Erykah Badu was hauled into court for her nude video walk in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza. (Photo: Mika)
Erykah Badu has paid a $500 fine and will serve six months probation for stripping during a music video shoot at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot in 1963.
Badu peeled off her clothes March 13 for her “Window Seat” music video.
Police in April cited her for disorderly conduct after a witness made a sworn complaint. A number of children were among the tourists and other random passers-by seen on the video.
Dallas city spokesman Frank Librio says Badu paid the fine Friday (Aug 13).
Badu ends up nude in the jarring cinéma vérité video.
When she arrives at Dealey Plaza where Kennedy was assassinated, she is instantly gunned down herself. But instead of blood, she bleeds a message.
As she lays on the sidewalk, nude in a fetal position, the word “groupthink” spills from her head and her disembodied voice chants a free-verse poem.
“They who play it safe, are quick to assassinate what they don’t understand,” she speaks. “They move in packs, ingesting more and more fear with every act of hate on one another.
“They feel more comfortable in groups, less guilt to swallow. They are us. This is what we have become, afraid to respect the individual.”
Badu’s new LP New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh, will be released Tuesday (Mar. 30). You can buy it here, by clicking the icon to the left.
The video also has the same look as grainy Kennedy assassination footage. It opens with Badu exiting from a 60s-era Lincoln Continental sedan. Radio commentary on the progress of JFK’s motorcade toward its date with destiny sets up the scene.
Badu provided the back story to the video on her Twitter account.
“We only had 1 shot to get it right,” she tweeted. “We didn’t plan the shot. [Director] Coodie and I just went raw dog. Too busy lookin’ for cops and being petrified.”
“The people caught in the shot were trying hard to ignore me,” Badu tweeted. “Lol, [except] one guy grabbing [my] clothes. … He disappeared. Didn’t have time to look for him or clothes. We ran. It was the peeps off camera yelling.
Despite the raucous, “I held my head up and kept moving. … There were children there. I prayed they wouldn’t b traumatized.”
Artists stripping down in protest is nothing new. Alanis Morrisette did it years ago, and she remains an activist to this day.
Badu nods to Matt and Kim’s “Lesson Learned.” The duo stripped in the middle of Times Square, to even less public reaction, in their video.
A spokeswoman for the singer did not immediately comment.