Spotlight: The Cannabinoids Featuring Erykah Badu

Erykah Badu doesn't merely want you to enjoy her music. The Dallas native wants her chronic-inspired concoctions to get you high. At least that's the idea behind her latest project, the Cannabinoids.

"A cannabinoid is a group of terpenophenolic compounds present in cannabis sativa, and they're the receptors that create the sensation felt by the brain when smoking cannabis," Badu explains. "I chose that name because I wanted to inspire that same feeling in the brains of people in the audience when we as musicians get together to stir up the human brain activity.

"I wanted to get people addicted."

The 11-deep Dallas collective, including members of PPT and Strange Fruit Project, cultivates sonic sticky icky onstage with eight turntables, six laptops, four keyboards, three drum machines, one funk box, and no rehearsals.

"I just reached out to musicians, DJs, and beatsmiths that I really enjoyed and have always admired," Badu says. "I wanted to conjure up some kind of magical potion to light some fire under Dallas' ass, because it felt really stagnant."

No schwag, the Cannabinoids' potion is 100% improvisational: on-the-spot beat-making, remixing, and reimagining. Given all that technological wizardry, can Badu still rightly be called an analog girl in a digital world?

"Of course," she insists. "Being an analog girl is a choice, and that's what I've chosen to be. But I'm having fun in your world. It's very important to me to mix the synthetic with the organic, because that's what really makes it taste good. Sweet and sour is what gives it flavor. I try to keep it as organic as I can, but we're in the year 2009AD. I want to be a weather girl, and it's difficult to predict the weather if you don't know what's going on outside."