D'Angelo's Return?

A few months ago, in a post I did on the new Al Green, Lay It Down (which is an even better record than I realized at the time), I ended with a prayer for the return of D'Angelo. I guess I was feeling nostalgic. Lay It Down was produced by members of the Roots and features guest appearances by some of today's better soul singers like Anthony Hamilton and John Legend. It comes off like a real communal thing and that much soul in one place brings to mind the left-of-center black music movement labeled Neo Soul that took place at the turn of the century, and featured artists who would soon disappear like Lauryn Hill, Erika Badu, Maxwell and, of course, D'Angelo.

D'Angelo's Voodoo (2000) has got to be one of the greatest achievements in black music - it presented sextempo R&B in such a muscular form, and with such taste and musicianship, that it became, and still is, the only necessary album of its kind. It has a weird sound. Like the picture of a buck naked, chiseled D'Angelo on its cover, the production is hard and bare. The highest thing in the mix are the sharp cracks of the drummer's cross-stick patterns, followed by the filthy mesh of conjoined drum and bass lines and the writhing tongues of D'Angelo's vocal tracks, a Medusa's head of serpentine soul overdubbed all over the place and buried faintly under the groove. Occasionally there is a trumpet, or a rhodes keyboard. But for the most part it's the hollowest and most skeletal soul music comes.

Voodoo was more than just a distillation of what had come before. It was an experiment in rhythm, a new kind of approach to groove sometimes called "wonky" where stuttering, rushing and dragging are all essential parts of the feel. Somebody's pushing, somebody's pulling, or better yet, everybody's taking turns pushing and pulling - sometimes in the same song or, more perversely, sometimes even in the same bar. The hip hop producer Jay Dee was most responsible for bringing this sound to D'Angelo's camp (via producer Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson of the Roots), if not being one of its first inventors. It's an approach that intentionally sounds "wrong" at first, and mimics the uncertain, jerky feel that comes from programming drums with fingers on a midi controller keyboard. Usually producers can smooth this out in their sequencers after the fact, but Jay Dee understood that there were benefits to not fixing that unevenness, that it was a path to a more human feel in machine-based music (check out the producer Flying Lotus's new record on Warp for the next-level in wonky). D'Angelo was getting his seasoned session musicians to replicate the Jay Dee effect, not through digital editing but in live performances. Playing this far out is more difficult than it sounds, especially if you want to do it in a way that retains a hard groove rather than just being novel. Luckily Thompson and bass legend Pino Paladino were not only game, but gifted enough to pull it off (D'Angelo actually played a lot of the instruments on the record as well).

Sadly, D'Angelo never finished the tour for Voodoo. It started off strong, then fizzled for reasons that Thompson touched on in this remarkable 2003 interview (scroll down about half-way to the part where they start comparing all the legends of black music to characters in Star Wars). Thompson discusses the way that D'Angelo felt turned into a sexual image commodity, and that the three-hour-plus soul reviews he was taking on tour were squandered on the wrong fans who were coming to the shows for the wrong reasons. He also predicts that D'Angelo, who became a household name in part because of his music video for "Untitled," in which his sculpted body was featured naked, would want to get fat and drop out of sight. This turned out to be prophetic, and the next time D'Angelo made news involved a mugshot of him during a DUI arrest in which he looked bloated and coked out. Most people couldn't reconcile the past image of the black Adonis with the fat criminal in their newspapers, and the obvious question was "what the hell happened."

Voodoo is still as hot now, eight years later, as it was when it hit stores (I put it on at a party a few weeks ago and asses started moving). It's so good in fact that speculating on its follow up is more than just an exercise in over-cultured sportstalk. Voodoo is that good. D'Angelo is that good - he's worth asking after. But there hasn't really been any info to go on. Until now. SPIN magazine has published a really readable and informative story cataloging the psychological factors that led to D'Angelo's dark turn, as well as a good bit of insider speculation that suggests a return to form could be coming soon.

SPIN publishes their entire magazine in a digital form. Here is the link to the August issue. The D'Angelo piece is on page 64. There are a ton of great revelations, such as the fact that Jay Dee was actually present at the sessions for Voodoo because his group Slum Village was tracking in a different room at the same studio, which means his influence on the record was more tangible than I realized. And there are some fantastic quotes, like Thompson's characterization of D'Angelo's new "fans" on the Voodoo tour: "The audience thinking, 'fuck your art, I want to see your ass' made him angry."

"One Mo' Gin" is probably my favorite track on Voodoo, and it happens to be one of the few tracks where D plays nearly every single instrument (Paladino is on bass). Put on some headphones and focus on Paladino's evilness, the way he has tuned his bass down and worked it into a slurred funk at that murky tempo. And D'Angelo's drums are swinging as hard as humanly possible, with the kick drum hit that anticipates the downbeat happening as fast as hummingbird wings - blink and miss it.

D'Angelo - "One Mo' Gin"

"Devil's Pie" is more sad prophecy in the D'Angelo story. It's a rant against the wanton vice that D eventually gave into. Fuck the slice, I want the pie/ Why ask why until we fry/ Watch us all stand in line/ For a slice of Devil's Pie/ Drugs and thugs/ Women, wine/ Three or four at a time/ Watch them all stand in line for a slice of Devil's Pie.

D'Angelo - "Devil's Pie"

And I know I've posted this before, but it bears repeating. This is D'Angelo and his touring band The Soultronics at the top of their game: