New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) is the fourth studio album by American R&B singer Erykah Badu. It was released on February 26, 2008, by her own label Control Freaq Records and Universal Motown Records following Badu's hiatus from recording music due to writer's block. In returning from the hiatus, she received music from several hip hop producers over the Internet and recorded demos of her vocals using the GarageBand software on her laptop. Most of the album was then recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York City.

New Amerykah Part One is an esoteric concept album titled as a pun on Badu's first name and a reflection of the record's political leanings. It features social commentary and themes related to the plight of the African-American community, including poverty, urban violence, complacency, and cultural identity. The record's densely produced music incorporates hip hop, soul, funk, jazz, and electronica styles.

The album debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 chart, eventually selling 359,000 copies in the United States by December 2009. Two singles were released in support of the album—"Honey" and "Soldier"—and Badu performed its music on her Vortex World Tour. Critically, New Amerykah Part One was a widespread success, being named by many critics as one of 2008's best records. In 2019, it was voted the 92nd best album of the 21st century in a poll of music journalists published by The Guardian.

Background

Dealing with writer's block and conflicted about her mainstream success, Erykah Badu embarked on her Frustrated Artist Tour in 2003. Her increasing popularity brought upon some backlash towards her public image and expectations of her as "queen of neo soul", an honorific nickname that she found limiting. Her third studio album, Worldwide Underground (2003), was released to mostly positive reviews and was certified gold, although it was underpromoted and sold less than her previous albums. Badu herself was not satisfied with the album and felt she had nothing substantial to express with her music at the time. She took time off from her recording career to deal with her creative block and focus on caring for her children, although she continued to tour in the period between albums.

In 2004, Badu gave birth to a daughter, Puma Rose, with her former boyfriend, rapper The D.O.C. Later that year, she received her first computer as a Christmas gift from drummer and producer Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, and began communicating with and receiving music from him and other producers such as Q-Tip and J Dilla. Beginning in 2005, Badu worked from her home in Dallas and used the software application GarageBand as a digital audio workstation, which she was introduced to by her son, Seven. He taught her how to use her laptop as a mini recording studio, and she used it to construct various backing tracks for songs. Using GarageBand, she recorded demos of her vocals by singing into the computer's microphone.

Badu composed more than 75 songs within the year and intended on splitting them among her planned series of New Amerykah albums. She said of her productivity with her laptop, "I could be here, in my own space, with headphones on, and the kids could be doing what they doing, and I’m cooking dinner still, I’m making juices still, and it’s so easy just to sing. You got an idea — boom! Idea, boom!" Badu's iChat contacts, including hip hop producers Questlove, Madlib, 9th Wonder, and J Dilla, instant messaged her to get back into the studio and sent her tracks. Such exchanges inspired a creative spark for Badu, who explained in an interview for the Dallas Observer, "I started to accept that maybe it's OK for me to put out music, and it doesn't have to be something dynamic or world-changing. But just as I was accepting that, here comes this burst of light and energy and creativity. And that's the process, I guess, of life—the detachment and the release of something gives you even more room to grow or be creative."

With the album, Badu sought to augment her music's production, expose the work of underground hip hop producers, and exceed listeners' expectations of contemporary music. She explained to Billboard that "in taking on a project like this, I'm taking the responsibility to talk for my race and my planet." In an interview for the New York Post, she explained the album to be about "the war against self ... against your inner being", and said of her hiatus, "I've always taken my time between albums. I'm a performing artist - recording is secondary to me. My performances are what drive me. It's like my therapy. I like to write a lot while I'm on the road before I even think about recording." Badu also said that she now had a relevant message to express for listeners and was no longer struggling with a creative block.

Recording

For New Amerykah Part One, Badu collaborated principally with Questlove, Madlib, 9th Wonder, Karriem Riggins, James Poyser, audio engineer Mike "Chav" Chavarria, and the members of musical group Sa-Ra, who made production and lyrical contributions to most of the tracks. She later explained choosing which producers to work with, saying "All of these people have a reputation for being visionaries and knowing them well, I felt 'Okay, now it's time to put together a project that not only takes us to another place, another dimension, but highlights these sights.' And that's what I had in mind for this project".

Badu began recording New Amerykah Part One at Luminous Sound Recording in Dallas, where she was assisted by Chavarria in recording vocals and basic tracks to 2-tracks. Her vocal harmonies were recorded to a Studer A820 ½-inch, an Analog Playback Tape machine, using RMG magnetic tape. Poyser, who was heavily involved as musician and producer in all of Badu's previous work, had his role on the album reduced amicably to accommodate her minimalist, beat-driven approach in production. "She wanted a dirtier, more organic underground hip hop sound", Poyser later said to Shook magazine. "So she dealt with cats that brought that sound to the table."

Additional recording sessions and programming took place at Sa-Ra's Cosmic Dust Studio. Sa-Ra member Om'mas Keith remarked on Badu's role at their studio, "Sometimes she’d come through and pick a skeletal and other times the beats would get made right then and there." Keith played instruments such as the Fender Rhodes, Roland Juno-106, and Roland SH-101. Of all her collaborators, Badu only let Husayn write lyrics for her on the album. Husayn said that because Badu had not allowed anyone to do this before, "she had to go through some personal things to come to the point where she'd let somebody write for her in the manner that we did. It was spontaneous but at the same time there was structure to it. It might not have the right expression, or the right enunciation. Writing is so personal. That was a big thing."

Electric Lady sessions Badu subsequently held recording sessions at Electric Lady Studios in New York City, where the album was completed. "Everything that the producers e-mailed me I put into GarageBand", she explained to Remix. "Then we would try to duplicate it at Electric Lady. I did vocals on my laptop, babies crying and everything. I also EQ'd the tracks using effects like GarageBand's Vocal Reflection." Badu worked with audio engineers Chris Bell, Tom Soares, and Chavarria. The latter had spent numerous hours with Badu listening to her previous albums, including her 1997 debut Baduizm and its 2000 follow-up Mama's Gun, as well as older albums such as The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) by progressive rock band Pink Floyd and Innervisions (1973) by Stevie Wonder. They worked with the producers' emailed music and embellished their own 2-tracks by using Pro Tools to incorporate live instrumentation such as bass, guitar, flutes, percussion, and keyboards. Contributing musicians included vocalist Georgia Anne Muldrow, trumpeter Roy Hargrove, vibraphonist Roy Ayers, guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López, and vocalist Bilal.

Inspired by Badu's creativity and their time listening to music, Chavarria added special effects and delays to the tracks by using and manipulating a variety of plug-ins and guitar pedals, subsequently reworking effects frequency and modulation parameters. Chavarria said they were able to expand on the producers' tracks rather than change them, because "Erykah made this record to display to the world that there is this whole group of producers out there who are outside of the mainstream making great music." Badu said of the approach, "I work in layers. The first layer is the track. The second layer is the songs. The third would be the musicians who add a certain nuance. And when they play, they play like they are a sample. Or we take a piece of what they played, and we sample and loop it."

Along with a talking drum, Badu used tuning forks when recording New Amerykah Part One to evoke a certain feeling through its frequency, a practice she had done on her previous albums: "Each tuning fork has a certain vibrational energy that is conducive to a feeling or a color or a smell. They're related to different chakras in the body, too. Some may make you feel good or sexy or conscious of what you're saying." The album was mastered at Electric Lady Studios in February 2008. Before it was edited down to 11 tracks, New Amerykah Part One was originally intended as a double album, with 18 songs over two discs.

Vocal production

At Electric Lady, Badu applied a multifaceted approach to recording her vocals and opted against editing them in post-production. Using her voice impressionistically, her vocals were characterized by high scales, varied frequencies, wide intervals, and time-stretched harmonies. Chavarria, who engineered the vocals with Badu, remarked on her singing, "Her voice has so many frequencies, from a subharmonic of her tonic to a thin raspiness, and she wants to hear all of that." Badu used a Shure SM57 dynamic microphone, finding it to have enough bottom for her voice type, and cut vocal takes while situated between two speakers in the studio's control room with the monitor mix playing. She explained this setting to be more comfortable, noting the ability to hear herself sing and hold the microphone when moving around. Badu preferred to sing in one take rather than edit different takes together: "When I do vocals, I am singing with a certain volume in my voice. I am singing the double and triple harmonies at different volumes. You don't have to adjust it; I have already done it. We mix as we go, so by the time we put the vocals to ½-inch tape, I know it. If you touch a damn thing, I will know it."

To adjust to potential audio feedback and leakage and obtain a usable take, Chavarria tried having Badu sit in an overstuffed chair six feet behind the mixing console and use alternate microphones such as a Neumann M 269 or AEA R44 ribbon microphone with Sony MDR-V900 headphones into a Furman headphone mixer. However, Badu felt she could not perceive all of her voice's frequencies with the headphones and often discarded them to move towards the studio monitors. He also considered situating her in an equilateral triangle with the two speakers, one of which would be placed out of phase in order to have the leakage cancel itself. However, according to him, the mic has to be stationary, while Badu "likes to hold the mic like an MC. She is at home as a live performer." He said of working around audio spills and adapting to Badu's methods, "We worked to make her vocals fit into the track, phase-wise ... What did work was to keep the monitors fairly low and turn the microphone out of phase, and we would move her around the room until she found a spot where the leakage was reasonable and where she felt comfortable and could hear herself. But just as often she would just sit in that chair behind the board in the A Room."

Musical style