Some people come up and ask for an autograph and don't even look at me. They're like, 'Here, do it.' That don't bother me, but it doesn't open my heart.
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.
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.
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.
[The Land] is a film that just happens to be directed and written by a Puerto Rican guy with a black dad. It seemed like a very natural, human interaction between people who all just came from one common cesspool of bad luck.
People who say that music is dead or hip-hop is dead are refusing to evolve.
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.
The reason why you don't see people looking like me is because I don't encourage that. I encourage you to be you.
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.
People are uncomfortable with sexuality that’s not for male consumption.
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.
A lot of people have dementia, which is great, because then they don't recognize me.
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.
We as Black people have to tell our own stories. We have to document our history. When we allow someone else to document our history the history becomes twisted and we get written out. We get our noses blown off.
I think a lot of people have lost respect for the individual, you know, the individual, the person who doesn't conform.
I think people who vibrate at the same frequency, vibrate toward each other. They call it - in science - sympathetic vibrations.