Column: Badu's brilliance takes a "Window Seat" to society

Nudity and ludeness are two different things and Erykah Badu gracefully taught us all that with her quest to break the uniform thinking of people in society through stripping down in Downtown Dallas. It was up to us whether we all chose to receive that message. Most didn't.

An alternative rock group, Matt and Kim, shot a video for there song, Lessons Learned, in the middle of Time Square completely nude. I heard nothing but kudos and congratulations from fans and the media for being so avant-garde and courageous. There was no punishment but a bogus scene in the video where two policemen grab Matt and Kim for about thirty seconds. They were never formally sentenced. However, everything changed when Erykah Badu shot her video for her single, Window Seat, inspired by Matt and Kim, in which she was nude in Downtown Dallas, March 16. She was arrested for disorderly conduct April 3.

How is this justifiable? If it was that much of a disturbance to the people on the street, the Dallas Police Department would have gotten phone calls on March 16 and detained Badu expeditiously and not nearly a month later.

I would hate to think that in these advanced times we are that one-sided and narrow minded to say that only white artists can run down the street naked and not be penalized; i.e. Blink 182, Matt and Kim, and Eminem. However, get a black artist to remove her clothes, whether tasteful and artistic or not, and she gets locked away.

I applaud her for not only possessing the courage to rebuke vulnerability and fear but for producing a video that was unwavering in the message that normal is non-existent. Society made that term up to feel comfortable; to feel "normal".

Eat your vegetables. Praise Jesus. Believe what the government tells you. We are all slaves to groupthink, a term created in the early 50's to represent the eeriness of society to have one view of proper behavior and our place in the world. In this generation, groupthink has hyper-sexualized ourselves until we must have a disclaimer (a museum marquee, ratings on a movie, a message before a tv show, etc) before we can properly see the human body as art and not a means of reproduction.

Before sentencing and detainment, Badu was interviewed in Quick newspaper about her video and her vision. She expressed that she was killed at the end of the video and the words group think spilled out of her head because it represented the character assassination that she would face because of the video and that groupthink would pull the trigger.

Guilty.