The Most Radical Thing You Can Do Is Pay Attention: Reflections on Erykah Badu and the philosophy of Iris Murdoch

There is a version of your attention that has been trained, gradually and without your permission, to function like a marketplace. It skips, scrolls, samples and moves on. Restless by design, you are primed to consume rather than absorb. Most of us have been living inside this economy for so long that genuine stillness has started to feel almost countercultural. And yet, philosopher Iris Murdoch would argue that attention, when it is really working, is of course not passive or reactive. For her, it is a conscious and active choice, something you have to deliberately bring to bear rather than let habit or algorithm decide for you. For Murdoch, to pay real attention is a moral act.

I want to bring your attention to Erykah Badu, who is particularly interested in this realm. The one that opens up when you stop performing engagement and actually arrive somewhere. She spent the late nineties quietly rewriting what soul music could sound like and the decades since treating sound as something closer to medicine than entertainment. I first heard "On & On" as a kid in the back of the car, and her voice had a looseness and presence I hadn't come across before. It made you lean in rather than sit back. Her 1997 debut Baduizm still sounds raw next to the glossy R&B of its time, like someone humming in the kitchen with the window open, unhurried and a little meditative.

Badu’s 'Monday Ceremony' is a listening ritual she has taken to small rooms in Tokyo, London and Berlin, and it feels like the natural endpoint of that voice: intimate, unrepeatable and deliberately uncomfortable to enter. Guests arrive to find tatami mats, high-fidelity headphones and an inner chamber designed for complete presence. Badu guides them through fragments from her archive, unreleased material and spontaneous improvisations that exist only in that room that day. No recordings or repetitions, just thirty minutes of raw, impromptu sound. The phones stay outside. In making that space, something rarer becomes possible: to truly listen is to make room for a shared reality in the present moment, one that belongs equally to the person giving the sound and the people receiving it.¹

I can imagine the discomfort at first is real. Lying on the floor with strangers, surrendering your phone, with nowhere to put your eyes. We aren’t trained for it. Most of us have quietly learned to manage our distance from art, from people, from our own interior lives. The ceremony dismantles that quite quickly, and Badu has spoken of watching people remove their headsets afterwards and there being a visible shift in how they carry themselves. Something gets peeled back, she says: the body, given no option but to receive, eventually does.²

She has spoken of every performance as a process of healing, in her or in someone in the room who is mirroring what she is working through. “They may get the healing before me,” she has said. This is not metaphor for her but a literal understanding of what sound does to bodies in a shared space. The ceremony is that belief made architectural, stripped of staging and the expectation of performance, down to just the music moving through you as you lay horizontal in the dark.³

Which is where Murdoch becomes useful again. A novelist who also taught philosophy at Oxford, she set out her thinking on morality in The Sovereignty of Good (1970), a set of essays that stuck with me long after I first read them. Her belief was that goodness starts with how you see, rather than what you do. She describes being lifted out of a bad mood by the sight of a kestrel outside her window, and coined the moment as "unselfing” - the moving away from ego-driven consciousness. The central task of the moral agent, in her view, is to actually look at what is there, with care and without agenda or assumption. Moral vision, she wrote, is bound up with the quality of a person’s consciousness, shaped by where and how they direct their attention. What you attend to determines what becomes real to you.⁴

The Monday Ceremony is a reset of that capacity. There is one thing in the room worth attending to and the quality of that attention is Badu’s offering to the room and the room’s offering back to her.

“Attention is a gift,” she has said. “Even a sign of love.”

That line lands differently when you sit with Murdoch, who was making much the same case fifty years earlier. What Badu is describing isn't a wellness trend but something older and stranger: the idea that when you truly listen to someone, not their planned performance or your projection of them but the frequencies unfolding in real time, you exercise true recognition.

At the close of the ceremony, Badu asked the room to sit with one question: how do you live the rest of your life truly present and fully focused? It is, in different words, the same question Murdoch was asking. Not how to be more productive or more optimised, just how do you actually show up for what is in front of you?

Both suggest the answer is practice - uncomfortable, unglamorous and repeated. You can start on a tatami mat in Berlin, or maybe you can start tomorrow.