\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span>n the mid-90s, the Roots\u2019 drummer Questlove was approached to work on the first album by a new soul singer. He turned the offer down out of hand: \u201cI was like, ehhh, soul singers in the 90s \u2013 whatever,\u201d he later remembered. \u201cI\u2019m not doing this. Nothing about soul singing had moved me, from any 90s offering, the same way it did with Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder, Lou Rawls.\u201d<\/p>\n A year later, with D\u2019Angelo\u2019s debut album Brown Sugar on the shelves, Questlove had radically reconsidered his opinion: when he spotted the singer in the audience at a show the Roots were playing, he \u201cthwarted and threw off the entire show\u201d by suddenly playing \u201can obscure Prince drum roll\u201d in a (successful) attempt to attract his attention. \u201cThe only person that mattered to me that night in the room was D\u2019Angelo,\u201d he admitted.<\/p>\n It worked: the pair became collaborators, forming the musical collective the Soulquarians with producer and DJ J Dilla in time for D\u2019Angelo\u2019s second album, Voodoo. But it\u2019s also a story that tells you a great deal about the disruptive impact Brown Sugar had.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t merely that D\u2019Angelo\u2019s debut album was critically acclaimed and commercially successful (it went platinum in the US). It was that it singlehandedly ushered in a new era and musical sub-genre: the term \u201cneo-soul\u201d was literally invented for it, as a marketing tool. In time, \u201cneo-soul\u201d came to signify music slavishly devoted to recreating the past, but that wasn\u2019t the point of Brown Sugar at all. There was certainly vintage equipment involved in its making, a Smokey Robinson cover lurking among its tracks, and a distinct hint of Donny Hathaway and Al Green about D\u2019Angelo\u2019s falsetto vocals: there were hints of jazz, gospel and blues about its sound. But Brown Sugar was resolutely not a mere homage but a product of its era, the work of an artist who cared as much about hip-hop as he did about Black music\u2019s history, who worshipped Prince and \u2013 as a songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist \u2013 modelled himself on his idol\u2019s auteur approach.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Packed with fantastic songs and smooth but emotive vocals, the results didn\u2019t sound like anything else in 1995. But as it turned out, Brown Sugar was merely the sound of D\u2019Angelo getting started. His progress was never smooth \u2013 over the course of his subsequent career, he suffered bouts of writer\u2019s block, crippling doubts about the way his music was marketed and issues with drug and alcohol addiction that meant his releases were infrequent and punctuated by long, troubled silences \u2013 but it was progress nonetheless: both his subsequent albums offered striking evidence of musical development.<\/p>\n Four years in the making, 2000\u2019s Voodoo was more experimental and more challenging than his game-changing debut, eschewing standard song structures for a looser approach that demanded the listener given themselves over to its ebb and flow. It was also noticeably darker in tone, its paeans to carnal ecstasy \u2013 most obviously the Prince-influenced single Untitled (How Does It Feel) \u2013 and its bursts of taut, sparse, funk balanced by troubled ruminations on Black masculinity and moments that sounded utterly despondent: \u201cI feel my soul is empty, my blood is cold and I can\u2019t feel my legs,\u201d D\u2019Angelo sang on The Root, \u201cI need somebody to hold me, bring me back to life before I\u2019m dead.\u201d It covered a vast amount of ground both emotionally and musically, but it somehow held together perfectly. You didn\u2019t have to agree with the jazz critic who excitedly compared it with both Miles Davis\u2019s Kind of Blue and John Coltrane\u2019s Giant Steps to think it sounded like a masterpiece.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The silence that followed (initially spurred in part by D\u2019Angleo\u2019s disquiet at the sex symbol status afforded him by the video for Untitled, in which appeared naked) was eventually broken by 2014\u2019s Black Messiah: the delay in its arrival prompted Questlove to suggest it was the \u201cBlack version\u201d of the Beach Boys\u2019 notorious \u201clost\u201d album Smile. Understandably, anticipation around its release was high; incredibly, Black Messiah didn\u2019t disappoint. Despite its lengthy gestation, it appeared to fit perfectly with increasingly troubled times: released not long after the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Black man Michael Brown led to unrest in Missouri, its lyrics dealt with gun violence and systemic racism. Its raw, dense, avant-soul sound shifted unpredictably from furious to dream-like: you could hear traces of Sly and the Family Stone\u2019s legendary 1971 album There\u2019s a Riot Goin\u2019 On, updated for a new era. It was superb.<\/p>\n It was also the last album D\u2019Angelo was to make, although a single, Unshaken, appeared in 2019. As late as last year, when D\u2019Angelo appeared alongside Jay-Z on the soundtrack to the comedy-drama film The Book of Clarence, there was talk of a follow-up: his long-time collaborator Raphael Saadiq told journalists he was working on a new album. Whether that music will now ever appear is open to question.<\/p>\n You could, if you wished, view D\u2019Angelo\u2019s career as frustratingly scattered: it would certainly have been nice if he had released more music than he did. But, then again, he leaves behind a perfect catalogue: only three albums in 30 years, but all of them are of an extraordinarily high quality. It was a conundrum neatly summed by Questlove, who was asked about D\u2019Angelo in the long, grim gap between Voodoo and Black Messiah. \u201cI consider him a genius beyond words,\u201d he offered. \u201cAt the same time, I say to myself: how can I scream someone\u2019s genius if they hardly have any work to show for it? Then again, the last work he did was so powerful that it\u2019s lasted 10 years.\u201d The music D\u2019Angelo did release will ultimately last far longer than that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the mid-90s, the Roots\u2019 drummer Questlove was approached to work on the first album by a new soul singer. He turned the offer down out of hand: \u201cI was like, ehhh, soul singers in the 90s \u2013 whatever,\u201d he later remembered. \u201cI\u2019m not doing this. Nothing about soul singing had moved me, from any<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[8289,16671,9441,686,1913,15088,3121,9625,6814],"class_list":{"0":"post-28029","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-boundaries","9":"tag-dangelo","10":"tag-experimental","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-political","13":"tag-radically","14":"tag-redrew","15":"tag-sensual","16":"tag-soul"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}