Erykah Badu Set To Kick Off ‘Mama’s Gun’ Tour
The anticipated run begins with a show at The Hollywood Bowl with Westside Gunn.
Erykah Badu will soon begin a tour to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Mama’s Gun. The run will kick off with a show at the Hollywood Bowl on October 3 featuring opener Westside Gunn. The anticipated celebration will continue through October and into November and December.
Before the Mama’s Gun anniversary shows, Badu went on tour with the Alchemist, with whom she released “Next to You” in June. Those concerts took place across North America in August.
Mama’s Gun, originally released in 2000, remains one of the most influential albums in modern music. Badu reflected on its place in the cultural landscape in a 2021 interview with The FADER. She said: “Yeah, I hear it. It tickles me. I’m thinking, ‘Oh my god, these are my kids. These are what Mama’s Gun spat out.’ They heard it. They internalized it. It’s a language that I thought only I knew.”
In that same interview, producer Mark Ronson also reflected on the album’s influence. He said: “Mama’s Gun, that is really my favorite album of that whole era, and I know that there’s so many great records that came out of that magic folklore period of Electric Lady and there’s Voodoo and Phrenology and all this stuff. I will stand in front of everybody else, and Mama’s Gun, when I heard it, it just knocked me out in a way that … I think because there were so many other influences in ‘Penitentiary Philosophy’ and the heaviness of it, too, and it did things that not all the records really did.”
Mama’s Gun cemented Badu’s status as the new face of R&B upon its release. After taking several years off to raise her first child, Badu returned to the studio to record her second album, much of which was inspired by love and her relationship with her then-partner, Andre Benjamin. Leaning into a more organic sound with less-elusive lyrics, Badu opted to speak to the state of Black womanhood and the world around her.
