The music channel in Defector's work Slack is, paradoxically or not, a fairly quiet place. People will talk about records they're enjoying or not enjoying, Patrick will reply "type shit" to various stuff, but for the most part everyone is off listening on their own and on their own time. But when D'Angelo died earlier this week at the age of 51, the channel lit up first with the sad stuff you'd expect, and then with memories of our favorite D'Angelo songs and performances and personal memories—all meaningful in urgent and individuated ways, often very different from one another, all anchored by this one uncanny and brilliant artist. Here is some of that music, and what it means to six of us.
1000 Deaths
I’ve spent a lot of time there, but music is still a foreign country for me. The creative process that makes it possible is not something I have access to at even the most basic level, and as a result I understand as more or less magic. I am fine with this, pretty much. I can still feel it, and that is generally enough for me. If I knew more about music, where it comes from or where it goes, it might mean less. When I have really thought about it—and also when I asked Bob Mould, an actual genius, whether it was fun to make a record—I have learned mostly that making music is a creative experience adjacent to but not really overlapping with anything I do in my own life as a writer. Again, that’s enough. I can appreciate the craft, and I can enjoy the product. I don’t need to know everything. I just need to know enough, or just know what I like.
But man I am curious about “1000 Deaths,” from D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, and have been since I first heard it. There are more immediately appealing songs on that record, and several I prefer just as things to listen to, but the feeling of being crossed up by “1000 Deaths” upon hearing it for the first time has stayed with me. I knew the story about what an undertaking the record had been, the years adrift and the years at work, and while the result was as fine-tuned and fussed-over as I expected, I hadn't anticipated the extent to which it could be both opaque and a fully finished thought. I don't know how I could have.
Given how world-historically charismatic D’Angelo himself was, the extent to which his presence is not so much sublimated within as diffused throughout “1000 Deaths” was striking. The whole record is like this—”1000 Deaths” is the second song on the album—and all of it is masterful. There are a lot of ways to be soulful on a record, and while the classic method vis-a-vis conveying that feeling is to foreground the voice of one specific soulful person, Black Messiah gets there in a more collaborative and surprising way, which is by foregrounding a complicated but fully inhabited vision in a way that often conceals the recognizable voice at the center of it.
The result of all the tumult and torment and study is singular and strange. The obvious comparisons are obvious, and also all apt enough—the elaborate and luxuriously uneasy funk stylings of Parliament and Sly Stone, the unhurried visionary Prince Thing—but also feel insufficient. I had listened to those records but my first thought upon hearing "1000 Deaths" was that I hadn’t really heard a song like this before, and while I knew instantly that it worked for me, everything about it was also someplace that I didn’t expect to find it. D’Angelo’s own voice is mixed down and outward; if you remember any specific aspect about the song, it’s either Pino Palladino’s jittery bassline or the insistent push-pull of Questlove’s (astonishing) drumming. The star himself is not in the foreground; he's in the mix, and everywhere in it.
The way that D’Angelo hides and uses himself on the album creates a tension that rides over and through all of it; when you hear him in full voice it feels significant, a signal lost and found, because of all the other ways you’ve heard and not heard that voice throughout. In “1000 Deaths,” he's muttering, chanting, nudging, pleading, illegible but comprehensible. This is his music; it re-centers things when he shows his face and raises his voice, but he's also so fully subsumed in it. I felt, that first time and also as I write this, that I didn’t really know how to listen to a song like this. I felt, then and now, like that is basically the most I could ask from anything that I would ever choose to listen to. — David Roth
The Line
In an old Pitchfork review of an Aphex Twin side project, Mark Richardson proposed the concept of “emotional drumming”:
In a recent Mojo feature on Bob Dylan's 100 greatest songs, Frank Black talked about his attraction to "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again." What Black loves about the song above all are the drum fills at the end of each verse. This is where Black looks for the most powerful emotions on Blonde on Blonde, and he says that those fills can have him close to tears. Black's response popped out for me because the idea of "emotional" drumming resonates and yet you don't see [it] mentioned often. Rare is the music where the percussion does this sort of lifting, but when it happens, the effect is striking.
I only sort of hear what Black hears in Dylan and what Richardson hears in Richard D. James. But the line has stuck with me for more than a decade, because "emotional drumming” nails what moves me in a bunch of my favorite music. Left unregulated, I tend to start vibrating at (and tapping out) their frequencies: boiling, buoyant, flinty, reverent. “The Line,” the fourth song on D’Angelo’s Voodoo, rides another of these rhythms. It often comes over me when I’m cooking something I know—when I’m in a groove, feeling deft, rugged, and supple.
On both “The Line” and most of the rest of Voodoo, the drums and bass are treated with zero reverb. The sound is stark, verging on pointillist; it’s like the rhythm section was recorded under vacuum seal after years of wind tunnel refinement by leading soul researchers. This might actually be pretty close to the truth: The recording process was described at the time as “five years of study at Soul University,” with D’Angelo and his collaborators starting each session by watching rare Soul Train bootlegs in search of arcane tactics.
What makes Voodoo’s rhythms so alluring is the way these precisely engineered components are deployed purposefully askew. Returning to the album for the first time in too long this week, it brings to mind the way Burial would sculpt and place each drum sample by hand because the goofy software he knew didn’t have quantization. Listen to how far ahead of the beat the snares hit on long-lost sonic cousins “Untrue” and “The Root.” This is J Dilla’s influence on D’Angelo; I note with regret about what might have been that Dilla and Burial each independently collaborated with Four Tet.
I resent the fetishization of “analog sound” and don’t at all want to locate D’Angelo’s appeal in making “real music” or whatever. I’m sure it didn’t hurt, but I don’t think the reason Voodoo sounds so good is because he used Stevie Wonder’s keyboards and Jimi Hendrix’s amps at Electric Lady. Instead, the drums were mic’d so lovingly and played so singularly because they follow from an auteur’s vision and his crew’s hard-won expertise at getting from vision to real-world result. D’Angelo’s imperative was to make something up to his standards, not to move units. You can tell.
Plenty of so-called “experts” are just hacks, and being an outsider—either not knowing or not caring How Things Work—can set a person up for mold-breaking success. But an error that punks of all stripes make, myself included, is concluding from these premises that expertise doesn’t matter. I fear that the list of living people who knew enough to imagine music that sounds like this, let alone actually make it happen, now has zero entries. — Sean Kuhn
Nothing Even Matters
This is not actually my favorite D’Angelo record, but it has the thing all my favorites do—from "One Mo’ Gin," to "Send It On," to "Another Life"—perfect romantic yearning. D’Angelo was one of our best yearners. His crackling, rollicking voice and velvet moan made the yearning feel as if your own soul had come to life. And “Nothing Even Matters,” with Lauryn Hill, is the yearner’s anthem.
When I think about either D or Lauryn or both, my mind often goes to what dream hampton said about the consensus obsession around them. That fixation bordered on the cultish, particularly in 1998 when pop music was desperate for the kind of authenticity both artists brought: “We told [D’Angelo] he was Marvin Gaye and we told Lauryn that she was Nina Simone and they each had one fucking album," hampton said. "It wasn’t fair to them because they started to believe it.” While I don't think D'Angelo needed critics to make him believe he was the new Marvin, it does get at both artists' very real ability to give you a real feeling and the cultural desperation for the kind of music that makes you feel something real. The emotional narcotic. Even the opening yelps of D'Angelo are enough to get you high.
Part of the argument for both these artists was that they had made these totemic works of art that were wise beyond their years. But when I listen to Miseducation or the first two D'Angelo albums now, it is not wisdom I hear but the emotional reckless abandon of being young. I have listened to a lot of people who seem scared of aging try to argue that age is merely a number and youth is a mindset that you can hold onto. (You're only as old as you feel!) On some level that's true, but the thing that no amount of exercise and ayahuasca can give back to you is that feeling of being 20 years old, when all your friends are within radius, maybe sleeping on our couch or you on theirs, and you've got enough money all put together for one large pizza. On your way there maybe you run into another group your age, you don't know them but you find yourself talking to them, they're attractive, they're interesting, but more importantly they're actually into you talking to them. All of a sudden you're making plans to hang out later. You don't know what you're gonna do, but that's part of it. The not knowing. That's what youth is to me.
That's what this song captures so perfectly. That feeling of being hopelessly in love in the way you were when you were young and it was just flowering. The way D'Angelo sings, your love makes me feel ten feet tall, without it I'd go through withdrawal, should be tattooed onto my skeleton I feel it so deeply. That needing. That craving. That desire to skip class or work and just sit in bed all day because you're that infatuated. It's passion and it can't be faked. When's the last time any of you told your partner their love made you feel ten feet tall?He could capture that with his voice—with the way he crooned, really. Lauryn could too. That's why the music lasts, and continues to live up to all the exaltation and praise. – Israel Daramola
Black Messiah
Black Messiah is my favorite D'Angelo album.
Before he dropped Black Messiah like a lightning bolt, D'Angelo had not released an album in nearly 15 years. He spent that period struggling through personal turmoil, creative restlessness, and an understandably poor relationship with the nature and scope of his fame. One might not associate a decade and a half's worth of such tribulations with a work of such heart and transcendence as Black Messiah. Put another way, one might not think that any work produced over the course of such a long time would be even remotely coherent. Yet D'Angelo borrowed from soul, funk, gospel, and R&B and blended the most interesting parts together to create something that sounds, as other people have noted in here, simultaneously familiar and futuristic.
Black Messiah is the only D'Angelo album that is also credited to the Vanguard, a loose collection of incredibly talented musicians. It's not like nobody was using real instruments in 2014, just as it is not true 11 years later that guitar music is dead or even dying, but Black Messiah is propelled to such heights because of the band; it is one thing to achieve such synthesis by digital means, and entirely another to orchestrate it for analog instruments. Broadly speaking, they create a groove then push around on its edges, never rushing through anything, merely exploring possibilities. The trick is that the music sets the table for the star of the show: D'Angelo's voice.
I have always felt something like a spiritual awe towards D'Angelo. This is surely due in part to how little music he produced, how assiduously he avoided the spotlight, and his religious conviction. Really, though, it is because of his voice. That is just not what people sound like. He sings as if he's expressing something profound and ineluctable, yowling or cooing velvet-soft or warbling in through a haze of distortion or bending his voice around a lazy guitar line to find some new space. He doesn't really need words, he can move me with a simple wail. Throughout the album, he sounds at different points like Sly Stone, George Clinton, Prince, and Marvin Gaye, but more than anyone specific, he sounds like someone twisting under the weight of the world. Despite it all, I am usually struck by a sense of sweetness.
D'Angelo famously pushed this album's release up because he was so moved by the police murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown and the subsequent calls for justice. I find the ways he engages with the struggles of the time to be both bracing and heartening—again, there's a sense of hope in it—but more than that I am struck that D'Angelo's response to the upheaval and racial tensions of the day was to release Black Messiah. This is a beautiful album, and it takes real heart and vision to create an object of such beauty, and for that beauty to be enough to meet such a moment.
They say D'Angelo was steadily working on new music before he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and I am sure what he was making was as revelatory and pure as all the other stuff he'd made. Black Messiah was the only D'Angelo record released in the last 24 years, and yet it still feels odd as a final statement. It doesn’t feel like the work of an artist who was out of things to express. That we'll never see him express more is a real loss. — Patrick Redford
Greatdayndamornin'/Booty
There’s one image of D’Angelo I treasure that I’ll never get to see in person. I came across it in Dan Charnas’s book Dilla Time, in a lovely passage describing the recording sessions for Voodoo. The writer details the methods by which D’Angelo achieved his warm, woozy sound. It took some tinkering in the studio.
D’Angelo asked his bassist Pino Palladino to lag behind the beat, just as D himself was doing on the keys. But then Questlove, on the drums, started to lag too, and the very beat that they were hoping to lag behind had fallen into lockstep with them. D’Angelo had Questlove take his headphones off, so that he couldn’t hear the other instruments, and told him to play it as straight as possible. The drummer figured out his role, put his headphones on again, and toyed around with other techniques—hitting his snare a little earlier than the ear would naturally expect, or letting his drumstick slip off the edge of the drum skin and into the metal rim for a slurred sound. Guitar and trumpet joined the fray, too. As Charnas tells it, D’Angelo took a bunch of genius musicians and “[put them] in degrees of rhythmic conflict with each other.”
All that conflict does something to the body. It’s a pleasurable form of confusion. Something like having to sneeze, if I had to try and describe it. As engineer Steve Mandell recalled in the book, this record will have you moving differently: “D’Angelo’s nod was so far behind the beat as to seem completely disconnected from it.” As does the creator, so does the listener. I can envision my high school friends, in that same viscous nod, with a pungent stank face on. I now crave any and all music that induces that nod, and I’m pretty sure I have this man to blame for those cravings.
For the last two decades, I’ve watched hours and hours of my life disappear into the lushness of this record. With Voodoo on I feel lost in absolute time but locked into the local groove—at least until that slips away, too, and I wait to catch the next one. I can’t even tell what words he’s singing so sweetly, because, as his engineer Russell Elevado once told NPR, D’Angelo preferred to have his vocals “enveloped” by the other instruments in the mix. And all those instruments sound, somehow, like they’re being played inside my sinuses, such is their intimacy. Even the songs on the tracklist edgelessly meld into one another. The result of all those choices is an album muted enough to leave on repeat—after having had it on for the last day, it has become difficult to justify filling my home with any other sounds, ever—and still rich enough to reward all that re-listening. Just braise your brain in Voodoo and you won’t regret it, I promise. The concept of a “podcast” will suddenly seem to you alien and profane.
On the day his death was announced, thinking back on all the passages of my life that his music has honeyed and mellowed, I searched his name in my texts on my phone. Aside from a few complaining about the current Dallas Maverick guard, and a few ecstatic ones about the musician’s return to public life, they are all some mundane snapshot of adolescent suburbia: a joint, a car, Voodoo on, headed to Sonic. I just know all those dumb heads in the car were nodding way behind the beat. I hope he still is, too. — Giri Nathan
Lady
The paradox of so-called artistic genius—where the deifying reception of a genius artist's work creates conditions that make it impossible for the artist to continue producing that work—is well-established, and probably no artist of his generation instantiates that paradox better than D'Angelo. If the myth of D'Angelo, and the impossibility of living up to the (sex) god his adoring public had fashioned him as, made it difficult for the man himself to release as much music as everyone would've liked, I've always found that the myth also threatened to obstruct the enjoyment and appreciation of the music he did give us.
Almost everything that is said about D'Angelo's music is true. He was a prism through which nearly the entire spectrum of the black musical tradition shone, and the colors and brilliance of all that light as it refracted through him was genuinely awe-inspiring. The progression of his career across his three albums reflects staggering growth, ambition, knowledge, and mastery. His best songs all somehow sound deeply rooted in the past, totally contemporary, and like something straight out of the future. He almost single-handedly revivified soul and funk traditions that had previously been so dormant that they had to come up with a whole new genre to describe his sound. The effect of all of that made joining the church of D'Angelo feel like something much bigger than music, as if you too were helping him bring about a conception of black life more capacious than what the white establishment was willing to represent and provide for.
But I've always felt that the actual experience of listening to D'Angelo was much more personal and intimate than all that mythological figuration allowed for. The thing that always drew me closest to him was his voice, the sheer expressive enormity of his voice. The combination of the soulfulness of his tone and the clarity of his singing made him capable of perfectly conveying any and every emotion purely through sound. More skeptical D'Angelo listeners often teased him for mumbling his lyrics and burying his vocal tracks beneath the music, to the point where you very often can't make out what exactly he's saying. This always seemed to me less like a flaw and more of an intentional emphasis on sound itself, the music and his voice achieving a state of unity that could carry all sorts of profound meanings without reliance on the words. Even if you don't know the exact lyrics of any given D'Angelo song, there's never any question what he's singing about. Because of that, there's no other artist who has as many songs that can instantly bring me to tears.
"Lady" is one such song. As with my relationship with D'Angelo himself, my associations with the song are deeply personal. My first introduction to D'Angelo came from my mom. I remember listening to her copy of Brown Sugar on CD back when it came out, and I also remember how, like every other red-blooded black woman in America, she somehow always found a free five minutes to stand in front of the TV whenever the "Untitled" video came on. But it wasn't until the mid-Aughts, during teen years spent in the blissful free-fall of music discovery, that I really came to know D'Angelo, or at least his mythological self. My music education in those days came mostly from the message boards of Okayplayer, the website Questlove originally set up as a fan hub for the Roots, but which quickly grew to become the congregation spot where a certain conception of black culture, specifically black musical culture, emerged. Okayplayer was my Bible, and D'Angelo was something like the site's Jesus. Before I'd personally acquired any of his albums, I'd been made a convert to the church of D'Angelo just from reading about what his music meant to the site.
It wasn't until I found the CD in my college dorm's library and burned it to my laptop that I actually heard Voodoo. For years I'd been reading about the album, having fully internalized its status as a seminal work of genius, and I was eager to finally experience it for myself. But a funny thing happened. Try as I might, the album didn't really click with me the way I expected it to. I kept playing it over and over, trying to will myself into the reverence I believed was objectively correct, but knowing deep down that something wasn't translating. Eventually, when I'd given it enough spins to justify to myself that I'd Done The Work, I put it aside.
It wasn't until a couple years later, when I came across a download link for Brown Sugar, that my relationship with D'Angelo changed. In Brown Sugar, I'd found the knock-my-socks-off response I'd been looking for in Voodoo. My love of his first album then inspired me to go back to Voodoo, where with a new frame of reference I was able to connect with the songs much more readily than I had before. What I came to realize was that the myth of D'Angelo and the capital-i Importance of his music had been built up so much in my mind that I couldn't hear the songs for what they were; they had been too freighted with meanings that had more to do with being a certain kind of person who loved the music than simply loving the music directly. As my musical interests had expanded over the years, and as the grip the Okayplayer worldview had on my mind eased, I could listen to Brown Sugar without worrying so much about what it supposedly meant to the world. Instead, I just opened myself up to the sounds and meanings D'Angelo himself had layered there in the music.
All of that personal history is why D'Angelo has always been one of the most important musical artists of my life, and why, when I finally learned how to put aside the mythology and love D'Angelo's music in its own right, he's also been one of my favorite artists, too. I walked down the aisle at my wedding to "Lady." It's one of the purest expressions of love and devotion I know, which I feel deep in my soul every time it plays—even though, on the lyrical side, I'm only certain about the three words of the chorus. D'Angelo may not have wanted to be one of the gods, and he struggled greatly both personally and professionally when he was eventually anointed one anyway. But if any voice could be said to channel the very thrum of life, it was his. It makes sense that on that plane, there are no words. — Billy Haisley
