Turn Me On, Dead Man

Erykah Badu's video for her song "Window Seat" invokes the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in an unusual way. Though the lyrics to the song do not address the JFK assassination, the video is a single-shot piece in which Erykah Badu takes off all her clothes while retracing JFK's route through Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963, the day he was assassinated. The video opens with Dallas radio station KBOX reporter Sam Pate's coverage of President Kennedy's motorcade just before he was shot. The audio clip is from the moment when the motorcade took a hard left turn from Houston Street to Elm Street, causing the President's limosine to slow down considerably.  In her video, Erykah Badu pulls up to a parking place on Houston Street, even stopping to plug the parking meter. She then walks up Houston Street and starts taking off her clothes. As she reaches Elm Street, Erykah Badu removes her blouse to reveal a tattoo across her shoulders that reads "EVOLVING." By the time she reaches the grassy knoll, she is completely naked. As the song ends, a gunshot is heard and Erykah Badu falls to the ground, with the word "GROUPTHINK" bleeding from her head. The camera then pans across Dealey Plaza, narrated by a poem that explains the connection between "Window Seat" and the JFK assassination: 

They play it safe
Are quick to assassinate what they do not understand
They move in packs
Ingesting more and more fear with every act of hate on one another
They feel most comfortable in groups
Less guilt to swallow
They are us
This is what we have become
Afraid to respect the individual
A single person with inner circumstance can move one to change
To love herself
To evolve

The song isn't about the JFK assassination, then--or even political assassinations--but instead it addresses the struggles of pathbreaking public figures confronted by a hostile public that doesn't understand them. In "Window Seat" Erykah Badu sings of a desire to escape from her role as an artist but concedes that she needs her audience--to the point where she is willing to bare all, as demonstrated by this video. Erykah Badu has gone to some lengths to explain her reasons for shooting this video on her Twitter account. She also addresses the significance of "groupthink," or "rationalized conformity," in the words of William Safire. She tweets, "we are ALL guilty of groupthink we have all been VICTIMS of groupthink."

One last point, Erykah Badu makes a couple of pop culture references of note in "Window Seat." She describes her ambivalence about continuing on with creative pursuits in the line "On this porch i’m rockin’ back and forth like Lightnin' Hopkins " Then she expresses a desire to escape in a Star Trek reference, "If anybody speak to Scotty/Tell him beam me up."