-
D'Angelo and the Vanguard
This is not hyperbole:
D'Angelo's
Black Messiah, out today on RCA after 14 years of people going "When the hell is D'Angelo's next album coming out already?" (or, more accurately: "What the hell is going on with D'Angelo") has been more greatly anticipated than any record I can think of over the course of my adult life.
For a fascinating look at the R&B crooner's upbringing and early career and, well, freakout after he became as well-known for his abs as his buttery vocals and wholly unique neo-funk/soul sensibility, I'd highly recommend this
GQ profile from 2012, when he was apparently finishing this new record. Though, if you just need a quick sense of his musical peers' respect for D'Angelo as well as the depth of many folks' straight-up fiending for this album, this quote by Questlove (who co-produced the new record) sums it up nicely:
"I've told him: He is literally holding the oxygen supply that music lovers breathe," Questlove says. "At first, it was cute — 'Oh, he's bashful.' But now he's, like, selfish. I'm like, 'Look, dude, we're starving.' When D starts singing, all is right with the world."
If you'll indulge me: A brief rundown of pop culture in the year 2000, the last time critics were able to giddily type "new D'Angelo album" (about
Voodoo, an album that makes other years' best-of lists cry).
- Christina Aguilera won "Best New Artist" at the Grammys
- Metallica was suing Napster
- Tom Hanks was talking to a volleyball in Cast Away
- The Marshall Mathers LP
- You could still go meet people at the gate at the airport; we were a full year and a half away from 9/11
- No one was listening to music on their cell phones, because if you had a cell phone, it looked like this:
click to enlarge
- Justin Bieber was 5 years old, and no one ever had to read headlines about him. A moment of silence, if you will.
I stopped to think about all these things while listening to
Black Messiah — through headphones, while sitting at my desk, and not, unfortunately, at a
listening party in New York with Questlove and Spike Lee — in part because, like
Voodoo before it,
Black Messiah manages to sound like the past and the future of music all at once. Recorded entirely to tape, the singer's vocals are undeniably Prince-like in several places, with shades of Sly and the Family Stone and Parliament-Funkadelic (whose Kendra Foster has a writing credit on eight of the 12 songs) emerging at turns through keys and horns; it's also clear that D'Angelo spent at least part of the past 14 years really learning to play guitar.
But by the time Track 10, "The Door," begins — with a whistling intro, no less — we've been taken to another planet entirely, one where Outkast and Jimi Hendrix and Beck mingle lovingly with the Roots and Kanye, and it takes zero effort whatsoever to pirouette from tracks that straightforwardly confront racial and socio-economic injustices around the world to lusty slow jams, and who's to say they can't be one and the same, anyway? We're made to feel comfortable, then we have the rug pulled out from under us; repeat. After a 14-year absence, this is the sound of a person who is perhaps gifted to the point of his own personal detriment grappling, through music, with the state of the world as he's been perceiving it — from the side of the stage, instead of front and center, with a camera panning up and down his abdomen. Where the hell has D'Angelo been? He's ready to talk about it.
I'm gonna need another few listens before I've digested it all, but I don't really want to listen to anything else right now, so that shouldn't be a problem. Join me, won't you? And year-end list writers: Re-start your best-of-2014 engines.
