I'm tryna come with the real

“I’m tired of hidin’ what we feel/ I’m tryna come with the real/ And I’m gonna make it known/ ‘Cause I want them to know” - D’Angelo, “Lady”

This past Tuesday, D’Angelo, the multi-Grammy-winning R&B artist, passed from pancreatic cancer. Over the course of his 30 year career, D’Angelo, with a smooth voice and prodigious musical talent, absolutely changed the face of his genre. Anything that I can say about D’Angelo’s importance would not be an exaggeration. If anything, it would actually be underselling him. In this newsletter, I have spent a lot time talking about R&B, particularly modern progressive/alternative R&B. None of it—and I mean not a note of it—would exist without D’Angelo. Why is this? Because he led R&B through a massive transition that changed the genre forever. To understand the importance of his work, we have to go back to 1995, when a 21-year-old D’Angelo dropped his debut album, Brown Sugar.

Ballads, Swing, and Soul

Up until 1995, R&B had two primary forms. There was the old-school format, popularized by all of the singers you can think of offhand: Whitney Houston, Anita Baker, Luther Vandross, Alexander O’Neal, Aretha Franklin, and Chaka Khan, to name a few. While they did have an occasional upbeat track, all of these artists made their money as balladeers. They sang slow and midtempo songs about romance and love, displaying amazing vocal control and range. They could both whisper in your ears and blast to the rafters with great ease. These songs are absolutely beautiful, but they were more popular with the older folks. If you were in a Black household, your parents, aunts, and uncles are bumping these tracks.

If you were of the younger generation, your R&B was better known as New Jack Swing. A fusion of dance-pop, hip-hop production, and R&B singing, artists that were popular in this style were Teddy Riley, Bell Biv Devoe, Keith Sweat, and Al B. Sure. In case you can’t hear New Jack Swing in your head, the following is Keith Sweat’s “I Want Her,” a seminal New Jack Swing song:

New Jack Swing is generally good, but it lacks the realness of both hip-hop and the aforementioned stand-and-deliver R&B. It exists in the uncanny valley that crossover music can create. It does both genres decently, but not well enough to cover over the slightly awkward fit.

These two styles of R&B were dominating the Black radio landscape when D’Angelo arrived on the scene in 1995 with Brown Sugar. When you turn on Brown Sugar, the first thing you notice is the organ, something that was uncommon on Black radio (or any radio for that matter) at the time. After a slight introduction, the band joins in and D’Angelo sets off on his mission, telling you about Brown Sugar, which I thought was a beautiful woman. Turns up it is marijuana, which actually makes way more sense, especially if you consider the reference to Chocolate Thai.

The lyrics of the song are immaterial to the point. D’Angelo’s voice is the true star of this song. His ode to his favorite strain is done in a beautiful, smooth falsetto. He never raises his voice or feels the need to blast the roof off the building. It was unusual to hear a R&B artist stay in such control during this time. Even though it is about weed, D’Angelo gets across so much passion and desire with his voice, which is probably why so many of us thought it was about a woman.

Furthermore, the instrumentation on Brown Sugar was quite a shift. If you listened to the Keith Sweat song, it is indicative of a lot of what was going around. R&B music, whether old school or New Jack Swing, used a lot of synthesizers and drum machines, eschewing session musicians. Instead of going that route, D’Angelo and his band brought back old-school soul instrumentation like organs, live drums, and live stringed instruments. As you hear the organ, live drums, bass, strings, and guitar, you’re transported back to the era of Marvin Gaye, when R&B was more, for lack of a better word, organic. You can hear the beauty of the classic instrumentation with D’Angelo’s voice when you listen to his beautiful cover of Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’”:

This version is absolutely stunning, but don’t be fooled into thinking that D’Angelo is just a revivalist. D’Angelo, after all, is a product of the hip-hop generation. The true innovation of Brown Sugar to me is that it found a way to bring hip-hop to R&B rather than the other way around. When you listen to stuff like SWV or TLC, which was R&B that used hip-hop beats, the R&B felt like it was wedged into the hip-hop sound; it works but it feels awkward, especially when you look back on it. When you listen to Brown Sugar, there are soul instruments front and center. The drums are locked in. They just click off like a metronome. The bass is steady and deep. The organ drives everything forward. The whole construction makes you nod your head and rock along with it. Brown Sugar feels like a hip-hop album in soul clothing, and the world hadn’t really heard anything like that before.

D’Angelo’s ability to merge the current hip-hop culture with old school soul culture led to Brown Sugar ushering in an entirely new form of music: neo soul. While I, like the others attached to this term (D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, and Maxwell, among others), don’t love this term for reasons that will become later, it quickly explains what Brown Sugar did. The album opened up ways to blend classic R&B/soul songcraft with modern influences (i.e., hip-hop). It was legitimately eye opening to hear this. The culture eventually caught up with D’Angelo, but that was only briefly. He still had more to do.

Working The Magic

Even though Brown Sugar absolutely blew the doors off of everything, D’Angelo was not content. He thought that the album, while great, came out a little too smooth. In an effort to change this, he completely changed the way that he started making music. After starting a jam group that contained drummer Questlove, producer J Dilla, and producer/multi-instrumentalist/songwriter James Poyser—a group that would come to be known as The Soulquarians—D’Angelo hunkered down in Electric Lady Studios and started watching bootleg videos of musicians like Fela Kuti, James Brown, Prince, and George Clinton. Using those as inspiration, the band went into the studio and started playing. When they hit upon something, they stopped, worked it out, and turned it into a song.

While it took five years for Voodoo to hit the public, these jam sessions turned out albums that would forecast what that album would sound like. During this five-year period, the following albums were produced: The Roots’ Things Fall Apart, Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun, Common’s Like Water for Chocolate, and Bilal’s 1st Born Second. For each of these artists, the album to come from the Electric Lady sessions is an absolute highlight, if not the high water mark, for their career. Things Fall Apart is the high water mark for The Roots. Mama’s Gun is a major step forward from Baduizm, which was a phenomenal album. It showed that Erykah Badu was the real deal, not just some lady with a lot of (fake) dreadlocks.

The thing that connects these albums, aside from the fact that they were born out of these Electric Lady jams, is that they all are genre agnostic. While, nominally, Badu and Bilal are soul singers and The Roots and Common are hip-hop acts, their albums from this period pull heavily from soul, funk, jazz, hip-hop, the blues, R&B. In short, they pull from the history of Black music and make it into something that honors those traditions while also creating something that is both modern and timeless.

This sound, pulling from everywhere in Black music, is at the core of D’Angelo’s Voodoo. D’Angelo’s voice is still very much at the heart of the music—and as beautiful as ever—and you can immediately hear the looseness that he wanted. The songs retain a jam-like quality, being anchored around core ideas with vamps and layers added judiciously. The groove is always front and center. Furthermore, he continues to explode what it means to be an R&B artist.

In the process of considering this dispatch, I read that D’Angelo didn’t aim to make R&B or neo soul or anything like that; he aimed to make Black music. You can call Voodoo a R&B or soul album, and you wouldn’t technically be wrong as it does maintain numerous markers of those genres. But, I think, after having listened to it a lot this week, that is maybe a bit too easy. Voodoo is a Black music album. It is in conversation with so much more than just R&B or soul. Over the course of the album’s 78-minute runtime (which I was shocked to learn because it doesn’t feel that long), D’Angelo and his crew touch on every major Black music movement of the past 50 years and create an absolutely legendary album. This was acknowledged by the Recording Academy when they named it the Best R&B Album at the 2001 Grammys. If I’m being honest though, most of you do not remember this album for the ways that it broke the R&B genre wide open and how it serves as a document of the power of collective art creation. You remember it for the video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)”:

One time when I was in grad school, we were watching random videos on YouTube. My friend Matt put this video on and said, “My sister watched this video and immediately went through puberty.” If you have ever seen this video, that reaction is valid. D’Angelo, sculpted and nude, is singing a pointedly erotic song about what he wants to do to the woman. If you get a little horny while listening to this song, that is completely normal. I would not blame you.

It turned up that this song was a double-edged sword for D’Angelo. The song and video catapulted him into the stratosphere. It opened at #1 on the Billboard Hot 200 and stayed there for 33 weeks. The album went platinum overall. It was a commercial success. You could not escape it on either BET or MTV. However, it placed a lot of pressure on D’Angelo, turning him into a sex symbol, a position that he was deeply uncomfortable with.

Becoming the Messiah

After the accolades and success of Voodoo, D’Angelo found himself lost, so he went away to find himself. Unfortunately, that led to him becoming an alcoholic, developing a cocaine addiction, getting arrested, and wrapping his car around a tree in addition to having mental health struggles. While he was still making some music, the idea that the public would ever get a follow-up to Voodoo was becoming fainter and fainter because it assumed that D’Angelo would be either in jail or, more depressingly, not alive to make it.

One year became five years. Five years became ten years. In 2014, with no fanfare, D’Angelo, with his band The Vanguard, released Black Messiah. This album was supposed to be released in 2015, but D’Angelo said that with the killings of Eric Gardner and the violence in Ferguson, Missouri, Black people needed this album. He was not wrong.

In a time when things were looking dire for Black people (I’m mean, they still do now, but we’ll set that to the side), Black Messiah was an album that spoke to the reality of the moment. The music, while dense, could be hectic, thrumming with tension and anxiety. You can hear this on “1000 Deaths” and “The Charade,” songs about fighting against police oppression. But, as any Black person knows, there are always moments of stress; this is the curse of Blackness. However, D’Angelo also knows that to be Black is so much more than that.

Across this album, D’Angelo explores love (“Really Love”) and faithfulness (“Betray My Heart”), and he reflects on his own life over the past decade (“Back to the Future”). In addition to the lyrics, the music itself continues in the mode that he was in on Voodoo. Never to be trapped by R&B, D’Angelo creates more Black music, referencing so many different styles and genres that are connected by how they speak to the Black community. If Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” was the song of the Black Lives Matter movement, this should be its soundtrack. It is complex, rich, and urgent, but it is also laced with a deep love for one another and an important message to remember to take care of yourself and each other, to remember that it isn’t a crime to be Black.

This album was correctly heralded upon its release. It is just another album that adds to his legend as a musical genius. Every listen hits hard while displaying new details. Most artists struggle to make one album that will be remembered by anyone, much less become a classic. Not only did D’Angelo make three albums that will be remembered, he made three classic albums, albums that are at the absolute pinnacle of contemporary Black music.

The Legacy

Like I said at the beginning of this piece, I cannot overstate how important D’Angelo is. Many of the major R&B artists that are dominating the market right now like SZA can track their legacy back to the genre-breaking music of D’Angelo. The world of alternative R&B does not exist without the work of an artist like D’Angelo, who broke down the strict ideas of what the genre could or could not be. Without him, we don’t get amazing albums like Channel Orange or A Seat at the Table. He is an absolutely gargantuan figure in music.

More than what has come after him, I cannot say this enough: these three albums are stone-cold classics. They are masterworks, full of inventiveness, creativity, desire, love, joy, realness, and unity. These are albums that stand on their own, and even more than that, they still hit now. They do not sound dated. Each time you listen to them, they sound fresh and exciting. They are absolute proof that D’Angelo was a musical genius. And, if you finish reading this and remember nothing else, remember that.

Thank you for reading The Rinse this week. We’ll be back in a lighter mood next week with a return to The Spins. What albums will I talk about? Who knows. I don’t. As always, tell your friends if you like what you’ve read here, and take care of yourselves and each other. If you can, take some time for yourself to do something you enjoy.