“Liberation, if there is such a thing, is possible in the interval as a present impossibility, an expansion that explodes even the interval in which we wait.” – Kara Keeling, “‘In the Interval’: Frantz Fanon and the ‘Problems’ Of Visual Representation”

The final shot of Erykah Badu’s music video “Didn’t Cha Know” (2001) shows the map of the journey she has taken throughout the video, etched in the desert landscape she has traversed. Illuminated in the sand, the path maps the spatio-temporal complexity of her movement in the video. Her path zig-zags, demonstrating that her progress is not always moving toward the destination, but is at times lateral, and, as we see throughout the video, includes pauses and rest. At the end of the path lies a small water hole, an oasis after her long passage. Yet the concluding scene does not frame this oasis as the central point of the shot as is the path that is highlighted, not the ending point. Emphasized further by the video’s focus on the journey she undertakes, it is the time in between origin and destination, the lag, that is most significant in this work. Lag, in both its verb or noun form, marks a temporal condition of delay: as verb, to fall behind or to be out of step; as noun, the interval or gap that separates one moment from another. In this sense, “Didn’t Cha Know” helps elaborate lag(ging) as the temporal structure of Black life, lived in the “interval”[i] between slavery and total liberation. Lag timedoes not name a temporality of stagnation, however. Lagging is both dirge and reprieve; pauses are a dense suspension where plots for freedom occur.

Building on articulations of “the wait”[ii] in Black studies and decolonial theory, lagging highlights the experiential and stylistic registers of racialized time. Scholars have described waiting as a tactic of inhabiting duration differently, a method through which the body rehearses its relation to what has not yet arrived. Defining the condition of the colonized subject, Frantz Fanon states, “‘I am one who waits.’”[iii] Kara Keeling expounds on the layered meanings of Fanon’s formulation, noting that he identifies a condition of anticipation, suspension, delay, and belatedness all at once. Most significantly, she describes waiting as an embodied orientation through which the senses sharpen, and the body becomes differently activated— or lies in wait. Drawing on David Marriott, Keeling emphasizes that this is the language of war and strategy: a mode of planning, plotting, and holding one’s position.[iv] Therefore, within the lag before emancipation, Keeling identifies an opening, a space of possibility that emerges from “enduring without something expected or promised.”[v] If waiting names a mode of inhabiting time otherwise, lagging is one of its central strategies—an aperture through which the phenomenology of waiting becomes legible. It is precisely this strategy that animates Badu’s performance practice, where delay, suspension, and stretching time reorganize the listener’s perception and open a different relationship to liberation.

One way lag(ging) functions as critique and strategy in the video is in the use of superimposition to layer Badu’s movement through the desert within the same frame (1:58–2:20), making time feel longer and more expansive than the music-video form typically permits. This effect recalibrates how direction, duration, and movement register for the viewer. Badu explained in a 2015 Facebook post about writing the song and directing the music video, “I envisioned myself on an extended journey or Sabbatical”[vi] The editor’s use of superimposition materializes this vision, elongating the time of the video to make perceptible the weight of a long passage. In one frame, Badu appears to be moving in two different directions at once, indicating the multiplicity and density of the temporality she is navigating. She appears to move simultaneously forward and backward, toward and away, splitting her trajectory into divergent paths. This doubling extends the space/time of the frames, and thereby, the duration of time it depicts. By design, video form relies on the rapid sequencing of individual frames to simulate continuity, producing the impression of normative, linear time for the viewer. This formal logic of the video organizes the viewer’s perception of time around progression and arrival, suturing each frame to the next in service of narrative flow. 

Here, however, the layering technique unsettles that logic: the frame is made to carry multiple movements and durations at once, so that it becomes dense, heavy, and overfull. The layers extend the time of the frame by thickening it, stacking her movements on top of one another so that the frame holds more than it should. This density elongates the frame’s time, forcing it to lag beyond a single moment and push past the limits of its design. In this thickened temporality, the video demonstrates how lag operates as a strategy—pressing against structural limits while inhabiting them, showing how time itself can be stretched, slowed, and made excessive within the very form that is meant to regulate it. Lagging here is at once the space-time of waiting for otherwise and the practice of it, where the constraints that produce the lag simultaneously generate new strategies for inhabiting it. In this sense, the video makes visible how lagging becomes strategy, a temporal practice that names the need for freedom while honoring the life that persists within the wait. Rather than orienting us toward a destination, the sequence redirects our attention to the journey itself.

Producer J Dilla’s sonic choices for the track emphasize the temporal disorientation performed by Badu. Dilla, widely regarded as one of the most innovative and influential producers in modern music, is known for is unique approach to rhythm, time, and texture. Dan Charnas calls Dilla’s groundbreaking style “Dilla Time."[vii] In Dilla’s work, time was a field of experimentation, resistance, and reimagining. In most popular music, rhythm adheres to one of two paradigms: straight time or swung time. These rhythmic feels are also racialized. Straight time, which privileges temporal precision, is often the time-feel in European classical music and is revered as a sign of refinement and technical control. African diasporic musical traditions more frequently utilize swing time— which emphasizes elasticity and embodied rhythm—and has been dismissed as unskilled. Refusing to adhere to either paradigm, Dilla created a complex temporal grid in his tracks which was both straight and swung, at times pitting "grid against grid:"[viii] a method of layering multiple rhythmic feels to create a complex interplay of tempos and grooves. Dilla layered rhythms with meticulous care, allowing each element of a track (bass, snare, high-hat, and the other instruments in a sample) to maintain its own temporal integrity while contributing to the overall groove.[ix] This approach creates a tension between consonance and dissonance, inviting listeners to engage with time and rhythm as a dynamic and multifaceted experience. Early critics often described Dilla’s rhythms using terms such as "sloppy," "drunken," "limping," "lazy," "dragging," and "off."[x] These descriptors reflect how his beats subverted the established time feels in hip-hop and pop music more generally, where precision and quantization (correcting and perfecting a beat with the use of machines) typically reigned supreme. By creating grooves that felt disjointed and incohesive, Dilla challenged audiences to rethink their relationship to rhythm and time.

J Dilla’s treatment of Tarika Blue’s “Dreamflower” as a sample for “Didn’t Cha Know” further exemplifies the temporal logic of the lag. Rather than quantizing the sample, he preserves the elastic phrasing of the original performance, allowing the piece he excerpted to stretch and contract in ways that unsettle the linear precision associated with digital sequencing. Additionally, he layers his signature drum pattern, which deliberately refuses temporal alignment, over the sample—the kick landing just behind the beat, the hi-hats nudging ahead—creating the push-pull tension in which the rhythmic elements never fully align. He further intensifies this temporal instability by trimming the loop so that it cycles back a moment before the expected point of harmonic resolution and hovers in a state of suspended anticipation. The progression of the melody, therefore, circles rather than advances. Together, these strategies produce a sonic environment governed by delay, asymmetry, and suspension: a musical articulation of lag that interrupts the expected groove of popular music, destabilizes teleological time, and offers an alternative conception of Black temporal experience that resists seamless progression.

While I argue that the music video and production demonstrate a critical relationship between Blackness and lagging, we cannot ignore the way that the concept of lagging has constituted Blackness in history and in time as too late “to the table of human civilization”[xi] as Shadee Malaklou states. That Blackness is produced as perpetually lagging makes us reckon with the fact that imperial modernity’s temporality is not experienced as a seamless arc for all. While enlightenment thought often privileges a linear, progressive view of time through which the subject effortlessly ascends the to the zenith of civilization,[xii] this teleological framework of modernity is undone by the very violence that excludes the racialized Other from it. I use the language of the lag because it names this rupture: a temporal glitch within modernity’s smooth narrative of progress, the unintended consequence and underbelly of its telos. Lag is a glitch in the western imperial machinery of progress that reveals both its instability and its reliance on racial differentiation to maintain itself. Therefore, thinking with the lag is not an effort to privilege anti-Black conceptualizations of time and history, but rather to interrogate the structures and processes by which this logic is constructed. Instead, I propose that the concept of the lag offers a framework for understanding Black people’s experience of time in the afterlife of slavery, at once produced by the racialization of time and naming a method of “doing” time differently.

The concept of lag time, then, picks up where Julius Fleming’s exploration of “Black time” leaves off in his book Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Liberation. Fleming posits that Black people strategically “wiel[d] patience as a political resource and a counter-normative strategy of self-making.”[xiii] This is the practice that lag(ging) names, the labor of Black life in the “interval,” between slavery and colonialism and liberation. Badu’s video not only elucidates this labor in the depiction of a long journey but also allows us to think through the experience of it. Lag time is not measured by the frantic drive to progress forward through time, the rush to achieve the goal. Rather, it is a temporality that recognizes the density of time during the wait for liberation: bursting with life, complex movements towards freedom, and dreams of otherwise that press insistently toward liberation. Lag time, then, helps us remap our journey to the future—where “future is not a destination”[xiv] but found in the “rich choreographies”[xv] of lagging, registering both an insurgent present and the long durée of racialized time in the afterlife of slavery.