Erykah Badu: Photos From the Billboard Cover Shoot

Erykah Badu remembers her last moments of normalcy. The generational talent who changed the course of R&B and hip-hop with her home-cooked neo-soul has never truly been “normal,” of course. But before Badu was the futuristic stylist we know her to be, she was just a young woman from Dallas. One who traveled to New York during the paralyzing North American blizzard of 1996 to finish a debut album she hoped would be good enough to allow her to make another one. “That’s how I met New York. Like, ‘Oh, you cold!’ ” she says in the much more agreeable climate of her hometown. “I was like, ‘OK, if this is what I got to do — then this is what I got to do.’ ”

Despite the frigid weather, the then-25-year-old Badu found a warm and welcoming community in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood. In 1992, Entertainment Weekly correctly noted the area was the “red-hot center of a national black arts renaissance.” Chris Rock called it home, as did Gil Scott-Heron. Digable Planets copped a spot and recorded its second album, Blowout Comb, as a love letter to the hood. Badu moved into a cozy apartment above Mo’s Bar & Lounge, right around the way from one of her favorite spots, Brooklyn Moon Café. Spike Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule — the studio behind Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X and Jungle Fever — was close by. “[I was] right in the center of Blackness,” she remembers. “Dreads, headwraps and people who looked like me who I didn’t know existed. I felt like I belonged there. I met people who felt the way I felt, and that’s when I knew I wasn’t alone in my journey or quest to find out, ‘Who am I?’ ”

Read the full Billboard cover story here. Join us at Billboard Women in Music 2025 — get your tickets here.