"A.D. 2000" (Erykah Badu)

On February 4, 1999, four plainclothes officers in the Bronx shot an unarmed immigrant.  The police were on late night patrol, looking for a serial rapist.  They spotted a man who purportedly fit the suspect's description.  When they attempted to stop him, he got scared and ran.  As he reached the vestibule of his building, he pulled a wallet from his jacket pocket.  The police thought it was a gun, and they shot him.  41 times.
The victim's name was Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old aspiring computer programmer from Guinea.  He sold trinkets on 14th Street in Manhattan to raise money for college.  He'd saved up about $9000 toward school, when his visa was about to expire.  Not wanting to be shipped back to Guinea after having come so far, he misrepresented himself when reapplying; he claimed he was an asylum-seeker from Mauritania, a country infamous for human trafficking and myriad human rights violations.  So when the officers stopped him in the wee hours on February 4, 1999, Diallo apparently thought that he'd been found out, and he panicked.
Whatever the case, he was still just an unarmed man who ended up losing his life unjustly.
Understandably, the incident sparked an outcry, particularly when the four officers were acquitted a year later in February 2000.  Joining the dissent, musicians from Wyclef Jean ("Diallo") to Bruce Springsteen ("American Skin") recorded songs about the incident.
So did Erykah Badu.
But her track, which she co-wrote with soul legend Betty Wright and named "A.D. 2000" (the A.D. referring to Amadou Diallo's initials), was less of an indictment of police or a retelling of the story and more of a reality check for society.  Apart from the title being an homage to Diallo himself, it silently asks the question: "How is this kind of injustice still happening in the year 2000?"
The answer is inherent in the lyrics:
No, you won't be namin' no buildings after me
To go down dilapidated
No you won't be namin' no buildings after me
My name will be misstated, surely
On the one hand, she's pointing out that our society really only values and protects those who are wealthy or powerful (i.e. the people with their names on buildings).  On the other hand, she's singing from Diallo's point of view in the afterlife, rejecting any hollow gestures to memorialize his life—i.e. naming some building after him, knowing that his name will be mispronounced in perpetuity and his spirit will be neglected, just as the building will be neglected.
It's a powerful, powerful lyric.
It's also musically rich.  Its singer-songwriter feel kind of surprised me the first time I heard it.  In fact, it still reminds me of early Roberta Flack, where there's some acoustic guitar, Fender rhodes, and a voice—pure and simple.
I particularly love how the track builds ever so subtly, every chorus adding another layer of harmony vocals and another layer of smooth Minimoog counterpoint, contributed by the gifted keyboardist James Poyser.
"A.D. 2000" is the true centerpiece of the album Mama's Gun (2000).

"Didn't Cha Know" (Erykah Badu)

Back in 2000, there were three albums that I absolutely wore out: D'Angelo's Voodoo, Common's Like Water for Chocolate, and Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun.  It wasn't until I really scrutinized the liner notes of each disc that I realized all three were recorded simultaneously by the same collective of musicians, the "Soulaquarians": Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, James Poyser, Roy Hargrove, the late James "J Dilla" Yancey...  Those names kept showing up in the credits, track after track—not unlike how, if you look at the credits of any great track put out by Stax or Motown in the 60s, you'll find the same players and composers, over and over.  Only, instead of the Soulaquarians having a particular "sound" (like, you can instantly recognize a vintage Motown record just by the way the drums and rhythm section sound), they were more about an approach to making music.  If you listen to any of the aforementioned albums, there's this aura of creativity that surrounds each one.  It's as if nothing was off limits, all ideas and inspirations were valid, and everyone shared the same vast musical vocabulary, which ranged from the Baroque to the Boogie Down Bronx.  The result was daring, yet accessible, music with richness and depth.  
It's timeless stuff.
One of my favorite Soulaquarians collaborations of that period is "Didn't Cha Know" off Badu's Mama's Gun.  The track came about after Common (a.k.a. Lonnie Lynn, Jr.) introduced Badu to DJ/producer J Dilla.  She and Dilla were hanging out at his basement studio in Detroit, talking music and getting to know each other, when he told her to go pick any album out of his enormous library of vinyl records.
As Badu reminisced to Fader magazine in 2006, "I’m looking through these organized, tightly packed crates, and I just pulled out one record, and the artist was Tarika Blue.  I liked that name."
The moment she heard the opening track on the album, a laid-back jazz fusion piece called "Dreamflower," she knew it was the perfect foundation for a new track with Dilla.
In true Dilla fashion, the sample on "Didn't Cha Know" is subtle and tasteful.  In fact, it doesn't smack you in the face that it's a sample at all; it feels completely organic.  Which is why Badu's lyrics and vocals mesh so well with it.  It's almost as if that melody was always destined to dovetail with her introspective poetry about being human and making mistakes but never doubting her direction in life.
Incidentally, it's a song that spoke to me when I decided to change career paths after college.  I kept getting doors slammed in my face by an industry that I quickly grew to despise.  When I finally walked away from it and took an unpaid internship at a small magazine in late 2000, I was kind of beating myself up about the choices I'd made up to that point.  But then this song came along at the right time and convinced me that being regretful about the past wasn't doing anything for me in the present.  I didn't know exactly where my path was going to lead, but I knew I was on the right track.
I still go to this song any time I need to shake off self doubt.

"Tyrone" (Erykah Badu)

My freshman year of college, I remember seeing Erykah Badu on MTV for the first time.  Only word to describe the experience: smitten.
She didn't look like anyone else in the music world at the time.  She rocked these funky headwraps like some kind of Egyptian princess and sang about stuff like reincarnation, apple trees, and sipping tea.  She was a breath of fresh air in the over-produced, bling-drenched world of late 90s R&B.
I had just purchased a copy of her debut album Baduizm (1997) when her second album, Live (aptly named, since it was recorded live in New York in 1997), came out of nowhere.  On it, there was a song that erased any minuscule doubts I had about her authenticity or staying power.
"Tyrone."
On this brief track, Badu croons her frank, off-the-cuff indictment of less-than-mature men over a simmering, jazzy stew of Fender rhodes, electric bass, and drums.  The feel is kind of like the second coming of Nina Simone, infused with a shot of hip-hop attitude.
By the second chorus, she has the entire audience in the palm of her hand, singing along like they've known the song for years (even though it was maybe the second time ever she'd performed it live).
And by the end of the song, when she suddenly stops the band and intones You better call Tyrone / But you can't use my phone, the audience reaction confirms that she'd crafted a bonafide soul classic.