Naked for a Cause

‘Window Seat’, Erykah Badu’s first video from her new album 'New Amerykah, Part II: Return Of The Ankh' defines for me the true meaning of ART!!

I love, love it, love it!! What is all the fuss about her going nude in the video about?! I don’t see anyone complaining so much about all the tits and ass that is shoved down my face on the rare occasion that I do decide to watch Music Videos!!

But someone embraces nudity as a means to communicate a message the world desperately needs to hear and all of a sudden, every watcher of MTV and consumer of Internet Porn becomes a pious little saint.


Erykah Badu

I understand how much of a struggle it is to maintain Individuality especially in this Hoover land called Lagos. It’s as if this place is just designed to suck out any atom of Individuality in you and bully you into adopting the ‘group think’ that Erykah is talking about in her video.

Just yesterday I was so depressed and un-enthusiastic about anything. Why? I felt ugly and unattractive because I recently decided I was no longer going to fix any Extensions on my hair.




So for the past few weeks, I’ve had my natural hair and have stubbornly refused to add anything remotely synthetic, Brazillian, Indian, Peruvian, Somalian, Yugoslavian or even Taiwanese to it.

It’s not been easy, seeing that the really dry weather we have in Lagos right now makes my hair dry very quickly. So yesterday was one of those really bad-hair days and I ended up feeling so ugly that I didn’t even want to go anywhere.

But then I started thinking, and realized that the only reason I was feeling unattractive is because I have bought into the collective lie that I can only be pretty if I have long, expensive looking hair flowing down my back. Did God make a mistake when he was giving me my short, dark and extremely thick African hair?

Why is it that as we are spending all our money buying Brazillian and Spanish hair, we don’t exactly see them running down here to buy Nigerian hair?! Someone somewhere has broadcast his/her idea of beauty to us and we have foolishly accepted it as the definition of what we should look like to be beautiful.


Beyonce Knowles

We have all bought into a lie. A person or a group of people’s ideas.

After thinking this yesterday, I got up, oiled my hair, styled it with my assortment of clips and went for a dinner I was invited to, looking and feeling like I could buy the entire world with a snap of my fingers.

I’m sick and tired of feeling not good about me because I haven’t measured up to what someone who just happens to have more access to mass media than I do has defined as Beautiful.


Erykah

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal about the message of the video Miss Badu said, "Group Think - that's like a form of thinking that causes you to bury what you really feel inside to please the group so you won't be ostracized by the group," she went on to say "It's a comfort zone that we create for ourselves, and I go outside of that comfort zone."

And so do I.