Anti-Climacus

Being a white dude from Michigan who grew up in the 90s, loving hip-hop was an easy and obvious choice. I've written before about the D.A.I.S.Y.-agers, groups like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul who did interesting things musically and conceptually, but who I only learned about after the fact. These things will happen when you're 10 years old. The Soulquarians, however--a group of hip-hop and r&b artists who all worked on each others albums--hit at just the right moment: though most of my time in high school was spent listening to various Britpop bands, a portion of it was reserved for the Roots and Erykah Badu, and D'Angelo and Common would pop up from time to time.

The Soulquarians tended towards live instrumentation, and Erykah Badu tended towards very long songs--"Orange Moon" from Mama's Gun is, at 7:13, only the second-longest song on the album, and not by much. When I do listen to her--Mama's Gun is a great album front-to-back--it requires listening in a different way: it's not the words but the inflections in the vocals; it's not the chords in the song but the variations on them. In other words, it's r&b that should be listened to like jazz.