Erykah Badu’s new album gets trippy, yet serious. Photo from The Smoking Section’s photostream on Flickr, licensed under the Creative Commons.

Erykah Badu’s infectious lead single, “Honey,” has been tearing up speakers for months. It’s straight crack and, based on that, her new album New Amerykah: 4th World War should have been similarly full of the jazzy smooth vibes Badu became known for on classic discs Baduizm and Mama’s Gun. Instead, “Honey” is a drastic exception on this album, coming under the title “Bonus Track” as the final song. But considering the rest of New Amerykah, that’s really the only logical place for it. Contrary to that sugar-sweet love jam, New Amerykah is, as Badu has said, a “documentation on what’s happening right now,” a social commentary. And it’s not a happy one.

After 10 songs of sonic madness, the headnodding bounce of “Honey” is a welcomed respite. New Amerykah is some heavy shit, hissing and crackling back and forth between static-y dreamscapes and harsh realities while dealing with the false promises, for many, of the American Dream.

At times, nothing is certain on the album, as in the eerily frenetic “My People.” As Badu croons “Hold on/my people” amid primal noises and cannibalistic drums, it feels as though you’re running through a forbidding jungle, being chased by a nightmarish something you can’t see. But when the sequence ends with an abrupt “Good morning, did you have a dream?”, the snap back to reality is no less disconcerting.

The next track, “Soldier,” begins with a promising, focused student who seems destined for great things: “Wanna learn more and more/Colin mama taught him good/He’s about to change the face/of your ghetto neighborhood.” He could be a savior, but he’s tragically shot while walking to school. The despondency continues with the cocaine pain of “The Cell” and the angry mournfulness of “Twinkle,” in which Badu cries, “They keep us uneducated sick and depressed/Doctor I’m addicted now I’m under arrest.”

The point isn’t so much bleak despair, though, so much as what needs to be done about it. “Twinkle” ends with a call to arms, from of an updated version of the famous “Mad as Hell” speech delivered by the character Howard Beale in the 1976 Oscar-winning movie “Network”: “I’m a human being, dammit! My life has value!”

Badu’s message is to keep struggling, to keep searching for that “beautiful world.” She believes in the healing power of hip hop, and in New Amerykah she harnesses that power to give hope to those for whom hope is scarce. The epic track “The Healer” embodies this; though you might not know it from listening to it. Badu spoke about it in a promotional interview:

The song itself is beyond brilliant and by far the album’s highlight. Over a trippy, Madlib-produced beat, Badu gets her medicine man on, chanting a mind bending mantra about Yahweh and Rastafarians, or something. The song has this future-tribal, smoked out-temple vibe to it. It’s vision-quest theme music.

Make no mistake: Though 4th World War is hard to digest, it is inspired. Musically and stylistically, it’s another dimension; Badu fans couldn’t have expected anything more. It means something, and that’s more than can be said of a lot of hip-hop these days.

Overall Rating: A-