Anniversaries: But You Caint Use My Phone by Erykah Badu
Erykah Badu is still on the line, still experimenting with that perfect frequency. In a world more digitally tangled than ever, sometimes the soul connection is just a hello away.
Erykah Badu has never been afraid to dial into the past to say something about the present. In late 2015, after a five-year recording hiatus, the Dallas-born singer and self-proclaimed “analog girl in a digital world” returned with a commercial mixtape that doubles as a concept album about phones and communication. Titled But You Caint Use My Phone—a witty reference to the famous punchline of her 1997 kiss-off song “Tyrone”—the project finds Badu reaching back across forty years of phone-themed pop music and patching artists as diverse as the Isley Brothers, New Edition, Egyptian Lover, and Usher through her own offbeat frequency. In just eleven tracks and thirty-six minutes, she manages to homage and reimagine phone-call classics from past decades while crafting a suite that feels thoroughly modern, playful, and profoundly Badu. It’s a cosmic party line bridging eras: rotary phones and pagers meet cell phones and hotlines, with Badu as the wise operator connecting it all.
The mixtape’s genesis was appropriately rooted in a modern phone phenomenon. Badu was inspired by the ubiquity of the 2015 smash “Hotline Bling,” a song whose DNA itself mingles past and present (its beat is built on Timmy Thomas’ 1972 soul tune “Why Can’t We Live Together”). Rather than covering the hit record, Badu expanded it into a sprawling, funky rewrite titled “Cel U Lar Device,” stretching over six minutes of sultry groove and humorous ad-libs. This impulsive creative spark led Badu to team up with a young Dallas producer named Zach Witness, and together they recorded the entire mixtape in an impromptu 11-day burst of energy. The result was what Badu cheekily dubbed “TRap & B,” a hybrid of trap-influenced beats and her signature R&B/jazz spirit. Even as they worked quickly and loosely, Badu and Witness paid loving attention to sonic detail—even using tuning forks and Tibetan singing bowls in post-production to tune the tracks to frequencies that “felt really good.” That blend of off-the-cuff creativity and almost mystical audiophilia is quintessential Badu.
History and wisdom are woven deeply into But You Caint Use My Phone. Erykah Badu came of age steeped in the rich vibrations of classic soul and funk records: in interviews, she has cited Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Chaka Khan as formative influences from her childhood. “Everything I do is a mixture of all those things I heard growing up as a Black youth,” she once explained. By the 1980s, she was also a hip-hop head; as a teenager, she even performed as a rapper under the name MC Apples, freestyle-battling on local Dallas radio and forming a rap duo with her cousin. This dual identity—reverence for vintage soul and the irreverence of hip-hop—has always set Badu apart. She can channel Billie Holiday or Chaka in one breath and bust an MC rhyme in the next. By the time she debuted with Baduizm in 1997, she was hailed as the new queen of neo-soul, but she defied any one genre. Fast-forward to 2015, and that genre-blending instinct is fully intact. On But You Caint Use My Phone, Badu’s deep roots in ’70s soul and her love of ‘80s/’90s hip-hop allow her to time-travel musically—honoring the past without ever sounding dated. It’s as if young Apples and old-soul Erykah teamed up to make a mixtape.
The opening track, “Caint Use My Phone (Suite),” immediately sets the tone with a bold callback. Over blaring synths and a jittery beat, Badu pointedly riffs on the line that inspired the mixtape’s title: “You can call me, but you caint use my phone.” It’s humorously laying down the law from the start. Each verse escalates the hyperbole—if you need to reach Erykah, “you better use telepathy… put a message in a bottle… use Morse code,” anything except her phone. Her voice drips with playful attitude, an update of the scolding she gave that no-good man on “Tyrone” nearly two decades prior. From there, Badu launches into a series of sly covers and remixes, each one plucked from a different corner of phone lore in pop music. “Mr. Telephone Man” conjures the mid-1980s with affectionate precision—it’s a cover of New Edition’s teen R&B hit from 1984, down to the songwriting credit for Ray Parker Jr. Badu delivers it with silky, flowing vocals and lush harmonies, leaning into the song’s sweet melody while subtly subverting its perspective. The original featured a young man lamenting that he “can’t get through” to his girl because the phone line won’t connect. In Badu’s hands, the track still bounces with an upbeat, old-school R&B feel, bringing a warm nostalgia amid the mixtape’s more trap-influenced moments.
“There is something wrong with my line, I get a click every time.”
“U Don’t Have to Call” rockets us into a funky afrofuturist fantasy. This track lifts its title and hook from Usher’s 2001 hit—a song about independence after a breakup—but Badu doesn’t simply cover it; she transforms it into something delightfully strange. Over a slippery two-minute groove, she sings to an extraterrestrial lover: “Ooh boy, what planet do you come from, boy? Is it Neptune or Jupiter?” By recasting the song as an interplanetary flirtation, Badu playfully displaces the original’s narrative. Usher was assuring a girl she “don’t have to call” because he’d be alright partying solo; Badu, on the other hand, seems perfectly fine with mixed signals and cosmic distance. She even calls her lover “squirrel” in this track—one of those quirky Badu-isms that make her music so uniquely hers. The effect is whimsical and subtly subversive: she turns a turn-of-the-millennium R&B jam into an out-of-this-world romance, perhaps commenting on how digital-era relationships often feel as alien as actual aliens.
Of course, no Badu project would be complete without original songs as well, and But You Caint Use My Phone gives us a few that stand proudly alongside the reimagined covers. “Phone Down” is one such standout—a slow-burning, late-night R&B number in which Badu issues a seductive challenge: I can make you put your phone down. Over ominous, woozy synths and a sparse beat, she practically purrs the refrain as both promise and dare. On the surface, it’s flirtation, suggesting her love is compelling enough to tear a man away from his Instagram feed. But underneath, “Phone Down” taps into something more melancholy—a lament that genuine human connection now has to compete with glowing screens. “I can make you, I can make you, I can make you put your phone down,” she repeats, her voice confident yet blue. Even as she beckons her lover to disconnect from the grid and be present with her, there’s a resigned awareness that he might not be able to; none of us can, entirely.
The mixtape’s thematic through-line of connection and disconnection is further explored through a few quirky skits and interludes—namely the contributions of a little-known rapper who goes by ItsRoutine. His presence on the tape is brief but notable: appearing on the short track “U Use to Call Me” and popping up again during “What’s Yo Phone Number.” They do, however, reinforce the mixtape’s core theme in their own way: this is a collection of songs about phones, and what’s more true to the phone experience than a couple of dropped calls or wrong numbers? Badu likely understood that even the static and noise have their place in a holistic exploration of communication. So whether you skip those brief tracks or appreciate them as lighthearted skits, they’re part of Badu’s vision—adding a touch of millennial meme humor to a project steeped in musical history. And importantly, they never overstay their welcome. Like a quick joke on your voicemail, they’re there and gone, clearing the line for Badu to resume her cosmic transmission.
If the mixtape begins with a callback to “Tyrone,” it ends with a call forward to an even more distant past—and with a deeply personal full-circle moment. The closing song, “Hello,” is a gorgeous revamp of “Hello, It’s Me,” the Todd Rundgren ballad famously covered by the Isley Brothers in 1974. Choosing this song to conclude the tape is significant on multiple levels. For one, it brings the mixtape’s tour of phone songs back to perhaps the ultimate telephone conversation song—the word “Hello” itself, the universal greeting. But Badu’s “Hello” is joined by a very special guest: André 3000, the legendary OutKast rapper, and Badu’s ex-partner and the father of her first child, Seven. It’s the only track on the mixtape to feature another star vocalist, and Badu saved it for the very end, like a cinematic climax. The chemistry between Badu and André is rooted in a real-life history that fans have long been fascinated by. In the late ‘90s, the pair were a celebrated couple—two young icons of hip-hop and soul, radiating Black creative brilliance. Their romantic relationship eventually ended, but not before inspiring great art (most famously OutKast’s apologetic hit “Ms. Jackson,” André’s message to Badu’s mother after their breakup).
But You Caint Use My Phone remains a fascinating entry in Erykah Badu’s catalog. On the surface, it’s a playful mixtape about phones, full of covers and cheeky skits. But beneath the surface, the dial tone hums with deeper themes and cultural commentary. Badu wanders through the tension between analog and digital living, between nostalgia and futurism, between private emotion and public connection. The project’s title, taken from a line improvised in a live song decades ago, encapsulates Badu’s stance: you can reach out to her through music, through spiritual means, through any cosmic channel you want, but she’s still setting her own boundaries. It’s experimental yet deeply rooted, funny yet poignant, nostalgic yet boldly current. It pays respect to the forebears of Black music (from the funk of Uncle Jamm’s Army to the slick R&B of New Edition) even as it asserts Badu’s own trailblazing voice. It also captures Badu’s engagement with Black culture’s evolving conversation: the mixtape can be heard as an allegory for Black communication—from the chitlin’ circuit phone operator to the hip-hop hotline blinger, all finding inventive ways to express love, pain, and everything in between.