Songfacts®:

• Erykah Badu's fourth album marks her return to the studio after a bout of writer's block that forced her into a five-year hiatus. In the meantime, she focused on raising her children and learning how to use her laptop as a studio - constructing backing tracks, recording vocals, and communicating with hip-hop producers via instant messenger. Within a year, she composed 75 songs that combined elements of soul, hip-hop, funk, and electronica. A handful of them form the first installment of New Amerykah, which addresses themes of racism, violence, and poverty that are prevalent in the African American community.
  
  "I named this album Nu AmErykah because I'm dealing with whatever is to come instead of what was," Badu told Billboard. "In taking on a project like this, I'm taking the responsibility to talk for my race and my planet."
• Although Badu wrote most of the tracks on the album, "Master Teacher" wasn't one of them. Written by soul singer Georgia Anne Muldrow, who sings the refrain "I stay woke," the song imagines an idyllic future for African Americans but acknowledges the reality of the systemic issues they face and the pressure to always stay on alert.
  
  "The biggest thing I was trying to communicate is that I could if the conditions weren't so daggone oppressive, for everyone, then, of course, I could be aware!" Muldrow told Pitchfork. "It was an ideal. It wasn't saying, 'I'm woke out here!'"
  
  The song was intended for a 2005 album by the alternative hip-hop trio Sa-Ra, which didn't end up getting released. A few years later, the group started working with Badu on her New Amerykah project and played her the tune, which she immediately fell in love with.
• Long before the Black Lives Matter movement adopted the phrase "stay woke" as a rallying cry for social justice, this introduced the term "woke" into the mainstream. But it had already been around for a long time. Harlem author William Melvin Kelley included it in his 1962 New York Times essay "If You're Woke You Dig It" as part of a guide to street slang.
  
  Muldrow first heard it during a late-night conversation with a fellow student at The New School's School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York City. "She would be like, 'Man, I try to stay woke, but I got to go to sleep.' It was just a natural word in her language. It used to crack me up," Muldrow recalled. The singer adopted the word as her personal motto and had it printed on a T-shirt as a constant reminder to stay on her game at a time when she was struggling emotionally.
  
  "When I wrote it on the T-shirt, I meant it like how it's used now - 'stay woke, stay aware.' I was trying to remind myself to do that because I was breaking,'" she continued.
  
  When she relocated to Los Angeles in the early 2000s, she incorporated the sentiment into "Master Teacher."
• Badu may have loved Muldrow's song, but she took some big liberties with it. Muldrow told OK Player that the original version was much more subdued, akin to an African chant, compared to Badu's futuristic funk version. The chorus was also supposed to be "I'd stay woke" rather than "I stay woke" - a subtle, but significant change.
  
  "I wasn't claiming that I was woke," Muldrow insisted. "I never saw myself as woke. I saw myself as aspiring for woke, to try and stay woke. But I knew I wasn't woke."
• This contains a sample of Curtis Mayfield's 1972 single "Freddie's Dead" from the Super Fly soundtrack.