Mastery

So yesterday I was at Good Vibes, saw some amazing shit that turns my brain to shit. Nas and Damien Marley and some guy who constantly twirled the Ethiopian Flag, a surprisingly enjoyable Koolism, A post apocalyptic dance party, a trippy spirutual journey into the colour blue with Faithless and the complete kitchen drumkit but none really compared to the incomparable Erykah Badu.

Why and how? She has mastery, like absolute mastery of what she does, it translates into this impossible sense of control over everything the whole music, not just her vocals but the band, the stage, the fans... in control. Just literally owns it.

Like I wrote about the importance of the audience in a performance but she just orchestrated the whole thing, just shit like 'okay I'm tired of your shit' blah blah blah I'd seed De La Soul on Friday Night, and MCs are really MCs they talk far more than when you see a rock band (maybe not a folk band though) but Badu puts De La to shame, made all the 'put your hands in the air' stuff seem really laboured and tired.

Mastery owns, I find it hard to articulate, but somebody who has mastered something owns it, their personality comes through. I was always struck with her studio albums how conversational and personal Badu's tracks are. Like you feel like you are sitting in her kitchen while she is just singing to you. I feel I know what it is like to be her kid getting lullabys sung or whatever.

Sooooooooooo really I shouldn't have been surprised that this is amplified in the live experience. Here's a clip that may or may not convey to you what the fuck I am talking about:



Now I say it's incomparable but I would compare Badu for my white male friends to seeing Mike Patton. Mike Patton has completely different yet similar vocal mastery, this too reminds me of some quote by somebody about NBA greats 'all this talk of what position a player plays, whether they are point guard, power forward, center. You have people like Barkley who was supposedly a power forward but stepped back and drained threes. You had Magic who was tall enough to play center and ran the point... in the end the truly great players don't play a position, they play basketball.' Patton is for my black female friends a vocalist ostensibly, but he can sing death metal style, opera, soul, beat box, rap etc. he is at the very least 6 vocalists in one. He has that kind of freedom, Badu and Patton don't just sing, they make music.

Patton has that presence too, given his cultish following yet broad reaching tentacles into the musical industry (a musicians' musician?) you see him playing to crowds who have no fucking idea who he is, particularly since in the US Faith No More are regarded as one hit wonders. (But what a hit) instead of produces of 4 five-star completely different albums.

He has that same undeniable personal presence in what he does. Mike Patton sounds like Mike Patton, Erykah Badu sounds like Erykah Badu. At the Peeping Tom concert which I did devotionally drag my feet along to because I thought it might be my only chance to see Patton, it fucking owned. I was not expecting to honestly enjoy the concert that much. The thing was though that I was directly behind some cocktard who did nothing all concert but take photos and spit on Mike Patton.

To give an example of Patton's unique and undeniable stage presence he got fucked off with this guy and told him to try and spit on his tongue, stuck it out and then the guy hocked like 7 loogies at Patton's face and Patton just stood there tongue out taking it.

So yes, Patton's a freak but he does have that complete mastery of what he does, a looseness and freedom that says you could throw anything at him and he will just do his thing. Here is a video of Peeping Tom to illustrate his stage presence.


So what is mastery, I actually suspect its the point where you know yourself so well that you can move freely, Badu has lyrics in some song that said 'I have the weight of the world on my shoulder' (sorry it's really hard to try and recall specifics of a live audio experience) but on the contrary she comes across as incredibly light and loose, but large, very large. The kind of large that bridges distances and makes them feel like they are in your face.

There's vocalists that are amazing like Maynard of Tool, they have range, expression and emotion, they have risen to near perfection of a tightly defined performance. There are in your high-school class, your workplace, your family people who can sing and carry a tune and hit desired pitches better than you ever will, but mastery is something different, it's where all the restraints, preconceptions and expectations fall away and whatever happens just don't matter. You are in control.

At the very start of her performance Badu spilled a thermos of tea (I assume) that ran down her jacket and her leg in an incident that I imagine would send one of the costume change-as-performance pop divas into an irretreivable tail spin. She didn't even shrug it off, it was like it just happened and it didn't matter.

I'm in a real Musashi frame of mind at the moment but I thinks this captures Musashi's 'heiho' concept that is near and dear to my heart, and I think this mastery, this looseness is what Takehiko tries to convey in the image below:


That indefinable quality, I hope I can get there with my drawing one day.