One day Steve was late going onstage, so I went out to the mic and threw out some jokes and stuff. I love being of service to people-the whole act of it is really great to me. I noticed Steve didn’t have a stage manager, so I got that job, making sure everybody was taken care of. I handled money and helped organize transportation and hotel reservations for the comedians that came in. When he knew he could trust me, he moved me to the ticket booth. When I started working there I was a waitress, and somehow I became a hostess. Funny, generous, considerate, and he knew I was an artist. When I was 23 or 24, I was rapping and emceeing a lot with Free, but I was also working at Steve Harvey’s comedy house. It wasn’t my aspiration to be a singer, it was to be an artist. I went to university from 1989 to ’93 to study theater, so I was an actor at that point. ** Erykah Badu: **That was back when I was in college. "The Other Side of the Game" turned out to be my favorite song to perform live. I added a few songs from The Roots whom I did not know until I moved to New York.
Anyway, Baduizm came out the way it was as a demo. I’ve been moved to Motown ’cause they divide you up like cattle in different sections of the system-the machine. He asked me to open for D’Angelo when he went to Dallas and Kedar really liked what he heard and both of us got a deal at Universal and I’ve been there ever since. He also understood that what me and D’Angelo had in common was not that we sounded alike, but that we didn’t sound like what was happening. Then I met this guy, Kedar Massenburg, who was managing D’Angelo at the time, and he understood what I was doing. A couple put me into artist development-a Special Ed kind of thing. We separated and I moved to New York and auditioned for many labels and they didn’t really get it. But in my heart, I didn’t want to be in a group. We took a couple of pictures and we were called Erykah Free-his name was Free. I wrote my first song when I was in a group with my cousin, called "Apple Tree." My cousin liked the song he played it for people and they liked it, and I said, "Alright, another one!"-and on and on, until we had put together a 14-song demo in Dallas in his room. I just didn’t know if it’d be theater or film. I liked singing and any kind of art and I knew this love for art and this practicing would be my career at some point. ** Erykah Badu: **I had been a theater major and a dancer for most of my life, from the time I was 4 years old. GQ: You’re happy with how everything played out? GQ: Would you change anything about the way you handled the start of your career? It only sounds alike because I’m present in all of it. I don’t have one song that sounds like another one in my entire catalog. If I can speak for a lot of artists who feel the same way I do, it doesn’t really matter. I think titles in music are mainly constructed to categorize things to sell units. ** Erykah Badu: **It was constructed outside of us.
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