Erykah Badu

At the 1998 Grammys, accepting Best R&B Album for Baduizm, Badu publicly thanked two names from the podium: George Clinton and Stevie Wonder. The debt runs deeper than a dedication. "We were all raised on a diet of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder and Chaka Khan and all those '70s soul singers," the writer Miles Marshall Lewis observed of the album's making, "and she was mixing that with asides about hip-hop culture." Wonder's habit of folding social conscience into a love song became the shape Baduizm's songs were poured into.

listen: upstream & heresource: Grammy.com — GRAMMY Rewind ↗share

1976

Pastime ParadiseStevie Wonder

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1997

DramaErykah Badu

listen forPlay 1976's "Pastime Paradise" behind 1997's "Drama" and the lineage sits in the low end: both tracks let a spare, acoustic bassline — Ron Carter's, on Badu's track — carry the weight while the vocal delivers a list of social ills as calm instruction rather than complaint. Wonder builds to a chant from a Hare Krishna temple choir and swelling strings; Badu keeps her arrangement bare, multi-tracking her own voice into the only chorus "Drama" gets, turning Wonder's communal sermon into something closer to a private argument with herself.

Badu's account of her childhood house divides cleanly by generation: her uncles' funk records, and her mother's "sirens — the Chaka Khans, the Phoebe Snows, the Deniece Williamses, The Emotions," as she told Billboard. Khan wasn't just inherited, she was studied — "Of course Chaka Khan, she liked Chaka, and you can hear that," said Madukwu Chinwah, who co-produced Baduizm, of the sessions. In 2013, Badu repaid the debt on stage, opening the BET Honors by performing Khan's "What Cha' Gonna Do For Me."

listen: upstream & heresource: RatedRNB — Erykah Badu Tributes Chaka Khan at BET Honors 2013 (public tribute performance) ↗share

1978

StayChaka Khan

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1997

StayErykah Badu

listen forRufus and Chaka Khan's 1978 "Stay" builds to a vocal high note Khan holds like a dare. Badu's cover, recorded live for 1997's Live, keeps that dare intact — she performs it in Khan's original key, confessing beforehand, with a laugh, that she'd chickened out of trying it once already, at the Soul Train Awards. The horn-and-groove bed under her is looser and jazzier than Rufus's studio original, but the vocal test at the center is the same one Khan set two decades earlier.

A year before Baduizm existed, Badu had already made her case for Marvin Gaye on record: in 1996, she and D'Angelo, a year removed from his own debut Brown Sugar, cut "Your Precious Love," a cover of Gaye and Tammi Terrell's 1967 duet, for the High School High soundtrack — "a hidden gem" that captured a chemistry neither had put on record before. The template she borrowed — romance and social conscience as one continuous thought — resurfaces a year later: "the soothing grooves of Marvin Gaye certainly struck a chord with Badu," evident, as the same piece notes, in "her classic 'On & On.'"

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1967

Your Precious LoveMarvin Gaye

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1996

Your Precious LoveErykah Badu

listen forGaye and Terrell's 1967 "Your Precious Love" rides a lush, string-swept two-step, the duet trading lines like a conversation rather than a call-and-response. Badu and D'Angelo's 1996 remake keeps the tempo and the intimacy but strips back the strings for a sparer, dustier soul-revival sound — the sound the neo-soul movement would shortly be built from. Listen for how closely Badu tracks Terrell's original melody, even as the arrangement around her sounds like a rehearsal for Baduizm, a year before it existed.