‘Green Eyes’: how Erykah Badu reinvented soul music in one track
Since emerging and developing during the 1950s and ‘60s, when the civil rights movement took hold in the United States, soul music has been a foundational genre. The sound of soul has been influential beyond comprehension, running the circuit and permeating the sonics of R&B, pop, and hip-hop artists alike. At the start, it was artists like Sam Cooke, James Brown, Etta James, Marvin Gaye, and Aretha Franklin who pioneered the genre and proved the fusion of gospel and blues to be truly riveting.
By the 1970s and ‘80s, a shift began in the genre, with jazz, hip-hop, and funk infiltrating the scene. Around this time, Prince began his climb to the top. He released his first two studio albums, For You in 1978 and Prince in 1979, which featured the electrifying funk steeped, soul grooves found on ‘Soft and Wet’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’.
Though his work was famously inventive and did have an incredible impact on soul and vice versa, Prince gravitated towards rock when he entered his Dirty Mind, Controversy, and 1999 eras. And anyway, in 1997, Erykah Badu roared onto the scene, upending what we had come to know as soul, with her debut album Baduizm. She came in with a heavy R&B and jazz sound, with Billie Holiday’s essence permeating the tone of her work, thereby helping take soul music to a new level.
However, it wasn’t until her sophomore album, Mama’s Gun, that Badu’s reinvention of soul music was truly on display. The album is an all-around wonder, with outstanding production that’s warm and dynamic and conversational lyricism executing a seamless narrative delivery. While it’s home to some of her most beloved songs like ‘Didn’t Cha Know?’ and ‘On & On’, the song that brought a new life to soul music is ‘Green Eyes’.
This final track rounds out the album perfectly. The song is a clever take on the idea of the green-eyed monster as Badu takes the listener on a journey through the end of a relationship. From denial to acceptance and a fight to rekindle the snuffed flame, told in three sonically distinct parts, her genius is evident.
The first part begins in a haze of blues, which just barely dips into jazz territory with the inclusion of some horns in the distance as Badu lyrically works to convince the audience and herself, in a state of denial, that she couldn’t care less that her former lover was moving on after the breakup. The second part transforms into a more traditional sound, though, where we see her split the audio between the left and right ears. This adds to the quarrelsome tension during the chorus as she establishes acceptance of the situation. In the third part, the tempo changes again, and an addictive R&B flow comes through. What unites each element of this track is the underlying essence of soul.
Her velvety vocals ground the whole song, thereby ensuring that its construction is anything but muddy. All in all, the track is only made more impactful because such keen care and attention is evident in the way Badu executes and blends each portion.
When soul music emerged in the 1960s, it aimed to be a method of storytelling around which a community could be formed. With ‘Green Eyes’, Badu carried on that root idea and tradition, though she allowed for a sonic fluidity to come through and further expand the genre, enhancing and broadening its capabilities.
