D’Angelo—“Untitled (How Does It Feel)”

Getting instant insights is amazing. But if there are too many data points, it can be hard to see what works. So I'll ask my AI Assistant for recommendations. And with PDF spaces in Acrobat Studio, it's easy to remix documents and transform insights into standout content so you can go from idea to creation in record time all within an AI Powered workflow. Do that with Acrobat. Learn more and try it out on Adobe.com. Music People often ask me, they say, Rob, what was it really like being a rock critic back in the late 2000s? And what I always say is, I once live blogged Michael Jackson's funeral. This is a moment that I wished that it didn't live to see come. No one has ever asked me what it was really like being a rock critic in the late 2000s. But if anyone ever did ask me, that's what I would say. On Tuesday, July 7th, 2009, I helped live blog Michael Jackson's funeral. Live blogging anything is a fundamentally perverse and debasing activity, much like taxidermy or pickleball. Live blogging a funeral is sicko behavior. Objectively, what is wrong with me? Stevie Wonder is on stage sitting somberly at a piano with a palpable unbearable grief and shock and heaviness in his voice. And meanwhile, I'm watching on my computer at my desk at the village voice, dofully typing away like, do do do do do do do do. I do know that as much as we may feel and we do, that we need Michael here with us, God must have needed him far more. To paraphrase, Grandpa Simpson live blogging was the style at the time. I don't know what to tell you. Twitter roundups and live blogs. The coins of the realm. This is MJ's public funeral. Of course, his absurdly star-studded public memorial service held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The next two people on stage after Stevie Wonder are Magic Johnson and Kobe Bryant. Meanwhile, in this hot live blog I got going, I remember Usher was performing. Usher sang gone too soon. And at one point, Usher is walking toward the casket. Michael Jackson's casket is on stage. His literally gold plated casket. And I remember writing like, Usher, you step away from that casket this instant. Do not throw yourself on that casket, sir. This is not a soap opera. Usher did not do that. Obviously, generally though, we all tried our best to match the incomprehensible and possibly unprecedented gravity of this moment. Michael Jackson had a state funeral, basically. His Staples Center memorial service aired live on 18 different American TV channels, ABC, NBC, CBS, etc. Where it was watched by 31 million people in the United States alone. Plus, it aired live in 88 movie theaters nationwide. Now, add the internet, roughly 59.5 million additional people in America streamed Michael Jackson's funeral. Now, add the whole rest of the world. I've seen estimates on the internet that a billion people worldwide watched this live. I've seen estimates that 2.5 to 3 billion people worldwide watched this live out of the roughly 6.8 billion people then living on Earth total. That's preposterous. And also, that's possible because as I sat there at my desk listening to Stevie Wonder saying his 1971 ballot never dreamed you'd leave in summer to Michael Jackson, who left us in summer. Among all the other stuff I thought and felt and blogged, I thought every single person on Earth is watching this. I never dreamed you'd believe in summer. And I know I'm wrong that everyone on Earth was watching this, but it doesn't feel wrong. Isn't it just the feeling that matters, really? I never dreamed this person would leave at all. I never dreamed he could leave. In say 1985, there were approximately 4.8 billion people on Earth total and they all owned a copy of Thriller, setting aside all the weirdness, all the darkness, all the harrowing allegations swirling around Michael Jackson. This is a person so thoroughly woven into the fabric of daily life that when he leaves us, even if you don't actively mourn him, you at least subconsciously mourn the bygone version of the world with him in it. You mourn your own childhood, perhaps. Just typothetically. I cannot fathom life on Earth without this person. It's like I'm watching a funeral for the moon. No, I never dreamed he could leave in summer. And so it falls to Stevie Wonder, and not for the last time, to help us make sense of this, to help us make peace with this, to help us process this, grieve through this, survive this. And I know I'm lapsing into the royal wee and I'm getting all floored and melodramatic. Now I'm acting like Usher walking toward the casket, but I don't know how else to react when Stevie Wonder escalates here. When he says Michael's name, when he sings the line, Michael, why didn't you stay? And he stretches out the word to stay for like 10 seconds. Stevie's voice bends, but it does not break. And in this terrible collective moment, that gives the rest of us permission to break. If that is what we feel like doing. But now my, my love is going away. Michael, why didn't you stay? That is a hard moment. Stevie Wonder is singing that word for that long, for that reason. And then he sings another song. Stevie sings another song of his from 1974 called They Won't Go When I Go. And this is a personal favorite of mine that is also much darker and angrier, especially on this particular occasion. No more lines, warning tragic things, though they do preaching, They won't go when I go. You know who did a great version of this song, George Michael? George Michael did a really fantastic cover of They Won't Go When I Go. I wrote an obituary for George Michael at my parents house on Christmas night 2016. I got the news that George Michael died. And then I played Skip Bow, the card game. I played Skip Bow with my family for an hour or so while we listened to George's greatest hits. And then I wrote his obituary. That's what it was like being a rock critic in the mid 2010s. So Stevie bends, but does not break on this particular occasion. I'd never seen this, but a few months after this in October 2009, Stevie's back on stage at Madison Square Garden in New York City for a ludicrously star-studded two-day celebration of the 25th anniversary of the rock and roll hall of fame. Stevie's on stage with John Legend, singing Michael Jackson's The Way You Make Me Feel. And here, now Stevie breaks down. Working for nine to five. To buy a piece. Let's do it. Let's do it. Come on. Let's do it. Let's do it. The ecstatic jauntiness of this particular Michael Jackson song, the peppy horns and whatnot as Stevie pulls back and fights back tears. That contrast. That's a hard moment. He sings the word love and he yanks his head back. The word love hits him with a visible physical force. The Madison Square Garden crowd, audibly rising up at the end, they're cheering Stevie on, trying to lift Stevie up. That's truly lovely. Even if it makes this moment harder. Stevie Wonder is also, of course, a Titanic figure from my childhood. And even more so now, he is beloved by all roughly 8.2 billion people currently alive on Earth. And Stevie is all the more Titanic and beloved now, because he is always here for us in these hard and terrible in-memorium type moments. He is universally beloved for the comfort he provides us, for his resilience. I'm getting floored again, but like it is an extra lovely moment on the chorus to the way you make me feel to watch as Stevie fights his way through his grief. The way his strength returns and his swagger grows with every individual line. The way Stevie eventually tears into the line, you knock me off of my feet now, baby. That's why he's the best. Because unfortunately, this is part of the gig when you're an enduring pop star. Part of the job is helping us say goodbye when we lose another enduring pop star. This might in fact be the hardest part of a pop star's job, the funeral performance, the tribute, the in-memorium performance. I'm overwhelmed even at the thought of it. I'm overwhelmed by Jennifer Hudson's huge sigh right at the beginning here. And her little shrug almost, for a split second, she raises her hands and surrender. As if she's saying, I apologize in advance, but I'm going to do the best I can. And then Jennifer does the best anybody could have done. We're lost. Love you. We're lost. Love you. We lost Whitney Houston on Saturday, February 11, 2012. One day later, on Sunday night, oh great, it's the Grammys. And so there's Jennifer Hudson on stage at the Grammys singing, I will always love you. Notably a song Jennifer Hudson had sung before in a high profile, high intensity situation. She sang it at the BET Honors ceremony in 2010 honoring Whitney Houston. Jennifer sang, I will always love you, pretty much directly to Whitney Houston, who was beaming up at Jennifer from the front row. Now here Whitney is left us and Jennifer is alone. And I am fascinated by the genuinely stricken look on Jennifer Hudson's face all through this. It's this searing singular mixture of total helplessness and total command. I will always love you. You. As great as Jennifer Hudson is at singing anything anywhere, this moment is as frightened as I have ever been in my life for a singer on television. Jennifer Hudson singing, I will always love you like 10 seconds after we found out Whitney Houston died. And this is as much sympathy, as much psychic emotional support as I have ever tried to remotely transmit to a singer on television. But of course Jennifer Hudson nails it. And then she says Whitney's name. Whitney we love, we love you. That is a terrifying and unimaginably difficult and very lovely moment. Jennifer Hudson nails it though in part because like Stevie Wonder, she's on the tribute performance circuit a lot. So that's the 2012 Grammys right here's what Jennifer is up to just one year earlier at the 2011 Grammys. Now we ain't making so bad. We only have pain. But now you feel one of my love. And for all it's you now. Just say it. Just say it. And I'll do it. Yeah, so in February 2011, amid widespread reports that Aretha Franklin was battling severe health problems, the 2011 Grammys kicked off with a delightfully chaotic and nearly frantic, five diva Aretha Franklin tribute medley shoot out. In order of appearance, just now that was Yolanda Adams, Martina McBride, Christina Aguilera, our friend Jennifer Hudson and Florence Welch all valiantly wailing their asses off during a climactic version of Sisters are doing it for themselves. This medley, all five singers got one song pretty much to themselves. And now this is the big Wampin finish. Sister, not the way for it. Sister! Yolanda, Martina, Christina, Jennifer and Florence are leaving no napkins unused. If you'll forgive the phrase, I remember in the moment being quite charmed by the outright panic radiating off this particular Grammys tribute. This whole medley is just 12 solid minutes of, there's just a relatable humanizing tangible vibe of oh shit happening here. Not Aretha, not now, not ever. Plus, you know, the acknowledgement that a remotely sufficient Aretha Franklin tribute takes a village. It takes an army. It requires at least five people, five world famous accomplished singers, minimum. All of these women are individually phenomenal, obviously. And it turns out they're also fantastic collectively, but we are throwing a great deal of spaghetti at the wall here in hopes that enough of it will stick. Just picking up the whole giant bowl of spaghetti like this is awfully dark humor and I apologize in advance, but two friends and colleagues of mine who will remain nameless, they were live blogging the 2011 Grammys as you do. And during this giant panic to Aretha Medley, one of the guys says, wait, did Aretha Franklin die? And the other guy goes, no, but the Grammys are full of surprises. And that is one of the wildest sentences I have laid eyes on in my 25 year professional career. Yo, I just about passed out. Aretha did indeed recover and prosper for a great while thereafter. She stayed with us for years. But when she did pass away on August 16, 2018, there's me scrambling to write Aretha Franklin's obituary and do her justice. And then a few weeks later on August 31st, here comes Aretha's ludicrously star-studded funeral. Streamed live from the Greater Grace Temple in Detroit and featuring every blockbuster singer and preacher and orator you'd care to name. Here we have Shaka Khan performing the gospel standard going up yonder. Here we have Shaka Khan really getting after it. I want to know. I want to know. I want to know. Which by the way was 10 hours long. That is not an exaggeration. Also, if you watch this whole song, the lyrics to going up yonder are very obviously hidden on the backside of Shaka Khan's giant church fan. As she sings, she consults her fan periodically, a savvy veteran move from Shaka Khan. Who are we going to get to close out this blockbuster 10 hour Aretha Franklin funeral anyway? I'll be loving you all the way. Always. Always. Of course, it's Stevie Wonder singing as with a giant Aretha Franklin memorial choir. Jennifer Hudson was there too. Of course, she sang amazing grace. Listen, we may blog our cute little live blogs and we might make our cute little dark jokes about all the wailing and the secret church fan lyrics and whatnot, but the tribute performance, the funeral performance, the in memoriam performance. This is a sacred pantheon. These songs in these moments sung by these famous singers to honor to mourn those other famous singers. And behind there's no equivalent in pop music to how psychologically fraught these moments can be how collectively emotionally cathartic they can be. And so is April 27th 2016 and the unthinkable the unbearable has happened and heroically out of nowhere out of the mist, deangelo reemerges to help us bear it. Tracy died soon after a long fall. Just after I wiped away his last two. I'm getting floored again and I don't care. Prince died on April 21st 2016. I was at a baseball game, a Cleveland Indians day game with my whole family. And the organist started playing a print song. Let's go crazy, I think. And I thought, oh, that's nice. And then the organist played a few more print songs and I thought, oh, no, I've said that before I say that a lot. I think about that moment a lot less than a week later on late night with Jimmy Fallon. Here is deangelo singing the prince ballad. Sometimes it snows in April directly to prince who left us in April. The Tracy in these lyrics is Prince Tracy is Prince's character and under the cherry moon in 1986 Prince movie that is less famous than purple rain. I'm trying to keep this light, but this moment is very beautiful and indescribably heavy. Deangelo's drop down into deep bass on the two syllable word he right here is very beautiful and indescribably heavy. I guess he's better off than he was. Oh, like better off in the foosie left here. On backing vocals, we got Maya Rudolph and Gretchen Lieberham who together are in a prince cover band called Princess. The Stricon, the almost shattered look on Maya Rudolph's face this whole time. It really sticks with me. Maya, of course, being a super famous goofball comic actor. Saturday Night Live and so forth. Maya Rudolph also notably the daughter of Minnie Ripperton, the famous incredible 70s soul singer with. I forget, I think it's a 12 octave range just a startling and inimitable voice. Minnie Ripperton died in 1979 at just 31 years old. For most of us, you best honor Minnie Ripperton's memory, I think, by not trying to sing. Like Minnie Ripperton, you will hurt yourself and others. Oh, geez, I'm through trying to keep this light. Let's just stay out of his way. I used to drive a tricy because I wanted to shit again. But sometimes, sometimes, I ain't always doing. That leap to fall setto there will change the trajectory of your whole day in my experience. I don't want to be weird, but I do want to be honest. This video, I just put it on and I cry all the way through it. It's out of my control. Okay, chorus. Sometimes, it's snow, it's in a breath. Sometimes, it feels so bad, so bad. And honestly, the most startling and the most moving element of this D'Angelo performance is simply the presence of D'Angelo. He's here. He is usually not here. He has been an all-time famous soul singer for 20 plus years by this point. But D'Angelo is historically defined as much by his absence as his presence. His first album comes out in 1995. His second album, he takes five years. It's not out until the year 2000. Then his third album, he takes 14 years. It's not out until 2014. There are long, seemingly endless reclusive stretches. There are personal struggles that he keeps mostly private, but not entirely private. To love D'Angelo is to miss D'Angelo. To want more D'Angelo and to generally not get it. But we need him now, and he knows it. Sometimes I wish life was never ending. All good things may sing ever less. Get a load of the dissonance on the word wish right there. That note is mega nasty. Complementary. That is some ugly cry swagger right there. And speaking of ugly crying, it is time for D'Angelo to say Prince's name. He points to heaven, and he sings. I often dream of heaven, and I know that Prince is there. The next line that D'Angelo tries to sing, but does not sing, is I know that he is found another friend. And whether it's Maya or Gretchen, someone gently slips in there, and she sings part of the line for him. And maybe that little backing part was rehearsed, but I'm hoping it wasn't. I like to imagine that as an exceptionally human and compassionate improvised gesture. That's the sound of all the fools Prince left here, leaning on one another for comfort. Maybe one day I'll see my trace again. This is a moment that I wished we didn't live to see come, and this will not be the last moment that we wished we didn't live to see come. But I think we've all learned the right to revisit another sort of stirring audio visual type moment. I just want to know how it works. How convenient that this is a video podcast now. Maybe don't watch this at work or on a plane. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 34th episode of 60 songs that explain the 90s, Cole and the 2000s. And this week we are discussing Untitled. How does it feel by D'Angelo from his second album released in the year 2000 and called Voodoo. That's Untitled parenthesis. How does it feel close parenthesis? If you thought that transition was jarring, here's an ad break. Alright, we got to change the vibe around here. We got pretty modeling back there. How about some treats? Who's up for some treats? D'Angelo's Voodoo is a lower heavy album. It's got its own elaborate origin story. It's got a whole entire mythos. It's got its own vocabulary. Voodoo is an album built on an unshakable foundation of Yodas and treats. Yodas meaning like that Star Wars guy. Yodas meaning teachers, mentors, deities. Yodas meaning like this guy. I am ready for the night train. I am ready for the night train. So in June 2000, D'Angelo gets a lengthy profile in Rolling Stone written by the great journalist and author Tare. And at one point, D'Angelo just sits in a hotel room in New Orleans and he watches vintage concert footage of James Brown. We got D'Angelo lounging with his right hand man, Amir Thompson, aka Questlove, drummer for the roots, future Oscar-winning filmmaker, future bestselling author, future late night with Jimmy Fallon band leader with the roots, current and future Renaissance man, quest love is a crucial musical presence on Voodoo. And he is even more crucial to the Voodoo mythos. So we got D'Angelo and Questlove in Rolling Stone just sitting around watching James Brown do night train on the Tammy show, the famous 1963 concert film. Tammy is an acronym TAMI, the tea stands for Teenage. This show is filmed in Santa Monica, California with a ludicrous blockbuster lineup, the Rolling Stones. The 1963 Rolling Stones went on after James Brown and Keith Richards would later say that trying to follow James Brown was the biggest mistake of their lives. That's high praise or low praise. Coming from Keith Richards, I seem to recall the Rolling Stones making several other high profile mistakes. I genuinely don't know if you're ready for the night train. I ain't... I ain't... I ain't... Rolling Stone, D'Angelo profile, Tare writes, quote, this is what they call a treat, something that gives knowledge of the Yoda figures. Mostly videotapes of shows, but also albums and books. A Yoda figure is one of the masters they revere, James, Prince, Stevie Wonder, George Clinton, Marvin Gaye, Fala Cudi, Al Green, Joni Mitchell, Sly, Jimmy. End quote. Also, this article says quote, they study the treats the way Mike Tyson studied tapes of legendary fighters, enraptured by genius, hungry to learn. End quote. This Yoda's in Treats Business is transpiring in the late 90s and early 2000s, when, notably, YouTube does not exist yet. We're talking literal videotapes, VHS tapes. We're talking physical media. Tare writes, quote, in their pursuit of knowledge about the Yoda's, D'Angelo and Quesla have acquired hundreds of treats. We got bootleg concert connects like fiends got drug dealer connects. Quesst says, during Voodoo there was at least 13 people providing us with stuff. End quote. And then D'Angelo's manager, Dominique Trennier, he jumps in and says quote, anytime I see them, they got at least 30 tapes on them. I could say, I'm bored. You got some old soul trains I haven't seen. They'll be like, yeah, you see the one where Michael Jackson fell. End quote. I have not seen the soul train where Michael Jackson fell. I don't know what they're talking about. I try to find that, but I can't find that. I apologize. As a consolation prize in terms of soul train treats. Are you up on the Curtis Mayfield orange shirt guy. Did you see him? Did you see orange shirt guy? This is Curtis Mayfield doing push your man on soul train in 1972. Curtis Mayfield is absolutely a Yoda. This video is four seconds long. I'm concerned that you may have missed orange shirt guy. Do you want to see that again? Sure you do. There he is. Raise your hand if you'd like to party with that guy. The title of this YouTube video, it says man in orange shirt laying it rough. So far, conservatively, I have watched this 85 times. I'm sorry. The video component of this podcast is optional. I do not wish to alienate our audio only consumers. If you're not watching this, it's a guy in an orange shirt with his arms way over his head, dancing fantastically and amusingly. One might say even he is dancing. There is some speculation about that in the YouTube comments. I feel so bad for DeAngelo and Questlove back in 2000 trying to amass all these treats without the internet. So ranking all the Yoda's in terms of importance is rude and unnecessary, but it's safe to say that Prince is most important. He is the ultimate. He is apex Yoda. In Rolling Stone, Questlove says flat out that Prince was the dominant influence on DeAngelo's voodoo album. And in fact, quote, way after voodoo was finished, De and I sat down and listened to it, and we both admitted that this was our audition tape for Prince. I think this album was made to show him that we're capable of collaborating with him. And I don't know if it's some bold-ass shit to say we know what he needs, but we want to work with him. End quote, that never happens. That's heartbreaking. But in light of his importance here, how about some Prince treats? When Michael Jackson died that night, MTV just ran a ton of old Michael Jackson stuff, videos live performances, etc. It was awesome. MTV briefly became MTV again. And then when Prince died, MTV did that again with tons of vintage Prince stuff. And so that night I sat and watched, say Prince doing party up on Saturday Night Live in 1981. This is how you end a song and leave a stage, people. If you noticed a guy in full medical scrubs on stage with Prince just now and rumbling off stage with Prince just now, you are not hallucinating. Why? That's Dr. Fink. Prince cohort and keyboardist who often performed in full hospital regalia. Do not attempt a party with Dr. Fink. You will not survive partying up with Dr. Fink. For me, another cherished Prince artifact is of course, Prince is 1987 concert film Sign of the Times, specifically the song House Quake. Specifically, the part of House Quake where Prince briefly seeds the spotlight to his backup dancer and singer Cat Glover. And Prince in fact briefly wanders off camera. And then suddenly he reappears on camera. It's subtle, but see if you can find Prince here. Did you see him? I laughed so hard the first time I saw Prince reverse worm but scoot his way back into the frame from right to left and then he does the splits and majestically rises back to his feet like James Brown. Prince is a pex Yoda. That's a dumb thing to say, but I'm not afraid to say it. For DiAngelo from the very beginning, Prince was the peak. Okay, Michael Eugene Archer was born in Richmond, Virginia on February 11th, 1974. His stage name DiAngelo comes from Michael Angelo, the famous Italian artist, the literal Renaissance man. DiAngelo's mother suggested he had the D and make a DiAngelo. He was apparently a musical genius from birth. In kindergarten, DiAngelo won a talent show so convincingly that they wouldn't let him enter talent shows anymore. As a seven year old, DiAngelo taught his older teenage brother, Luther, how to play the Prince song Do Me Baby, which is not appropriate for a seven year old. The brothers loved Prince. And they studied each new Prince album obsessively, but they kind of had a sneak prince into the house. DiAngelo's mother, Maryann E. Cox, was a pastor. His father, Luther Archer senior, was a pentacostal preacher. DiAngelo played in his father's church for a while, and then he went to live with his mother, and he played in his grandfather's church in Powetan, Virginia. DiAngelo told Rolling Stone, quote, that's the real stomp down pentacostal holiness church, shouting, speaking in tongues, and just fire. That's where I really grew. That's where I was really playing, end quote. And so, like so many of the<|zh|> DiAngelo is musically raised in the church, and the church will never leave him musically and otherwise, but he is increasingly drawn to secular music as well. He's got his gospel side and his prince side. Yes, at 16 years old, DiAngelo made it to Harlem and played amateur night at the Apollo. He sang Peaball Bryson's 1977 quiet storm hit Feel the Fire and lost. The next year, DiAngelo came back and he sang Johnny Gill's new Jack Swing adjacent 1990 hit Rub You the Right Way. And this time DiAngelo won. Those are both excellent songs that I would not recommend playing in church. In this pre-Fame era, DiAngelo got a few groups together. He was the frontman in an R&B focused and family heavy group called Michael Archer and precise. Then he was in a more hip hop oriented group called IDU, which stands for intelligence deadly but unique. I have some thoughts about the band name IDU, but I will keep them to myself. It was inevitable. This guy would go solo. It is inevitable. He would drop out of school and move to New York City. It is inevitable. He would get a record deal and put out one of the best R&B albums of the 1990s. In 1995, DiAngelo releases his debut album called Brown Sugar, which kicks off with the title track, a fine addition to the canon of timeless R&B anthems that have heartedly pretend to be about a foxy lady but really they're about smoking weed. You can tell this song is about smoking weed because there's a smoke machine quantity of weed smoke blowing in DiAngelo's face as he sings. See, we be making love constantly. That's why my eyes are a shade blood burgundy. That's quite an elegant way to put it. Mary Jane by Rick James. That's in the foxy lady as weed canon as well. Rick James, another Yoda. Brown Sugar's title track is produced by DiAngelo and Ali Shaheed Muhammad of a tribe called Quest. What makes this song for me is the subtle DiAngelo chorus running in the background, going to the whole time. I love the way DiAngelo sings that. And I love that he sings that part like 500 times. In this, our formal introduction to DiAngelo, he's clearly a handsome swaggering guy, but that's not the point. You don't see much of him. Even his face is half in shadow. A lot of the time. Only the band matters. Only the song matters. Half of the Brown Sugar album is produced by Bob Power, who'd worked as the engineer on a tribe called Quest's 1991 album, The Low End Theory. Brown Sugar also has a song called Jones in My Bones, co-written by the soul singer Angie Stone. DiAngelo and Angie Stone had a son together. Michael Eugene Archer Jr. born in 1998. DiAngelo's collaborators are always crucial. You can somehow always hear them in the room with him, but you can also clearly hear 200 DiAngelo's in the room with him. Per the liner notes, DiAngelo himself plays the vast majority of the instruments and sings all of the vocals on this album. But there's a reticence, a mysteriousness to him, even as he multiplies. And he casts a bigger shadow the farther away he receives. Brown Sugar is an era defining song. A 90s R&B defining song. And the Brown Sugar album is fantastic from front to back. But to my mind, all 10 of these songs melt into one another. They're all masterfully absorbed into a 53 minute long insinuating, never-ending, absurdly sumptuous vibe. I put this record on and regardless of the volume level, regardless of what chaos might be transpiring in my house, it's the subtleties that leap out at me, the grace notes, the slightly distant backing vocals, the blank spaces, the presence as absence, the deep listening headphone details that I can sense, even if I'm not listening on headphones. I track too on the Brown Sugar album is called All Right. And it's the bass line that grabs me first, right? I hear doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo do doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo doodoo dood but he is also manifestly R&B's past. There is a somewhat corny made up genre name for this. After the brown sugar record blows up, D'Angelo is constantly exhaustingly described as neo-soul. Rock critics do this, right? We invent corny made up genres. We build little boxes and cram young artists into those boxes. But this one was not our fault. D'Angelo is a then manager, Keedar Massenberg. He coined the term neo-soul and then he presented his two biggest clients, D'Angelo and Erica Badu, whose error defining debut album Baduism came out in 1997. Suddenly there are the ambassadors, the leading lights, the king and queen of neo-soul. And D'Angelo and Erica Badu do not like it. Of course they don't. In 2014, during a lecture at the Red Bull Music Academy, D'Angelo says, quote, I never claimed I do neo-soul, you know. I used to say, when I first came out, I used to always say, I do black music. I make black music. End quote. And for D'Angelo, sometimes that does involve literally doing the 90s, doing the 70s. Hey, the group all the brides, everything with you all my world. I love it, I love it. Oh, baby, you're losing to me. You've been one way to love, once, before, yeah. He's still an alarmingly handsome man, D'Angelo, but he's also still just another guy on stage, even in some she was black and white. As a pure pop music album, Brown Sugar peaks with a song Cruisin, which is indeed a cover of the 1979 Smoky Robinson, top five pop hit, the sharpness, the hugeness of that chorus is always super striking to me compared to the rest of D'Angelo's first album, where the pleasures are not subtler, exactly, but more deliciously complicated. I hear the song Lady, and again, it's the baseline that first grabs me. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, but then you add the backing vocal army of D'Angelo's, then the quick shots of piano, then the watery little electric guitar rumbling along. Lady doesn't have a Cruisin style, gargantuan pop chorus. What Lady does have is the tangible sense that very much by design, the sum of this record's immaculate parts is greater than the whole. I'm on begging on, I want them to know my lady, you're my lady, you're my lady, you're my lady, you know, oh my God. I dig D'Angelo's coat here very much. His remarkably large and body covering coat, D'Angelo's casual vocal command, even there in that 15 seconds or so. He sneaks into the chorus and his lower register. But SUNY is reaching for that filthy and godly falsetto. Unbelievable. Lady is co-written and co-produced with the great Raphael Sadiq, he of late 80s and 90s hitmakers, Tony Tony Tony. Also, if you're watching this, if you're watching these early videos, perhaps you've noticed that D'Angelo, of course he's the focal point. He is dapper, he is suave, he's wearing various fantastic coats. And in this video for Lady, okay, he's doing the sexy R&B guy thing where he's cruning the song directly into a young lady's ear. But he is dressed. Okay? Also, D'Angelo is generally on stage. He's part of the band. He's playing keyboards as he sings. He's leading the band or leading the orchestra. But he's not demanding the spotlight. He's not all beef caked up. He's not humping a chair or whatever. He's not trying to impregnate you telepathically. This is not a jodicy situation. Is what I'm saying. Whatever I listen to the Brown Sugar album now, I can't decide. Does this especially sound like 1995? How out of place? How timeless? How neo-soul? Does D'Angelo sound exactly? In 1995, an R&B got Jodicy's third album, R Kelly's second album, and the first Faith Evans album. You got My Life by Mary J. Blodge, another all-timer in terms of the 90s doing the 70s. But is D'Angelo trying to sound like 1995? Is he trying to sound like 1975? Is he trying to sound like the distant future? Like 2045? You get hints in D'Angelo's interviews in the 90s that he is perhaps dissatisfied with the state of modern R&B, with a tone. Talking to Essence Magazine in 1999 about the lyrical content of 90s R&B, D'Angelo says, quote, have some class. I don't know how many motherfuckers going to tell me I'm going to lick you up and down. If I hear that in one more song, dot dot dot, end quote, I have no idea what he's talking about. Okay, I might have some idea what he's talking about. That was Freak Me, a number one pop hit for the Atlanta R&B group Silk in 1992. The second Silk record came out in 1995 as well. Silk are for sure trying to impregnate you telepathically. And God bless them. Listen, when D'Angelo was seven years old, he was teaching his older brother how to play super horny Prince songs. There is an inherent swagger and inescapable ludeness to D'Angelo, even if he does have quite a bit of class. Anyway, the single most 1995 thing about the brown sugar album might be that there's a song called Shit Damn Motherfucker. This song is a murder ballad, essentially, and it proves that D'Angelo sounds seductive even when he's singing a murder ballad. And then suddenly we're going someplace else. Brown sugar goes platinum. The record sells a million copies within a year and a lady is a top 10 pop hit. This suggests a winning formula, but we're dealing with a guy who moves on quickly. Well, okay, D'Angelo moves on from an old sound quickly and then he develops a new sound and a new look very, very, very slowly, not that we're complaining. D'Angelo takes nearly five years to release his second album, which comes out in January 2000 and is called Voodoo. Voodoo does not sound like the year 2000 or the year 1995 or the year 1975 or the year 2085. Voodoo is an era and a universe unto itself. This is track one. It is called Play a Play a and the words D'Angelo sings are nowhere near as important as how he sings them and how many of him sings them. The army of sleepy, slurring hypnotic D'Angelo's summoned here amidst all the entrancing studio noise, the horns, the percussive clatter, the wobbly thunderbolts of funk guitar, the jarring random studio voices, including the one that goes take them out. This record is overpowering on both a micro and a macro level. Once again, listening from a distance, I recognize these songs first by their unruly bass lines. The bass line to play a play goes boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. But if I'm listening in headphones, my favorite part of this song is the ride symbol. Right here, the soft and steady the whole time here. This would be the micro level. Yes. On drums, indeed, we got Questlove, who is crucial to Voodoo on both a micro and a macro level. By the macro level, I mean the Yodas, the treats. The very explicit understanding that this album is part of a hallowed soul music lineage that D'Angelo and Questlove and all their friends have been obsessively studying James, Stevie, George, Marvin, Slide, Jimmy, Prince. In his 2021 book Music Is History, Questlove writes about bonding with D'Angelo very intensely overall this stuff. He says, quote, back in 1997, we were at Electric Lady and it was all about bouncing off each other. You know this song? I can't believe you know this song. It was like falling in love. End quote. Yes, work on Voodoo is already underway in 1997 and they are recording this record very slowly over the course of years. In New York City's famed Electric Lady studio, founded by Jimmy Hendrix, they're imagining Voodoo by their own admission as an audition tape to maybe work with Prince. So they sit around playing Prince Records all day and then they try to make their own platonic ideal of a Prince Record all night. Per that 2000 Rolling Stone article, quote, one night they played Prince's parade until they flowed into a new groove that became the song Africa. End quote. Africa is the last song on Voodoo and I'm starting to suspect that it's my favorite. That's an actual sample from Prince's parade album, a drum loop from the song I wonder you. Though it's the gorgeous descending music box riff that really gets to me. Parade is the album with sometimes it snows in April on it. By the way, Prince Super fans sampling Prince in an attempt to impress Prince. That's the vibe on Voodoo. Now, whether you're a rock critic or not, every album by anybody ever, you talk like this. You say, oh, it sounds like this. It's like this old famous album. It's like this old famous person. Erica Badu sounds like Billy Holiday, whatever. But with Voodoo, with his constant Yoda talk, the lineage is explicit. The Angelo's inspirations and his aspirations are explicit. I've read a lot that Voodoo sits at the precise midpoint between what's going on, the Marvin Gaye album, from May 1971, and there's a riot going on. The Sline the Family Stone album from November 1971. Those being two of the biggest greatest, most influential, most famous albums of all time by anybody ever in any genre. What's going on? Sorry, gorgeous, immaculate, searching, is Marvin Gaye's question. There's a riot going on. Rockest, dirty, chaotic withholding is Sly Stone's answer. Voodoo is a reverent tribute to them both, and incredibly a worthy successor to them both. This song is called Devil's Pie. It is co-produced by DeAngelo and the great DJ premiere, who totally qualifies as a modern Yoda. Speaking of which, another Yoda, another massive presence on Voodoo, even if he's not credited anywhere, is James Yancy, aka JD, aka JDilla. The Detroit rapper and producer, who by the year 2000, has more or less reinvented rhythm. His beats are not metronomic, they are not consistent. If this word means anything to you, they are not quantized in the precise technical musical sense. They do not adhere to classic notions of straight time or swing time. DeAngelo has instead invented Dilletime. Dillet's beats are... Let's see here. His beats are off, his beats are wrong, his beats are wobbly, sloppy, drunken, limping, lazy, dragging, messed up, fucked up. I just picked a bunch of random adjectives from the first chapter of the fantastic Mocha Dilletime. Published in 2022 by the rap journalist Dan Charnes. Some of those adjectives, sloppy, wobbly, drunken, they started off as insults, but eventually they became compliments. Here's this song called Players from Dillet's turn of the century rap group Slum Village. That's his voice, but more importantly, that's his limping, fucked up, and weirdly glorious approach to rhythm. The kick drum and the hand claps and so forth just don't quite fall where they're supposed to. It's unsettling, it's mesmerizing, and that's the energy DeAngelo wanted for voodoo. Questlove, talking to the Red Bull Music Academy in 2014, he talked about how he had to go from playing drums with absolute precision, playing as straight as 12 o'clock, to playing crookedly. Questlove says, quote, it was like being told to use the force in Star Wars, like just trust me, just keep it in the pocket, be sloppy as hell, and it's going to work. End quote. J. Dillet's approach to rhythm radicalizes a whole generation of rappers and soul singers. Here in the late 90s and early 2000s, DeAngelo and Questlove and J. Dillet have started a low-key native tongue style musical collective called the Soul Quarians, along with Erica Badu by Laul, Mozdev, Talib Kuali, Common, and a handful of others. Various members of the Soul Quarians will cycle in and out of Electric Lady Studio, making various startling turn of the century rap and R&B albums. Mama's Gun by Erica Badu, Electric Circus by Common, etc. Dillet does not officially contribute to voodoo, and yet I hear Dilla everywhere on voodoo, and maybe especially on Devil's Pie. Meanwhile, usually, DeAngelo is not a screamer or a belter, and so when he sings with even a tiny bit more force, it feels like an earthquake. It feels like the rapture. Like right there, when he sings the words, I know why I was born to die. Also, that's DeAngelo himself on bass there. Aside from DJ Premier's stuff, that's DeAngelo on every instrument on Devil's Pie. He does that. He does everything a lot. Just like Prince did. Nonetheless, another crucial part of the voodoo mythos is the guest list, all the other monster musicians and Soul Quarians who drop by, Pinot Paladino on bass, Roy Hargrove on horns, James Poiser on keys, Charlie Hunter, somehow playing guitar and bass simultaneously, etc. One of my favorite moments on voodoo is on a song called The Root, which features a Charlie Hunter guitar solo playing in reverse. That was producer and engineer Russell Elevato's idea. In his own 2014 interview with the Red Bold Music Academy, Russell says they were sitting around listening to old Jimmy Hendrix records and working on this song The Root, and Jimmy somehow inspired them to flip the tape and run Charlie Hunter's guitar solo backward. Yoda's every song on voodoo has that sort of depth, that sort of lineage extending backstory. Both Africa and the beautiful extra slow jams send it on are about DeAngelo and Angie Stone's young son, and DeAngelo's cover of Roberta Flax feel like make and love is a splendid example of the year 2000 doing the 70s. But also all 13 of these songs melt into one another. They're all masterfully absorbed into a 78 minute long, insinuating, never-ending, absurdly sumptuous vibe. Really, the only way to make any one song on voodoo stand out is to shoot a really shocking video for it. Holy crap, I mean no disrespect to untitled how does it feel the song, co-written and co-produced by DeAngelo and Raphael Sadeek, but untitled how does it feel the song cannot be separated, it cannot be rescued from untitled how does it feel the video, in which DeAngelo is super jacked and possibly totally naked. You can't tell yet that he's possibly totally naked, but he just did sing the opening line girl it's all on you and then lick his lips as though trying to telepathically impregnate you. What do you want from me here? You want me to point out that DeAngelo just sang the line if you get a feeling feeling that I'm feeling that's three feelings in nine words. You want me to call out the rad little guitar riff that sneaks in amidst all those feelings? Is anyone listening to me anymore? Is anyone listening to the song anymore? For you audio only folks, at this point in the untitled video it is now clear that DeAngelo is possibly totally naked. He is definitely shirtless and at the very least functionally panceless. This is the chorus just in case you might be inclined to not even notice. That's the chorus. Let's focus people. I refer you now to a February 2000 New York Times article about DeAngelo with the headline singing in the buff colon the pure beef cake video. In this feature some fantastic quotes from journalist and magazine editor and author and friend of the show Danielle Smith. Danielle says quote last week I was at the hair salon which is always a bustle of activity. People hollering for hair dye. BET and MTV are on all day long with no one paying too much attention. But when that video came on you could have heard a bobby pin drop. All the women just watched in silence and when the video was over there was a collective sigh of oh my god he is beautiful. End quote. That's hilarious. Focus Yoda's treats prints untitled how does it feel is extra prints. It's maximum prints. It's in the proud colossal ultra yearning tradition of doomy baby of nothing compares to you of a door of the beautiful ones. Here listen to this part dig the rad cacophony of moaning and purring and wailing deAngelo's right here. Oh jeez you're not listening you're not listening even if you're only listening you're thinking about the super close up of deAngelo's abs even if you can't see him. Ain't ya. The untitled video is co-directed by Paul Hunter and deAngelo's then manager Dominique Trennier and it was Dominique who in 2008 told Spin magazine quote I'm glad the video did what it did but deAngelo and I were both disappointed because to this day in the general populace's memory he's the naked dude. End quote. The untitled video really screwed deAngelo up. It paralyzed him it almost derailed his career. DeAngelo's third and final album Black Messiah took basically 15 years it did not come out until 2014 and the untitled video is partly why because the video created the expectation that deAngelo would always look like this and on stage he would always you know be like this and do this in that 2008 Spin article Roy Hargrove the jazz great and voodoo trumpet player Roy talks about touring with deAngelo after this video came out and he says quote we couldn't get through one song before women would start to scream for him to take off something it wasn't about the music all they wanted him to do was take off his clothes. End quote. Spin also quotes deAngelo's voodoo era tour manager Alan Leeds who'd previously worked with James Brown and Prince and Alan says quote I didn't realize how vulnerable deAngelo was and how deep his issues ran. He's cursed now with fretting over how much of his fan base is because of how he looked as opposed to the music. It took away his confidence because he's not convinced why any given fan is supporting him. End quote big finish now a truly phenomenal prince build up and climactic prince scream right here a classic prince scream into the pure beef cake void. I should mention that that 2008 Spin article is headlined deAngelo colon what the hell happened because by then deAngelo had all but disappeared he had legal issues health issues substance abuse issues I don't want to talk about it really I kind of wish the world could hear untitled how does it feel again for the first time without the video I wish we could hear untitled as simply an immaculate throwback instant classic slow jam that helped annoying deAngelo as an apex Yoda I kind of wish we could redo deAngelo's whole career without the video maybe nothing would be different it's ridiculous a naive to say that without the video deAngelo would have been totally healthy and happy and comfortable and he'd have made a dozen classic albums instead of just you know three but the untitled video happened the video made deAngelo super famous but also super vulnerable and so he retreated and so he became defined as much by his absence as his presence and so anytime deAngelo reappeared it was like a galactic event it was like a biblical revelation like in 2014 when he put out black Messiah like in 2016 when he eulogized Prince or like in 2025 when he appeared in his old buddy quest love documentary about sly stone how hard is it to be vulnerable in front of a world watching it is really hard it's the hardest thing to do the hang ups baggage guilt and pain and shame that comes with it you know and if you don't know how to handle it if you don't have your soul centered and people around you got you really trust and people that really know you and it's really down for you yeah man it can be you can be unbearable man yeah it'll make it'll turn you into an unwilling participant and that's that's equivalent to hell this is from quest loves 2025 movie sly lives aka the burden of black genius it's the notes deAngelo doesn't play here that really hit me hard the pauses the quiet terrible gravity in his voice ostensibly deAngelo is talking about sly stone there but not really the phrase an unwilling participant really stinks there deAngelo died on October 14th 2025 of pancreatic cancer he was 51 most people didn't even know he was sick his memorial service was a far more private affair stevy wonder sang at it also on October 25th deAngelo's old friend and colleague Erica Badu she played royal Albert Hall in London and she talked about the two times a person dies the first death involves your physical body I didn't intend to start modeling and end modeling but it's terrible how many other people in this story are gone now sly stone angi stone cat glove er Roy Hargrove deAngelo's mother Marion jadella we're still mourning them all but because this is part of the gig Erica knows what to do for deAngelo and for all the rest of them and then Erica Badu sang shit damn mother fucker it was awfully profane as eulogies go and it was perfect we are so honored to be joined once again by hanif abduroke bestselling author and poet and macArthur genius and mayor of columbus in my opinion his latest book out in paperback now is called there's always this year on basketball and ascension hanif thank you so much for taking the time it's such an honor to be here i always always love getting talk with you and i can well thanks so much i really appreciate it i i feel like deAngelo is such a mythic figure now and i wonder if you can remember it all hearing him for the first time hearing the brown sugar album or even hearing voodoo like dude did you know immediately that this was a mythic in all time great who we'd still be talking about 30 years later is it more of a slow burn to realize his greatness like what was the experience on first contact with him yeah well i mean i i was like 12 so i wasn't necessarily thinking about the long-term legacy but brown sugar the album came out in July of 1995 the single lady came out not the single lady the single comma lady came out shortly thereafter i think you know brown sugar was preceded by a couple singles but lady was a single that hit right after the album came out and so that summer of 1995 lady was pretty huge it was played a lot um you know back then it was a big radio station thing so i was detapped in with the radio stations here in columbus and lady was a great transition song from the that summer you would get these uh bursts where the radio would play hip-hop like more contemporary poppy rnb more electronic rnb but then it would it would delve into the quiet storm era of the night the quiet storm on the and lady was such a great bridge song so you would hear it a lot at around 8 45 pm whenever sunset would start you know but i remember first hearing lady there used to be these block parties that happened in columbus on the east side and sometimes it was filling the osc's campus and my parents would take us to these block parties and these are big city-wide block parties and it was only time where i felt like i could kind of wander a bit you know my parents didn't have a great eye on me my brother and i remember somehow getting on the top of a not very high building uh around Mount Vernon somewhere around Mount Vernon avenue and someone had a boom box and they were playing lady very loud and this was in the middle of the day which is not normally when it played and i remember feeling like i was watching a film like i remember feeling like watching all these people kind of fold it was a very romantic scene like people who were sweating dancing urgently a moment ago we're now kind of slow dancing and swaying and to see that kind of command that a single song that have over a people as a 12-year-old who was beginning to understand to understand desire broadly i loved it i mean i knew nothing about the angelo at that point you know at that age i knew the song existed but i did not know who the artist was and i i think that i learned the artist through my siblings my older siblings were playing that record out a lot um but my earliest memories are of that single i mean that's interesting so interesting to hear about you know your older siblings and your family because i've always wondered like does brown sugar sound like 1995 does angelo seem like a contemporary artist or does he immediately seem you know the whole neo soul thing like is he a throwback originally or is he like a futuristic artist and immediately like how did you sort of fix him in time did he feel contemporary to 1995 or 2000 you felt particularly when i think about if i'm moving forward a couple of years and think about 1998 99 2000 that to me i know that neo soul had begun to be crowned i think qr messinberg coin met him and it was almost in opposition to the sonic experience of contemporary r&b that we were seeing right again like a lot more electronic sounds in contemporary r&b at that time um a very producer driven commercial approach whereas what we were so to understand about neo soul was that this was stuff where musicians were we're touching live instruments in the studio and yes there was a more careful approach taken with it and so you do get this class of not just still aquariums but also someone like maxwell being placed in that category um we were to believe it's like these distinctions that get made with with a lot of genres right like there's a level of intention of care being placed into this bucket that is not being placed into that bucket now i'm someone who liked contemporary r&b at that point and i also love neo soul and i actually never really brought into this idea that neo soul necessarily meant um a turning back towards the past perhaps in terms of rigor or approach to making so if we are to believe that neo soul is employing techniques and tactics that you would hear perhaps in studio a at motown um you know or on some of like those old Atlantic records or some of the philly soul stuff sure but sonically it was very updated like the things that were happening were drawing clear inspirations from funk in past soul but it's not like it did not feel like a throwback thing to me so the angelo to me felt also the idea of what neo soul was had permeated the entire sonic universe of r&b by the late 90s so in some ways more poppy producer driven r&b felt like the outlier to me even though i enjoyed a lot of it that that is what felt more like an outlier and of course voodoo it's all about the Yoda's right it's they're sitting around electric lady studio they're just watching prince videos james brown videos etc all day and then they specifically try to make a record that fits into that lineage like did you hear voodoo as a very explicit attempt to like make that chain backward and also forward gosh you know in some ways the song funky drummer can tell the story of everything that came after yeah like really in some realms of rap music of you know their stories about like jade dillow listen to a funky drummer over and over again and learning teaching himself about returning to the one so to speak no matter what you do in between movements you return to the one and in some ways quest loves role he's not really quite stubblefield to an exact point like that's not a one to one because the thing about funky drummer is that stubblefield's not really playing the 16 notes with real consistency which makes for that really great and quest love on voodoo is playing with a like a ferrasa ferocious consistency but he's doing that because everything else every other musical element is kind of happening behind the beat you know and so the baseline is not where you think the baseline would go like you're expecting a baseline to come in a new rise baseline is a little bit behind the drum and so there's all this back phrasing that's happening and it's beautiful because it's so loose like the album feels like you're eternally in this pocket that you don't expect to be in and i think that is paying a march to james brown to slice stone in many ways to prince to marvin gay i mean there there are all these elements and what i like about voodoo i think voodoo is a great album is that i love an album that is imperfect and it's attempt to pay these omages because when you're pulling it and i say this i think i think voodoo is i would i think voodoo is the angel's best record and i love the other two but that is the one for me i would think it's the one for me because the swings that he's taking in pursuit of paying homage in what it takes to get someone to buy in to get a band of talented people like a pinopaladino for example uh to buy in to this constant approach to back phrasing where everything feels so behind the beat there's something very human about it like quest loves drumming feels very alive with a humanness because it is um imperfect it's it's pulling like in a culture where samples were really ruling the day it was interesting for me to hear and i look back to voodoo now it's interesting to hear musicians um almost building what a sample can do and then placing it on a track and i think i'll last say six i know i'm going off about this and i'm sorry uh please what separated voodoo for me is the track length like those songs are very long and those songs are also way um if we're talking about like beats per minute those songs are kind of way below the bpm of what was getting played on the radio but even what was happening in other neo soul circles it's this album that feels um like you were just watching smoke slowly rise from a candle that never burns out you know and that that intrigues me you know i think um i remember in my younger and foolish days because i'm saying all this shit now but like real talk i was i was a high school junior room voodoo came out and you know we weren't put we weren't playing that you know we were right not because it wasn't bad you know we're not because it was bad but because you know we're 16 years old and we were you know we're i'm playing like jagged edge where the party at like i'm playing stuff you know we we're not playing that at the high school parties but i remember the beginning i got yeah we're looking for a higher bpm but when i got to college it was like yo this is on and it's important all the time you know we're trying to end up with certain kind of audience apps yeah no i get you know i agree with you i just the sense of place in voodoo like the listening on headphones like the studio chatter like hearing quest loves voice you know every once in a while just the way it's clipped together like the perfect imperfections of it just the sense that you're in the room you know with the smoke rising you know i can't take up another record off hands that offers that same sense of place that same sense that you've been sitting in electric lady studios with these people for three to five years yeah yeah you know i i wasn't there in the rooms i can't say but what what comes off in review is that the angelo i'm intrigued by the angelo as a band leader as someone who seems to have a real sense of control but yes is not like a dictator there's not it doesn't seem like there's a sense of brown it's not James brown which is interesting because if i'm being if i'm saying like i think flucky drummer is the core to understand what's happening on flucky drummer is is like unlocking a key to the sonic universe that so much music exists in it's flucky drummer is really James brown kind of standing over in kind of you know dictating the terms of the sound the sonic world being built in Clyde Somalfield do it totally it's best to be flexible with that it does not seem like the angelo it seems like the angelo had a vision and then trusted people to execute that vision it is more like it feels to me and i again like i don't know what the sessions were like but it feels more like brine willson making pet sounds where he's articulating his vision to a talented group of people and then allowing them in in brine willson making pet sounds it was a bit of there was control but also care in trust yes and it really does feel like voodoo is an album of um incredible trust there's a real generosity it sounds like to de angelos approach where he's eager to see where the musicians can take him and not necessarily always where he can force the musicians to go that's that's beautiful i i i wonder how much de angelos scarcity contributes to how we think about him now you know we got three albums you know across what was it 20 something years i you know if if there are 15 de angelo albums instead of three like do we hear brown sugar voodoo and black messiah differently do we cherish these albums more because it's all we got yeah i mean i guess part of the answer that depends on how bad how bad a good does other albums yeah yeah i mean yes i mean the short answers yes scarcity is always the um you know not uh i'm not the artist the angelos was but still every time i finish a book for example right like when there's always this here came out um in in the immediate moments before it came out i was like i have no idea how the world is going to receive this this could be the one that everyone hates and then when that didn't happen i felt this immediate sense of relief and then after that immediate sense of relief there is a small part of me that's like maybe i should quit now maybe i've maybe i've yeah i've talked to other artists about this feeling this sense of maybe i should quit while i don't have but then i think and i have heard other artists say shortly after that feeling of maybe i should quit now is this feeling of i'm ready to rise to the occasion of finding the next thing that i can i can conquer within myself and i do think that the angelo um succeeded at that at least at least two times if we're saying coming off brown sugar and making voodoo and coming out voodoo and making black messiah and to have and i get it that some artists have done that more than two times with to me to even be able to do that once particular for me specifically to come off of voodoo and make black messiah i don't care how long it took like that to me is a triumph beyond language because you are particularly coming off voodoo because you're not only competing with the past version of yourself in the expectations that that past version of yourself created in the consciousness of the consuming public but you're creating you're creating not in opposition to but against a past version of yourself that is so divorced from the current version of yourself that you almost have to sell people on a new relationship you know entire like an entirely new relationship and to just put your head down and say i'm going to do this through the sheer level of rigour and ability that i'm putting into the music i think i mean i know i just have voodoo i think voodoo is the best record and i maintain that in some ways i think black messiah is just the most triumphant one of the most triumphant records of my lifetime so yeah we if if the angelo put out more records we would definitely be weighing this creatively because i just don't think if he's getting into like eight album category and trust me when i say i think the angelo is one of the most talented people who has ever lived but so much of his work seemed to revolve around time and patience and um building something tactfully and thoughtfully i don't know if he's like a eight album artist i don't know if he's a five album artist yeah i would worry about what those albums would sound like that's valid first of all please don't quit i understand completely what you're saying about thinking about quitting but please please don't quit thank you thank you advance for not quitting um okay so if we're talking about the image the new relationship i defaulted with black messiah like we got to talk about the untitled video right because when the angelo passed like everything written about him and everything written about him since that video is like that video kind of ruined his career or at least derailed it's really drastically changed his relationship with the public his confidence level like it froze him you know for what turned out to be almost 14 years like how do what do you think now about the untitled video and maybe sort of the wish that people have that maybe it had never existed and you know maybe angelo's career and discography is very different if the untitled video never happens i don't know i always tread carefully around that because i don't know i mean the angelo had some real struggles that happened in the aftermath of that video that i don't know if they were entirely tied to that video and i always want to be careful about conflating um you know real turmoil the turmoil with substances he also suffered real losses like he lost friends he had a close friends die these things i think sometimes get intertwined into the aftermath of the untitled video and i don't know if that's entirely fair now i do think that the angelo is someone who did suffer the outsized expectations of the public imagination when it comes to anointing um a black male sex symbol because within the american imagination that kind of historically the the black sex figure and it's not just men but like of course that history definitely affixed itself to the black women it has historically as well but for the sake of talking about the angelo the the black male sex figure is someone who is both um lusted after by a wide audience what's seen as dangerous and and seen as um many things beyond what they might have been attempting because i think actually the untitled song and video is such an incredible commentary on patience and desire and um in almost this kind of you know if we're thinking about like the angelo's relationship with the black kind of coastal tradition um kind of this line between course the the sacred secular but the intersection of that which is a buildup that says you can you can have everything but you have to continually wait for it and so i think that the video is is playing into that kind of you know how patient can you in not interest me i'm probably not the person to analyze sexy things i guess but i will say nor i will say okay but however but i do think the video is tied into that kind of commentary of like what are we doing to to visualize this aspect of a desire that is ever present but only arrives through devotion and patience and and so the misreading of the video perhaps at least the way i'm presenting video the misreading of that to just say look at that sexy man with no shirt on of course that's to be expected in our in our cultural climate our visual climate um where it's like read and react but i also think that fails um it it fails the artist and it fails the full vision of what the artist is trying to articulate and i do sometimes wonder if that had an impact on him as well um you know of course i imagine it had an impact when he's like playing songs people are all like playing doing live shows and people are just yelling i'm gonna take a shirt off a shirt like that but i will say i have to say i saw him play untitled live in 2015 okay and i was so moved by it because what happens you know if you listen to untitled on any streaming network or on the record it cuts off abruptly at the end because i did that on it does taping the tape ran out right um and what i love actually about them keeping it like that is that you you cannot replicate what happens at the end of of untitled because the angel though at that point you know where he's like screaming essentially you know he's channeling all the the what time i'll notice he's like channeling trans brown and marvin gay and prince all in one and it's almost like a spiritual awakening like he is stepping into all three of them and they are stepping into him and so what you get on tape is what you get you cannot replicate that that's the reason why there's not a lot of great covers of untitled because if you are trying to do that you've already failed that is something that happens to you that is something that you experience is not something you can find but i will say i loved seeing him play untitled in 2015 because he found a way on stage to almost replicate that where everything he's playing with a full band and then as a song hits its crescendo point and goes up and up and up each member of the band left the stage like stop playing him at the stage until i think that was him on piano and i was like this is also maybe a better manifestation of what the song is trying to articulate than the shirtless video and so yeah i try not to conflate the video with all of his struggles but i do think the video for me led to a massive misreading of the song's intentions because the urgency of and i don't know if is like pg 13 podcast whatever but but i i will say the urgency the urgency of sex is different than the patience of desire or build up of desire and the urgency and immediacy of like wanting is different than building up something that you are eager for and so that is my perhaps not say for work analysis of that is so much more beautifully rendered not say for work analysis than listeners of this show i've grown accustomed to that is the loveliest pg 13 misive i have ever heard in my life and thank you very much for that i that makes me think i don't know if you saw the sliced stone documentary that quest love did recently in 2025 but jangelo's on camera in it you know i very possibly for the last time and he's talking about the burden of black genius you know about the expectation and the loneliness of it and the expectation that gets thrown on you you know buy and untitled buy an untitled video the way fame and adulation can make you an unwilling participant is the way that he puts it like do you hear that burden actively indian jelos work like from the beginning but then i guess especially on black messiah do you hear his personal struggles you know including with the reaction to voodoo and untitled you know in what came after and even in untitled live in 2015 yeah you know i brought up the jangelo's kind of um the music existing behind the time um or or or because these kind of disjointed i'll try to make this a shorter thing what i love about the angel is what i love about the angel is how frequently he fucked with time and so um it's almost like he built his own metronome for example and not just one he built several of his own metronomes and then placed things where he wanted them to be so yes the bass is back here but the drum beat is here so yes the guitar is coming in at this angle that you don't expect and i tend to think that kind of um reinvention of time and the placing of sounds sometimes behind the beat or sometimes coming in at different places that is a byproduct of um or at least sonically what i love about that kind of making is that it is a making that um is an artist is making that is done by artist who is so far ahead of their ear or their brain is is so far ahead of where you may be as a listener that they are trying to do you a favor almost by um by saying i'm going to piece these things out and put them in places you don't expect because it will be surprising to you but it's never surprising to me you know because i've imagined it already i'm so far ahead i'm on my own time and i'm so far ahead that i have imagined every possibility for how the song can go and to to to be that far ahead is lonely like that's the lonely place i i don't know what it's like to be that brilliant um and but i do think that to operate on your own time to the degree not just within the musical world but like to operate on your own time to the degree that the angel had dated in terms of creation and it's creative practice and all of that has to be lonely there's no other and it doesn't mean that you don't have friends or it doesn't mean that you don't have but it means that you relate to the world in such a way um that might seem detached from just the the language by which most people function and so what i liked about the angelau up until the very end of his life is how he seemed to only share things when he had things to share you know we didn't see a ton of interviews with him he wasn't like selling us stuff um you know he didn't have like uh he didn't have any ulterior motives other than i made something and i wanted to i want you to have it and yeah i think look i love black messiah and i sometimes um think that black messiah you know it is a sibling of a it is a sibling of like there's a riot going on in a way which is a record i love but it has that same kind of even though it's it's a lot more lyrically clear than there's a riot going on like it is a lot more uh most records are yeah most records are you know uh but it has this unsettled it's an unsettling record like it has it is um the intertwining of it's like this moment of spiritual rebirth where you come out of it and say okay i'm spiritually reborn but then you look at the world and you're like holy fuck you know yeah i think the i think the bad time that becomes the issue reborn because yeah now i am hyper aware of everything and shit is not good you know it's 24 knees yeah in 2014 right and i kind of love that i love black messiah as this beautiful album and i'm not saying that the angel wasn't you know paying attention to the world before but there is something there's something to be said for being like man i have hit this point of spiritual rebirth and i am alive and my eyes are wide open and then you turn towards the world and you're like fuck this sucks you know and it's hard to balance that it's hard to balance that on an album and i think black messiah is just a masterpiece of holding that uh just a couple quick questions and i'll let you go i you talk about d'Angelo only appearing when he has something to say i d'Angelo doing sometimes it snowes in april after prince died like there's there's something about that that stands alone for me i don't even know in what category it stands alone but i put that on and it just affects me like no other piece of music in any context and i think about like stevee wonder at every major memorial you know michael jackson or ethofranklin whoever i think about erica by do after d'Angelo passed you know he's she's doing shit damn motherfucker like she's talking about like the second time you die is the last time someone says your name and she says d'Angelo's name like do you get how do you sort of manage the enormous you know power of that performance the in memoriam you know tribute performance often you know days hours in the case of when he used in you know after we lost that person yeah i also think about mahalia jackson who's saying at many funerals and then when she died people showed up to sing at her funeral and then erita kind of carried that torch of singing at many funerals and then when erita died i mean you know it's like a concert it's an hours long concert and like nine hours yeah yeah you know there's something beautiful about that immediate aftermath that says um through the performance of your song i am not letting you go and i also think that if you love someone if you love someone's music but in the case of these musicians who are honoring other musicians if you genuinely deeply love someone as a person um you have perhaps prepared for the we're already prepared yourself for the world at the minute not prepared in an emotional sense but prepared um a part of your brain and heart have maybe already done the work of knowing what must be done you know because you can't actually prepare for what it is to grieve someone or prepare for the world that you have to live in without them but there is a part there's a part of my heart in mind that would be able to find some kind of language eventually uh after someone i loved i'd like the language is already there how long it might take how long it would take me to access it i can't say but what i love about these performances is that it's just kind of a reiteration of the reality of saying i love you and i won't let you fade i won't let you fade not in this immediate moment not in the long term um and because like when i think about prince's loss i not only think about prince but i think about that the angel of performance and then i think about how much of the angel that was tied to prince is making and then i think about everyone i think about the large web of prince and everyone who has perhaps pulled something from him and made something and so these kind of things use big moments um that come in memoriam only kind of expand the long arc of affection for someone in the way that we can through our own memories attach ourselves to that person's living and so yeah you know i know Lauren Hill did pay tribute to the angel at the grimmies i was like i don't really watch the grimmies ever but that was i watched the clip of that good idea and um yeah i mean i i was very moved by the loren hill performance and it also made me it was also heartbreaking in a sense because loren hill is another example like the angel though of and there are many but just these are black artists who had to confront i think expectations that um in retrospect seemed massively unreal and these expectations emerged because people believed in their talent or believed in what they produced but that's just not the end result of those expectations aren't always fair to a life or a career and so of course watching that loren hill performance was really moving because it did feel like loren hill both as a musician and a person not only had access to de angelo as a human being but had access to the world that he was trying to navigate because um absolutely it was also a world that she was trying to navigate and i don't think either of them failed to navigate it i think there are many ways that the world failed them and they are trying to survive in the aftermath of the world's failures and the fact that they did for a while in triumph every now and then in those attempts at survival i think is incredibly impressive yeah i so absolutely the last thing and i wonder if this is related like just following you even on instagram i've noticed that you you celebrate people's birthdays very specifically it seems to me like you post songs you know words of appreciation specifically on someone's birthday even if they're no longer with us uh de angelos february 11 by the way i is there a particular reason that you sort of go for the birthday you know versus the anniversary of an album coming out or some more you know rock critic news peg is the birthday like a specific special thing to you i tend to think i'm not so i don't like i don't care about my own birthday ever at all um and i think i have a i have like a fraught relationship with um getting older and i think that my not to get to deep here but i do think my fraught relationship with getting older is tied to grief and tied to the amount of people i have for example outlived right at at a relatively young age although i'm getting older by the day as we all are but what i will say is that also triggers a thing in me that um relies on immense gratitude for having lived in a very specific time so i think i honor birthdays because it's kind of like i'm there i'm distinctly aware of the fact that i could have been born at any point in history right any point and it's fucking it's pretty fucking sick that i got to be born in a time where i could hear de angelo or steve wonder or prince or read the frankly yes i you know there's a there's a world we're in i could have been born at a point where i heard none of this stuff and you know i don't really believe in a second other life so my one wild and precious life could have been in an era where i had no access to any of this music and so i think i honor birthdays because it's i'm in awe this isn't maybe a small and silly thing to be in awe of but i'm in awe of the fact that de angelo was born in a timeline that allowed for our lives to intersect for a while and i got to benefit from that i got to benefit from that greatly and um so you know i think that's as a music fan that's one of the the most uh perhaps childlike things the the sense of childlike wonder where i look at a calendar and look at my own life and say wait a minute i have a life that is is intertwined with all of this other stuff that i love that was made by people who also could have been born at any other point in history but by the virtue of some miracle uh got to intersect with my own life and so i i think the the birthday celebration is is a good reminder for for me to have some gratitude for the passage of time but also to have gratitude for being situated um in a lifetime line that has afforded me uh uh real brilliance that i have access to yeah honey if this has been absurdly wonderful i am so grateful to you for your time as always i love talking to you so much thank you so much thank you and so pleasure as always thanks so much to our guests this week honeyf abdurakib thanks to our producers jussin sales Olivia kirey and chris sutton additional production by kevin puller animations and graphics by chris calaton additional art by mat james and special thanks to koul kushna and thanks very much to you for listening and or watching and now let's all go listen to untitled how does it feel by d'Angelo we'll see you next week