--that generates her cultural power.

This process begins by reconsidering what counts as "orderly" conduct and why. The way Badu provokes and empowers this reconsideration suggests she is assuming the role of a modern Cynic, as theorized by Michael Hardt. Hardt describes the Cynics as groups of rebels who "provoke and scandalize society" for about years at the turn of the Common Era by "[daring] to do in public view what 'normal' people do only when hidden"--for example, walk the streets naked.

On the contrary, Hardt writes, "they invite scorn and ridicule The militant life of the Cynics does not stand above the lives of others, so to speak, as a vanguard organization, but rather seeks to change social life while being a part of it, exposed to others. And while her act is transgressive, its execution is not cavalier.

Instead of capturing the empowering ritual through which the star sheds her inhibitions, heedless to the possibility that, in the language of the Texas code on disorderly conduct, "another may be present who will be offended or alarmed by his act," 47 the video documents the far more modest process by which Badu submits herself to the authority, scrutiny, and inevitable judgment of others.

Badu has said she was "petrified" when the filming began, 48 and her facial expression seems to reflect this; her face is characterized by concern more than pleasure throughout her walk. This is one of several ways in which her video departs from its inspiration, the video for the song "Lessons Learned," by white indie rock artists Matt and Kim. As Matt Johnson told an interviewer about his and Kim Schifino's decision to strip while walking through Times Square, "I've been really stressed out for the last three years So I was like, 'How are we gonna portray this I-don't-give-a-fuck-anymore attitude?

Badu clearly, as she put it, "held my head up and kept moving. It is this relinquishment of power, however, that enables Badu's trickster resurrection. The video therefore shifts the locus of Badu's cultural authority from "black power revolutionary persona" to flesh-and-blood woman vulnerable not only to death but to public derision.

By refashioning her cultural power into the image of radical ordinariness, Badu redistributes it to others. According to Hardt, the Cynics' militancy "is certainly not a rejection of critique," but it adds something to critique: it "aims also at constructing a new life and creating or at least prefiguring a new world.

For this reason, "Window Seat" helps us imagine forms of freedom that will not be granted by anyone but might be collectively accessed and claimed. There are several reasons why Badu's projective politics might resonate in a post-civil rights context, when the returns of protest politics can seem nominal at best. Not only has the U. Theorizing Badu's projective politics in the Obama era allows us to see not only how she eschews the reification of interracial hierarchy, but also how she destabilizes intra-racial power relations.

As Erica Edwards's astute work on the fantasy of charismatic black male leadership reveals, even if black vanguard leaders do not encourage ideological and practical conformity among group members, the very performance of black male charisma may disempower black women in particular, while also making it hard to continue a movement once its leaders are gone 53 --or, in the case of Obama, once they are firmly in executive office.

This problem brings us to the immediate stakes of Badu's projective politics. Ever since Obama's stellar performance as keynote supporter of John Kerry at the Democratic National Convention, commentators have compared Obama with JFK more than any other president aside from Lincoln. Of particular significance, however, is the notion that JFK is the presidential face of the civil rights movement that ostensibly reaches symbolic fulfillment with the election of the first black president.

How Kennedy would come to be the face of a movement that he spent most of his presidency trying to avoid is explained in part by his assassination, which obviously aligns him with assassinated leaders of the era such as Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X. Further, however slow Kennedy was to act on civil rights legislation and as of this writing, his slowness is matched precisely in Obama's inaction on the right of gay marriage , his eventual submission of what would become the Civil Rights Act of enshrined him as a martyr of the movement who, like Martin Luther King, would not "get there with you.

In his victory speech on the night of November 4, , he declared, "We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America Three years later, "Window Seat" reads as a performance in which Badu presciently and provocatively positions herself, not Obama, as the rightful heiress of Kennedy's power and even King's legacy. She now appears to harness the symbolism of the American presidency in order to dramatize her own power to imagine changes that have not yet come to America.

At a moment when what Iton terms a post-civil rights "exhaustion with politics" 57 manifests as a more specific Obama-era disillusionment with electoral politics, Badu's video seems to express an energized exasperation with America's over-investment in executive leadership, even as she uses this investment to figure new forms of personal and social autonomy.

So while I would not exactly claim that Badu's video is, at its origin, born of post-Obama disenchantment, I believe it now reads as an extraordinary response to such malaise. An exchange Jenny Eliscu cites in her Rolling Stone profile on Badu seems telling, in this regard. Badu mutters, 'I don't even know why we get mad at George Bush. For what? They're doing a job that was written for them to do. They're following a script. We need a new bowlin' alley--a whole new setup, a whole new thing.

It's not just the individual. The next leader is gonna do the same thing, in a truth disguise. Badu gets frustrated. Notwithstanding Badu's apparent disenchantment with presidential leadership and desire for "a whole new thing," it is important to consider how Badu's work in "Window Seat," as I have analyzed it, resonates with Obama's own "power to the people" "script.

Change comes to Washington. Change happens because the American people demand it--because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time.

On the contrary, it is the narrative through which James Morone analyzes the entire development of U. It's been about you" is simply the exciting preface to the sobering version of the same point, which he would make at his Inauguration: "what is required of us now is a new era of responsibility. A Cynic who refuses cynicism, she takes Obama at his word: if the Obama era is not about Obama but about everyday people, she offers a vision of what it might mean to actually believe this.

The distinction between electoral politics and Badu's cultural politics is crucial. Without such a distinction, it may seem that, in stripping away conventionally recognized forms of politics, Badu also projects a vision that is paradoxically bereft of power.

However, the power of government officials is necessarily of a different order than that which Badu symbolically seizes and redistributes. Power is not immutable; its meaning depends on context, and thus it changes as it changes hands. The power I am locating in "Window Seat" is precisely the power to redetermine where power is located. This means redetermining the forms that politics can take--revising conventional notions of what counts as political work, and who counts as a political subject who can do that work.

As is apparent from the recent Occupy protests, "everyday people" may indeed assume their own power to redefine the forms of politics. One way they may do this is by performatively proposing that the decision not to articulate a specific agenda constitutes a form of political "speech" in its own right.

I have noted that the very act of making demands may enforce the petitioner's disenfranchisement by ratifying extant social hierarchies. It is also the case that the refusal to make demands can disrupt those hierarchies insofar as it marks a refusal to legitimate those in positions of formal political power. Indeed, as Judith Butler has argued, it may even constitute a form of "ephemeral" politics whose staying power consists precisely in its potential for repetition or transposition: "Just because a form of politics seems to be ephemeral does not mean it cannot be repeated endlessly.

The point of the comparison is to concretize the claim that an event can expand our understanding of what qualifies as legitimate or meaningful political work. This is what "Window Seat" does. Further, if "Window Seat" expands on what counts as politics in a general sense, it also expands ideas within black cultural studies about the forms progressive cultural politics can take.

Namely, Badu's claim to national citizenship offers a variation on Iton's notion of the "black fantastic," to which point I want to turn now. A key text in African American Studies, Iton's In Search of the Black Fantastic ascribes the persistent investment in black popular culture after a moment when long-overdue African American political representation might lead one to expect a diminished need for black cultural representation--to the fact that black popular artists continue to voice concerns and possibilities that formal politics seldom admits.

This last point is especially important: while Iton focuses on U. Rather than exposing Badu's investment in a national identity that she does not understand to be implicated in her triple marginalization as a black female artist, "Window Seat" opens up possibilities for considering "black fantastic" art that is as concerned with national identity as it is with other forms of affiliation. When Badu stages "Window Seat" in her hometown and uses her video to imaginatively seize and transform presidentialist power, she stakes a claim to national citizenship.

It is her challenging claim to that citizenship, however troubled that status or insufficient its returns, that makes Badu a black fantastic artist who is also what Ralph Ellison called a "vindictively American" one. But neither does it see that citizenship as utterly compromised by its origins in racial capitalism, any more than Ellison or Badu would see modern African American identity as entirely compromised by its genesis in the slave trade. If the forms of politics and power can change, as "Window Seat" implies they can, then so too can the meaning of the nation itself.

I am not suggesting that each of these artists offers a wholly progressive vision.