Erykah Badu
"The Return of Automatic Slim" Tour
Fox Theatre
Detroit
Nov. 20, 2025
A towering figure with shoulders pointed to the sky like mountains appears onstage to an atmospheric soundtrack. When the lights come up, who else would it be other than Erykah Badu glowing under red lights in an oversized hat and floor-length golden cape like a celestial deity?
Badu stopped at Detroit’s Fox Theatre Thursday night on her “The Return of Automatic Slim Tour” for the 25th anniversary of her second album Mama’s Gun. While, admittedly, I’m more familiar with her first album, Baduzim (with fond memories of playing my mom’s copy of the CD on my boombox on repeat for weeks), the evening was soulful, jazzy, spiritual, and full of as much shit talking as I’d expected.
She sounded better than I remember when I last saw her in 2016 at the Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre, back when it was still called Chene Park. Her performance is not like a Beyoncé show where you have a full-on ensemble of dancing and other theatrics. But her stage presence, banter, and sheer vocal power make for an electric evening. I had chills after the first song, “Penitentiary Philosophy,” that continued the entire evening as she played through the entire Mama’s Gun album.
When she said, “I am a warrior princess, I have come from the other sun,” I believed her, and even more so when she chanted, “I’m alright with me,” during “Cleva.”
A few songs in, she steps off her perch through an electric triangular portal to come closer to the audience. And every couple of songs, she removed a layer until she was down to a white button up, with a thick red belt and leather underwear, proudly showing us her ass during “Annie (Don’t Wear No Panties).”
Her spoken0word piece “Black Box,” a clear sexual innuendo, felt like a poetry slam that she is destined to win.
Some of the best parts of the show were her banter with the crowd and crew. “Get the fuck out the way, please,” she told a cameraman on stage. The stage manager Jamie got most of the flack, as she repeatedly told him to hurry up. “Jamie, my booty’s cold, bitch. This ain’t part of the act or nothing. I’m serious [as] a motherfucker,” she said.
Her performance of “Orange Moon” was an ethereal journey into space like the Fox Theatre could sink into a crater of love and soul, and we’d come out the other side on Mars in the moon’s orange glow.
“This is my third home,” she said of Detroit, giving shoutouts to Motown, Berry Gordy, and J Dilla, who produced three tracks on Mama’s Gun; “Didn’t Cha Know,” “My Life,” and “Kiss Me on My Neck (Hesi).”
But she doesn’t let us off the hook with the friendly shoutouts, as she fired off about Detroit, “home of the killers … motherfucking stealers.” We were not offended, just amused that she had the audacity to make the joke. It was clear it came from a place of love.
Unexpectedly, she treated us with a short rendition of “Tyrone,” when someone yelled the name of the song, but not without giving us a hard time first.
“You didn’t get the memo, this is the Mama’s Gun tour and Tyrone isn’t on that album,” she spat before going into the song and ended with, “OK we did fucking 'Tyrone.' You happy?”
But she also reminded us, “There’s nothing better than love; it’s the strongest frequency on this earth.”
She closed the evening with album finisher “Green Eyes,” an absolute love ballad, before crawling back through her portal, leaving “Fuck You” displayed on stage.
This is why we love Erykah Badu. She is unapologetically herself at all times, no matter if it comes off unhinged. She simply does not give a fuck. Her music and performance are like an experiment where someone said: I wonder what would happen if I just did whatever I wanted, took off my clothes, and started making beats in my underwear? What if I surrendered to the creative spirit and released any notion of normalcy in favor of sharing what’s stirring in my soul instead? That is Badu.
Published in conjunction with Detroit Metro Times.
