ERYKAH BADU TOOK OFF THE HEADWRAP AFTER A PRIEST IN CUBA

Erykah Badu stopped wearing her signature headwrap after a trip to Cuba around 2000, where she went with Common for a Santería reading and misjudged the man she had come to see. She told Casey Gerald of The Cut in 2023: "I didn't wear the headwrap anymore after that day." The headwrap had been a defining part of her look in the 1990s, and the encounter in Havana is the reason she set it down for a long time.

A Priest in Pumas

Badu arrived dressed in white, with her headwrap on. Common had arranged the trip shortly after the release of Mama's Gun, according to accounts of the story, and the couple went to the home of a well known priest in Havana so that Badu could receive a reading. BET quotes her describing the outfit as a white head wrap, a long white dress and all of her jewelry, with the people around her dressed more casually.

Inside, she found herself judging a man with dirty fingernails and, in her words, "some Pumas that was tied so tight that you couldn't see the tongue of 'em." She took him for an assistant. He was the priest. Global Grind has since nicknamed him the Puma Priest, after the shoes.

"There Was Nothing That He Could Wear"

The priest came from a long line of healers, and Badu drew the lesson from that lineage. She says there was nothing he could wear, or not wear, that would erase that history. His authority did not come from his clothes. Badu has said her own standing, by contrast, had been arriving ahead of her through the way she looked.

That reversal is the center of the story. Badu had dressed for a spiritual appointment as if the outfit were part of the credential, and the man whose credential was a family tradition looked like someone she would have walked past in a different setting. The shoes, the fingernails and the casual clothes were all information she read wrong.

What the Headwrap Had Been Doing

The experience made Badu rethink how the headwrap shaped the way people treated her. On airplanes, in her neighborhood and seemingly everywhere she went, she says it commanded respect: "No matter what I really knew, they just respected me because of that and the way it looked."

She told The Cut that after that day she wanted to find out what she was made of without it. "I wanted to see what I was made of," she said. The sentence reads as a decision to test whether her standing came from her words and her music or from the silhouette that announced her before she spoke.

The timing matters. Stereogum notes that her elaborate signature headwrap was gone around the time of Mama's Gun, which sources date to October 31, 2000 or to November 2000. NSS Magazine says 2001 was the last year she wore the turban. Sources differ on the year, and the 2000 trip is the date most accounts agree on.

She Returned to the Subject in 2023

Badu has told the story more than once. In September 2023, around New York Fashion Week, TheGrio reported her reflecting on the head wrap, and the same year she spoke with Casey Gerald for The Cut, the interview this account rests on. The photographs of the headwrap years are credited to Marc Baptiste, Ethan Miller and Eric Johnson.

Twenty Six Years On

The decision has outlasted several reinventions. Badu released the 16 track album Before the World Blows with The Alchemist on August 28, 2026, and the photographer and former NBA player CJ Miles gave it his first album review on October 6, calling it perhaps the most hip hop album he had heard in a long time. The headwrap era, in other words, ended 26 years before her most recent record.

Badu's own account is the useful one here. She did not frame the decision as fashion. She framed it as a test of respect: what people gave her because of the way she looked, and what they would give her without it. The 2023 interview with The Cut is the version of the story she tells now, and the line she chose to end it on is the one about finding out what she was made of.