Getting the Audience Involved

Hip-hop soul queen Erykah Badu and rap jack-of-all-trades Wyclef Jean both emphasize personal and cultural empowerment in their work. But on Sunday at the Hollywood Bowl, these acclaimed artists took very different approaches to getting their messages across.

Headliner Badu took the stage wearing a huge straw hat, floor-length grass vest, long emerald dress, thigh-length tiny braids and tall platform boots. Making her Bowl debut in an installment of its world-music series that also featured global soulsters Zap Mama, she must have realized the audience wasn’t strictly her crowd. After all, when she broke out the concert favorite “Tyrone,” in which she gives a good-for-nothing boyfriend the boot, almost everyone missed their cue to join in.

Badu didn’t get angry or defensive, but good-naturedly stopped her nine-piece band, teased the crowd, and explained the drill. Her patience was rewarded when she sang “So I think you better ... “ and thousands of people yelled, “Call up Tyrone!”

Wyclef Jean’s 45-minute set underscored the charismatic former Fugee’s strengths and weaknesses as an artist. He freestyled funny lines about his airport travails, played guitar passably (but with teeth-picking, behind-his-back-riffing flash) and mingled jovially with the crowd.

But his activist stance and most of his social conscience were obscured by a persona so crowd-pleasing he literally did back flips at one point.

Still, his band shifted fluidly among the reggae, R&B;, hip-hop, funk, soul and rock blended into such selections as the current hit “Two Wrongs.” But he pinged so relentlessly from song snippet to song snippet that the performance never really found its groove.

Badu and her group were similarly adept with the mix of Billie Holiday-esque jazz, propulsive funk and soulful hip-hop in her 75-minute set.

She used her high, agile voice as a lilting, scatting instrument, as well as a sharp arrow to make points ranging from the self-acceptance of “Cleva” to the touch-me-like-I-like heat of “Kiss Me on My Neck” to the sorrow and confusion of a broken commitment (in an encore tune with guest rapper Common).

By show’s end, even those who didn’t know her work intimately understood that she’d revealed more than just the slinky black dress under her outfit. And they begged for more right up until curfew.