Well, At Least Erykah Badu's Naked Video Won't Harm Dealey Plaza's Reputation

By Robert Wilonsky Thu., Apr. 1 2010 at 6:30 PM

Categories: Local Music, News

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~~The Onion News Network~~The Associated Press just posted its breathless report on the brouhaha over Erykah Badu's "Window Seat" striptease, which has become the Zapruder film of 2010. AP, why the headline: "Dallas Residents Stunned Over Erykah Badu Video"? Shouldn't it have been: "Two Tourists Who Don't Know Who Erykah Badu Is Offended Over Something They Didn't See Till AP Reporter Showed Them"?

If nothing else, every time I feel bad about pestering DowntownDallas president John Crawford with a silly question, I'll remember the time the AP asked him if a naked celebrity could somehow harm the reputation of the stretch of downtown cement where John Kennedy was murdered. Says WFAA this evening, Erykah could be rewarded with a disorderly conduct charge for her work promoting Dallas better than the CVB ever did. Does that mean I can file a complaint about the "One More Thing" video? Because I will.

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Why were they interviewing tourists? And who cares? So she was naked for around 5 minutes. Do people just go around fearing naked people? It's not like she assaulted anyone.
Please, Kennedy would've hit that in a Dallas minute. Nerds.
Heh Joe Bob, I think I know where you can find "ugly-on-a-stick". She's running around Dallas somewhere sans clothes.
Listen, a more worthy protest would be aimed at those generously-sized, middle-aged women who insist upon wearing low-cut garments that reveal pendulous, liver-spotted, stretch-marked breasts. Ewwwwww!
"Hey look! Right there, that's where JFK got head head blown off!!!" I agree with Johnny Mack - the X-spot is the most tasteless thing in Dallas. Every time I drive through Dealey Plaza and see that monument marker to murder I feel disgusted all over again. What I find most offensive about Badu's you-tube moment is all the attention it brought to the Dallas symbol of crassness - the X-spot.
i doubt that this would receive a second glance (pun intended) in europe. america is too prudish for it's own good. dallas, get over yourself already. that ground is not sacred. as for the disrespect of kennedy, i bet he was looking on from where ever he is and enjoying the show.
Naked woman in street, or taking a picture of your kid standing on a painted x in the middle of the road where someone shot the President in the skull. Gee, I wonder which is more offensive? Dallas will never get it.
I, personally, was inspired by the video to recreate it at work. Kid went blind. Thank God I know how to fix that.
I wonde how many people they interviewed who didn't care and what kind of questions were asked.
the ap is pathetic.
Bacon is right, the racism is there. Looks like the complaints go down racial lines.
Who cares, next time try it on Central at Mockingbird
�First of all, it was shocking, provocative," said Dallas Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway. Looks like Ms. Badu has found a loophole in the "Pull Your Pants Up" campaign. I can't wait for the city council to protect us from future travesties. The streets of downtown - safe once again.
Oddly enough, the late of Dallas Rod Dreher, who only recently has been demoted by the Templeton Foundation from formerly being a vaunted "seven-time Pulitzer Prize nominee" to now only having been "nominated by his editors seven times for the Pulitzer Prize", <a href="http://blog.beliefnet.com/roddreher/2010/03/tactless-erykah-badu-gets-naked-at-jfk-death-site.html">would agree with robert</a>, albeit in a typically Drehery mixture of sexual squeamishness and chipper white trash racism against a background of neoBrooklynite disdain for the town that somehow still misses him. The naked black woman Badu, Dreher informs us, is "utterly, completely, nauseatingly tasteless", and, because we know how these black folk are it should then come as no surprise to us to learn that "Julie saw her once at the Whole Foods in our part of Dallas [the temerity!] shopping while barefoot..." Since Dreher was never known as a foot fetishist, maybe that otherwise extremely odd little bit of info was intended to leave us thankful Whole Foods had already paved its parking lot so that the barefoot Badu had no grass underfoot to kill, as the folk wisdom of rural white Louisiana explains the bare earth of rural African-American yards to its rural white children like Dreher. After all of Dreher's crypto-racist puling over his "utterly, completely, nauseatingly tasteless" barefoot black buckette, though, um, why? For Dreher, his real shock was "to visit Dealey Plaza for the first time and to observe how this infamous place was so ... banal. I don't know what I expected, really, but I expected more than an ugly intersection." Why, what better place then for an "utterly, completely, nauseatingly tasteless" black woman to do a striptease for a no longer "seven-time Pulitzer Prize nominee" than at a "banal""ugly intersection" in his long-disdained former city of residence? At least this time she didn't implicitly threaten the sanitation of the food supply in Dreher's part of town or risk killing the grass underfoot with her bare feet. KipS
What's all this Badu-ha-ha? It's a tempest in a C-cup!
So why wasn't she arrested? Isn't public nudity against the law?
Big Bob - Is nothing sacred anymore? I'll confess, I am a 40 something white guy and yes conservative. I am on board with free speech, freedom of expression and artistic creativity/interpretation. But this is just wrong! And for Ms. Badu, to strip down and fall on the spot where a man, an American President, was assassinated is un-speakable. I may be alone on this, but her message is lost by desecrating this ground.
Well, the people they interviewed were white, so obviously their disapproval was motivated by racism...
hey Dallas Police! Erykah's hiding out over at the Texas Theatre!
Sex being used to sell something? All Badu was doing was finding her DSpot. Or wait, maybe Crawford finally found it, but did not like it.