D’Angelo—“Untitled (How Does It Feel)” | 60 Songs That Explain the '90s

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 wish I 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 doofily typing away like do-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 of 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 25 to 3 billion people worldwide watched this live out of the roughly 68 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 sing his 1971 ballad 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 Every single person on earth is watching this.

And I know I'm wrong that everyone on earth was watching this, but it doesn't feel wrong.

And 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 48 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 hypothetically.

I cannot fathom life on Earth without this person.

It's like I'm watching a funeral for the moon.

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 we, and I'm getting all florid 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 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 not mine.

My love is gone.

That is a hard moment.

Stevie Wonder 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 lying friends, wanting tragic ends.

Though they do pretend, 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 Skipbo, the card game.

I played Skipbo 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.

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 visible physical force.

The Madison Square Garden crowd audibly rising up at the end there 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-memoriam type moments.

He is universally beloved for the comfort he provides us, for his resilience.

I'm getting florid 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 memoriam performance.

I'm overwhelmed even at the thought of it.

I'm overwhelmed by Jennifer Hudson's huge sigh right at the beginning here.

In her little shrug, almost for a split second, she raises her hands in 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.

And I will always love you.

We lost Whitney Houston on Saturday, February 11th, 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 has 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.

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.

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.

Oof.

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's up to just one year earlier at the 2011 Grammys.

¶¶ ¶¶

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 shootout.

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 whompin' finish.

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 Grammy's tribute.

This whole medley is just 12 solid minutes of ah.

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 panicked 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've 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 16th 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 Chaka Khan performing the gospel standard Going Up Yonder.

Here we have Chaka Khan really getting after it.

Tremendous stuff happening at Aretha Franklin's public memorial 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 Chaka Khan's giant church fan.

As she sings, she consults her fan periodically.

A savvy veteran move from Chaka Khan.

Who are we going to get to close out this blockbuster 10-hour Aretha Franklin funeral anyway?

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.

To my mind, there's no equivalent in pop music to how psychologically fraught these moments can be.

How collectively, emotionally cathartic they can be.

And so, it is April 27th, 2016. and the unthinkable, the unbearable has happened.

And heroically, out of nowhere, out of the mist, D'Angelo reemerges to help us bear it.

Tracy died soon after our long-form civil war.

Just after I wiped away his last tear, I'm getting florid 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 Prince song.

Let's Go Crazy, I think.

And I thought, oh, that's nice.

And then the organist played a few more Prince 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 D'Angelo 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 in Under the Cherry Moon, a 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.

D'Angelo'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 before, A whole lot better off.

On backing vocals we got Maya Rudolph and Gretchen Lieberum, who together are in a Prince cover band called Princess.

The stricken, 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 Riperton, the famous, incredible 70s soul singer with.

I forget, I think it's a 12 octave range, just a startling and inimitable voice.

Minnie Riperton died in 1979 at just 31 years old.

For most of us, you best honor Minnie Riperton's memory, I think, by not trying to sing like Minnie Riperton.

You will hurt yourself and others.

Oh geez, I'm through trying to keep this.

That leap to falsetto 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 I feel 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.

Get a load of the dissonance on the word wish right there.

That note is mega nasty.

Complimentary.

That is some ugly cry swagger right there.

And speaking of ugly crying, it is time for D'Angelo to say Prince's name.

I often dream of heaven, and I know that Prince is there.

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 has 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 he's found the answer to all the April snow.

Maybe one day I'll see.

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 earned the right to revisit another sort of stirring audiovisual type moment.

How convenient that this is a video podcast now, eh?

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, colon 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.

All right, we got to change the vibe around here.

We got pretty maudlin back there.

How about some treats?

Who's up for some treats?

D'Angelo's Voodoo is a lore-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 the Star Wars guy.

Yodas meaning teachers, mentors, deities.

Yodas meaning like this guy.

Are you 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 Ture.

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, a.k.a.

Questlove, drummer for The Roots.

Future Oscar-winning filmmaker.

Future best-selling author.

Future late-night with Jimmy Fallon.

Bandleader with The Roots, current and future renaissance man.

Questlove is a crucial musical presence on Voodoo.

And he is even more crucial to the Voodoo mythos.

So we got D'Angelo and Questlove and Rolling Stone just sitting around watching James Brown do Night Train on The Tammy Show, the famous 1963 concert film.

Tammy is an acronym, T-A-M-I.

The T stands for teenage.

This show was 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.

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.

Good gravy.

So in this Rolling Stone D'Angelo profile, Ture 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, Fela Kuti, 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 and 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.

Ture writes quote In their pursuit of knowledge about the Yodas, D'Angelo and Questlove have acquired hundreds of treats.

We got bootleg concert connects like fiends got drug dealer connects, Quest says.

During Voodoo, there was at least 13 people providing us with stuff, end quote.

And then D'Angelo's manager, Dominique Treniere, he jumps in and says, quote, 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 tried 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 pusher 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 cocaine-edly.

There is some speculation about that in the YouTube comments.

I feel so bad for D'Angelo and Questlove back in 2000 trying to amass all these treats without the internet.

So ranking all the Yodas 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 D'Angelo's Voodoo album.

And in fact quote way after Voodoo was finished, D 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.

We don't want to fight no more.

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 to party with Dr. Fink.

You will not survive partying up with Dr. Fink.

For me, another cherished Prince artifact is of course Prince's 1987 concert film Sign of the Times.

Specifically, the song Housequake.

Specifically the part of Housequake where Prince briefly cedes 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 here reverse worm butt, 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 Apex Yoda.

That's a dumb thing to say, but I'm not afraid to say it.

For D'Angelo, from the very beginning, Prince was the peak.

Okay, Michael Eugene Archer was born in Richmond, Virginia on February 11th, 1974.

His stage name D'Angelo comes from Michelangelo, the famous Italian artist, the literal Renaissance man.

D'Angelo's mother suggested he add the D and make it D'Angelo.

He was apparently a musical genius from birth.

In kindergarten, D'Angelo won a talent show so convincingly that they wouldn't let him enter talent shows anymore.

As a seven-year-old, D'Angelo 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 to sneak Prince into the house.

D'Angelo's mother, Marianne E. Cox, was a pastor.

His father, Luther Archer Sr., was a Pentecostal preacher.

D'Angelo 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 Powhatan Virginia.

D'Angelo told Rolling Stone that's the real stomped-down Pentecostal holiness church shouting, speaking in tongues and just fire.

That's where I really grew.

That's where I was really playing."

And so, like so many of the Yodas, like Aretha Franklin, like Sam Cooke, like Al Green, like Whitney Houston, D'Angelo 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, D'Angelo made it to Harlem and played Amateur Night at the Apollo.

He sang Peebo Bryson's 1977 Quiet Storm hit Feel the Fire and Lost.

The next year D'Angelo came back and he sang Johnny Gill's New Jack Swing Adjacent 1990.

Hit Rub You the Right Way.

And this time, D'Angelo won.

Those are both excellent songs that I would not recommend playing in church.

In this pre-fame era, D'Angelo got a few groups together.

He was the front man 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 Intelligent, 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 D'Angelo releases his debut album called Brown Sugar, which kicks off with the title track.

A fine addition to the canon of timeless RB anthems that half-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 D'Angelo'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 D'Angelo and Ali Shahid Muhammad of a tribe called Quest.

What makes this song for me is the subtle D'Angelo chorus running in the background.

Going... Pretty much the whole time.

I love the way D'Angelo sings that.

And I love that he sings that part like 500 times.

In this our formal introduction to D'Angelo.

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 and My Bones, co-written by the soul singer Angie Stone.

D'Angelo and Angie Stone had a son together, Michael Eugene Archer Jr., born in 1998.

D'Angelo's collaborators are always crucial.

You can somehow always hear them in the room with him.

But you can also clearly hear 200 D'Angelos in the room with him.

Per the liner notes.

D'Angelo 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 recedes.

Brown Sugar is an era-defining song, a 90s RB-defining song, and the Brown Sugar album is fantastic from front to back, but to my mind, all ten 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.

So track two on the Brown Sugar album is called All Right, and it's the bass line that grabs me first, right.

I hear do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do, and I think, oh yeah, this one.

But the vocal interplay between the plural D'Angelos, here the casual echo, that's all right.

That's all right, that's just as vital.

And so is the half-buried, crackling noise throughout the whole song.

The classic vinyl dustiness.

The luxurious atmosphere.

That's alright.

We made a misunderstanding.

That's okay.

Because you're my girl and I'm your man and that's just fun.

Because with D'Angelo we're dealing with a guy who can show up at the Apollo and sing both Peebo Bryson and Johnny Gill.

He can do the 70s and the 90s.

And more specifically, he can do the 90s doing the 70s.

He is R&B's future, 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's then-manager, Kedar Massenburg, he coined the term neo-soul.

And then he presented his two biggest clients.

D'Angelo and Erykah Badu, whose era-defining debut album, Baduism, came out in 1997.

Suddenly, they're the ambassadors, the leading lights, the king and queen of neo-soul.

And D'Angelo and Erykah 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.

I love it.

He's still an alarmingly handsome man D'Angelo, but he's also still just another guy on stage, even in sumptuous black and white.

As a pure pop music album.

Brown Sugar peaks with the song Cruisin', which is indeed a cover of the 1979 Smokey 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 bass line that first grabs me.

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 Cruzan-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 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 in his lower register.

But soon he's reaching for that filthy and godly falsetto.

Unbelievable.

Lady is co-written and co-produced with the great Rafael 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 is wearing various fantastic coats.

And in this video for Lady okay, he's doing the sexy RB guy thing where he's crooning 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 Jodeci situation, is what I'm saying.

Whenever 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 in RB you got Jodeci's third album, R Kelly's second album and the first Faith Evans album.

You got My Life by Mary J. Blige, 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 RB with a tone.

Talking to Essence magazine in 1999 about the lyrical content of 90s RB.

D'Angelo says, quote have some class.

I don't know how many motherfuckers gonna 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.

Let me hit you up and down, till you say stop.

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, an inescapable lewdness 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 Lady is a top ten 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.

DeAngelo 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 Playa Playa, and the words DeAngelo 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'Angelos 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 Playa Playa goes.

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, Sly, Jimmy, Prince.

In his 2021 book Music is History, Questlove writes about bonding with D'Angelo very intensely over all this stuff.

He says, quote, 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 Jimi 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 albums, 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 superfans 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.

Erykah Badu sounds like Billie Holiday, whatever.

But with Voodoo, with his constant Yoda talk, the lineage is explicit.

D'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 Sly and 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?

Soaring, gorgeous, immaculate, searching is Marvin Gaye's question.

There's a riot going on.

Raucous, dirty, chaotic, withholding is Sly Stone's answer.

Voodoo is a reverent tribute to them both, and, incredibly, a worthy successor to them both.

Ain't no justice, just us.

Ash to ashes, dust to dust.

Time has come for most of us.

Choosing which ground we trust.

This song is called Devil's Pie.

It is co-produced by D'Angelo and the great DJ Premier, 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 Yancey aka.

JD, a.k.a.

J Dilla, the Detroit rapper and producer who, by the year 2000, has more or less reinvented rhythms.

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.

D'Angelo has instead invented Dylan time.

Dylan'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 book Dillatine, published in 2022 by the rap journalist Dan Charnas.

Some of those adjectives sloppy wobbly, drunken.

They started off as insults but eventually they became compliments.

Here's a song called Players from Dilla'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.

You, y'all, y'all, you wanna be so...

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 D'Angelo 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 Dilla's approach to rhythm radicalizes a whole generation of rappers and soul singers.

Here in the late 90s and early 2000s, D'Angelo and Questlove and J Dilla have started a low-key native-tongue-style musical collective called the Soulquarians, along with Erykah Badu Bailal, Mos Def, Talib Kweli Common and a handful of others.

Various members of the Soulquarians will cycle in and out of Electric Lady's studio making various startling turn-of-the-century rap and RB albums.

Mama's Gun by Erykah Badu, Electric Circus by Common, etc.

Dilla does not officially contribute to voodoo and yet I hear Dilla everywhere on voodoo, and maybe especially on Devil's Pie.

I know I'm gonna die, search to find a piece of my 85, don't be blind, there's a voodoo coming.

Meanwhile, usually, D'Angelo 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 I was born to die.

Also, that's D'Angelo himself on bass there.

Aside from DJ Premier's stuff, that's D'Angelo 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 solquarians who drop by.

Pino Palladino on bass.

Roy Hargrove on horns.

James Poyser 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 Bull Music Academy.

Russell says they were sitting around listening to old Jimi Hendrix records and working on this song, The Root, and Jimi somehow inspired them to flip the tape and run Charlie Hunter's guitar solo backward.

Yodas.

Every song on Voodoo has that sort of depth.

That sort of lineage extending backstory.

Both Africa and the beautiful extra slow jam Send It On are about D'Angelo and Angie Stone's young son.

And D'Angelo's cover of Roberta Flack's Feel Like Makin' 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 D'Angelo and Raphael Sadiq.

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 D'Angelo 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 D'Angelo 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 cleared that D'Angelo is possibly totally naked.

He is definitely shirtless, and at the very least, functionally pantsless.

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 D'Angelo with the headline Singing in the Buff colon The Pure Beefcake Video.

And this features 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, yodas, treats, prints.

Untitled, how does it feel, is extra prints.

It's maximum prints.

It's in the proud colossal, ultra-yearning tradition of do-me-baby, of nothing compares to you, of adore of the beautiful ones.

Here, listen to this part.

Dig the rad cacophony of moaning and purring and wailing D'Angelos right here.

Baby.

Ah, geez, you're not listening.

You're not listening even if you're only listening.

You're thinking about the super close-up of D'Angelo's abs, even if you can't see them.

Ain't ya?

The untitled video is co-directed by Paul Hunter and D'Angelo's then-manager, Dominique Trenier, and it was Dominique who, in 2008, told Spin Magazine, quote I'm glad the video did what it did, but D'Angelo and I were both disappointed because

To this day, in the general populace's memory, he's the naked dude."

The untitled video really screwed D'Angelo up.

It paralyzed him.

It almost derailed his career.

D'Angelo'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 D'Angelo 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 D'Angelo after this video came out.

And he says, quote, we couldn't get through one song. 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 D'Angelo'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 D'Angelo was and how deep his issues ran.

End quote.

Big finish now.

A truly phenomenal Prince buildup and climactic Prince scream.

Right here.

A classic Prince scream... into the pure beefcake void.

I should mention that that 2008 spin article is headlined D'Angelo colon what the hell happened.

Because by then D'Angelo 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 anoint D'Angelo as an apex Yoda.

I kind of wish we could redo D'Angelo's whole career without the video.

Maybe nothing would be different.

It's ridiculous and naive to say that without the video, D'Angelo 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 D'Angelo 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 D'Angelo 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 Questlove's documentary about Sly Stone.

How hard is it to be vulnerable in front of a world watching you?

It's really hard.

It's the hardest thing to do.

The hangups baggage guilt, and the pain and the 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 that you really trust and people that really know you, and it's really down for you.

Yeah man, it can be.

It could be unbearable man.

Yeah, it'll make, it'll turn you into an unwilling participant And that's equivalent to hell.

This is from Questlove's 2025 movie, Sly Lives, a.k.a.

The Burden of Black Genius.

It's the notes D'Angelo doesn't play here that really hit me hard.

The pauses, the quiet, terrible gravity in his voice.

Ostensibly, D'Angelo is talking about Sly Stone there, but not really.

The phrase an unwilling participant really stings there.

D'Angelo 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.

Stevie Wonder sang at it.

Also on October 25th, D'Angelo's old friend and colleague, Erykah 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.

Second death is, it occurs the last time someone says your name.

The last time someone sings your song.

The last time someone admires your art.

The very last time, that's the seventh death.

I didn't intend to start maudlin and end maudlin, but it's terrible how many other people in this story are gone now.

Sly Stone, Angie Stone, Cat Glover, Roy Hargrove, D'Angelo's mother, Marion.

Jay Dilla, we're still mourning them all.

But because this is part of the gig, Erica knows what to do for D'Angelo and for all the rest of them.

The mere thought of you keeps you alive.

And we will always say your name.

D'Angelo!

And then Erykah Badu sang Shit Damn Motherfucker.

It was awfully profane, as eulogies go.

And it was perfect.

We are so honored to be joined once again by Hanif Abdurraqib, 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 love getting to talk with you when I can.

Well, thanks so much.

I really appreciate it.

I feel like D'Angelo is such a mythic figure now and I wonder if you can remember at all hearing him for the first time, hearing the Brown Sugar album or even hearing Voodoo.

Did you know immediately that this was a mythic and all-time great who we'd still be talking about 30 years later?

Is it more of a slow burn to realize his greatness?

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 uh came out not the single lady the single comma lady came out um 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 would be tapped in with the radio stations here in columbus and Lady was a great transition song from that summer.

You would get these bursts where the radio would play hip hop like more contemporary poppy RB, more electronic RB.

But then it would delve into the quiet storm era of the night, the quiet storm moment.

And Lady was such a great bridge song.

So you would hear it a lot at around 8.45 p.m.

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 would spill into OSU's campus.

And my parents would take us to these block parties.

And these are big citywide block parties.

And it was the 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 and my brother.

And I remember somehow getting on the top of a not very high building around Mount Vernon, somewhere around Mount Vernon Avenue.

And someone had a boombox 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, were now kind of slow dancing and swaying, and to see that kind of command that a single song could have over a people.

Um, as a, as a 12 year old who was beginning to understand, to understand desire broadly.

I loved it.

I mean I, I knew nothing about the Angelo at that point.

You know, at that age um, 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, 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 D'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 now? immediately?

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 years and thinking about 1998 99, 2000 that to me I know that Neo Soul had begun to be crowned.

I think Kedar Massenburg coined that term.

And it was almost in opposition to the sonic experience of contemporary R&B that we were seeing.

Again like a lot more electronic sounds in contemporary RB at that time a very producer-driven commercial approach.

Whereas what we were supposed to understand about Neo Soul is that this was stuff where musicians were touching live instruments in the studio.

And there was a more careful approach taken with it.

And so you do get this class of not just Soul Aquarians but also someone like Maxwell being placed in that category.

We were to believe it's like these distinctions that get made 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 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 um 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 and past soul, but it's not like It did not feel like a throwback thing to me.

So D'Angelo to me felt also the idea of what Neo Soul was had permeated the entire sonic universe of RB by the late 90s.

So in some ways, more poppy producer-driven RB felt like the outlier to me, even though I enjoyed a lot of it.

That is what felt more like an outlier.

And of course, Voodoo, it's all about the Yodas, right?

They're sitting around Electric Lady's studio.

They're just watching Prince videos, James Brown videos, et cetera, all day.

And then they specifically try to make a record that fits into that lineage.

Did you hear Voodoo as a very explicit attempt to make that chain backward and also forward?

Gosh.

In some ways the song Funky Drummer can tell the story of everything that came after it.

Like really, in some realms of of rap music of you know, there's stories about, like um, jay dilla listened to funky drummer over and over again and learning, teaching himself about um returning to the one, so to speak.

No matter what you do in between movements, you return to the one.

And in some ways questlove's role um, he's not really clyde stubblefield to a, to an exact point, like that's not a one-to-one um, because the thing about fucky drummer is that stubblefield's not really playing the 16th notes with Real consistency, which makes for that really great – and Questlove on Voodoo is playing with a 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 and you realize 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 homage to James Brown, to Sly Stone in many ways, to Prince, to Marvin Gaye.

I mean, there are all these elements.

And what I like about Voodoo why I think Voodoo is a great album is that I love an album that is imperfect in its attempt to pay these homages.

Because when you're pulling it and I say this, I think Voodoo is, I think Voodoo is D'Angelo's best record and I love the other two, but that is the one for me.

I would agree.

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 Pino Palladino, for example, 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 Questlove's 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 at 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 lastly say because i know i'm going off about this and i'm sorry uh please please what separated voodoo for me is The track length, like those songs are very long.

And those songs are also way on.

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 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 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 when Voodoo came out and

You know we weren't put, we weren't playing that, you know, not because it wasn't bad, not because it was bad, but because you know we're 16 years old and we were.

You know I'm playing like Jagged Edge where the party at, like I'm playing stuff.

You know we're not playing that at the high school parties, but i remember the minute i got yeah, we're looking for a higher bpm.

But when i got to college it was like yo, this is on in the dorm room all the time.

You know we're trying to entice a certain kind of audience.

Absolutely yeah no, i get you.

I no, i agree with you.

It's just the sense of place in voodoo, like the listening on headphones, like the studio chatter, like hearing questlove's 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 think of 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.

And you know I wasn't there in the room so I can't say, but what comes off of you do, is that that d'angelo?

I'm intrigued by d'angelo as a band leader, as someone who seems to have a real sense of control.

But yes, is not um, like a dictator?

There's not.

It doesn't seem like there's a sense of brown.

He's not james brown, which is interesting because if i'm being, if i'm saying like, i think funky drummer is the core to understand what's happening on funky drummer is like unlocking a key to the Sonic universe that so much music exists in.

Funky 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 and Clyde Stubblefield doing his best to be flexible with that.

It does not seem like D'Angelo.

It seems like D'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 Brian Wilson making pet sounds, where he's articulating his vision to a talented group of people who and then allowing them in.

In brian wilson, mega pet sounds.

There was a bit of.

There was control, but also care and 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 d'angelo's 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 beautiful.

I wonder how much D'Angelo's scarcity contributes to how we think about him now.

We got three albums across, what was it, 20-something years.

If there are 15 D'Angelo albums instead of three, 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 to that depends on how bad or good those other albums would be.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, yes.

I mean, the short answer is yes.

Scarcity is always the, you know, not to.

I'm not the artist, D'Angelo was, but still every time I finish a book, for example right.

Like when There's Always This Here came out.

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.

I've talked to other artists about this feeling, this sense of maybe I should quit while I don't.

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 am ready to rise to the occasion of finding the next thing that I can conquer within myself.

And I do think that D'Angelo succeeded at that, at least personally.

At least two times if we're saying coming off brown sugar and making voodoo and coming off voodoo and making Black Messiah.

And I get it that some artists have done that more than two times.

But to me, to even be able to do that once, particularly for me, specifically to come off of voodoo and make Black Messiah, I don't care how long it took.

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 and the expectations that that past version of yourself created in the consciousness of the consuming public, but 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.

An entirely new relationship.

And to just put your head down and say I'm going to do this through the sheer level of rigor and ability that I'm putting into the music.

I think, I mean, I know I just said 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 D'Angelo put out more records, we would definitely be weighing this career differently.

Cause.

I just don't think if, if he's getting into like eight album category and trust me when I say I think D'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 uh, 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 in advance for not quitting um OK, so if we're talking about the image, the new relationship he had to forge with Black Messiah, like we got to talk about the untitled video,

Right.

Because when D'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, 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 D'Angelo's career in 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, D'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 real turmoil, be it turmoil with substances.

He also suffered real losses, like he lost friends.

He had 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 D'Angelo is someone who did suffer the outsized expectations of the public imagination when it comes to anointing 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 black women.

It has historically as well.

But for the sake of talking about the Angelo the the, the black male sex figure, is someone who is both um lusted after by a wide audience but seen as dangerous, and seen as 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 in almost...

If we're thinking about D'Angelo's relationship with the Black Pentecostal tradition, kind of this line between, of course, the sacred, the secular, but the intersection of that which is a buildup that says you can have everything but you have to continually wait for it.

And so I think that the video is playing into that kind of you know how patient can you?

And trust me, I'm probably not the person to analyze sexy things, I guess.

Nor I, 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 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 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, Of course I imagine it had an impact when he's playing songs and people are doing live shows and people are just yelling at him to take his shirt off and shit 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 they did it on analog tape and the tape ran out right.

And what I love actually about them keeping it like that is that you cannot replicate what happens at the end of Untitled, because D'Angelo, at that point, you know where he's like screaming.

Essentially, you know he's channeling all of the we're talking about Yoda's.

He's like channeling James Brown and Marvin Gaye 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.

It's 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 he's playing with a full band.

And then, as the song hits its crescendo point and goes up and up and up, each member of the band left the stage, like stopped playing him at the stage until all that was left 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 there's like pg-13 podcasts whatever but but i will say the 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 um building up something that you are eager for and so that is my perhaps not safe for work analysis of That is so much more beautifully rendered, not safe for work analysis than listeners of this show have grown accustomed to.

That is the loveliest PG-13 missive I have ever heard in my life.

And thank you very much for that.

That makes me think.

I don't know if you saw the Sly Stone documentary that Questlove did recently, in 2025, but D'Angelo's on camera in it, very possibly for the last time.

And he's talking about the burden of black genius, about the expectation and the loneliness of it, and the expectation that gets thrown on you by an untitled video.

The way fame and adulation can make you an unwilling participant is the way that he puts it.

Do you hear that burden actively in D'Angelo's work 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 D'Angelo's kind of the music existing behind the time or because these kind of disjointed.

I'll try to make this a shorter thing.

What I love about D'Angelo is how frequently he fucked with time.

And so it's almost like he built his own metronome, for example.

And not just one.

He built several of his own metronomes before. and then place 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 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 an artist who is so far ahead of their ear or their brain, is so far ahead of where you may be as a listener, that they are trying to do you a favor, almost 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've imagined every possibility for how the song can go.

And to be that far ahead is lonely.

That's a lonely place.

I don't know what it's like to be that brilliant.

But I do think that to operate on your own time to the degree not just within the musical world, but to operate on your own time to the degree that D'Angelo did 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 that might seem detached from just the language by which most people function.

And so what i liked about the angelo 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 a, he didn't have any ulterior motives other than i made something and i wanted you, i want you to have it and yeah, i think look, i love think that Black Messiah, you know it is a sibling of us.

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 rag going on.

Like it is a lot more.

Most records are.

Yeah, most records are, you know, but it has this unsettled.

It's an unsettling record.

Like it it has.

It is the intertwining of it's like this moment of spiritual rebirth and 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 picked a bad time to become spiritually reborn, because now I am hyper aware of everything and shit is not good.

You know?

In 2014.

In 2014, right?

And I kind of love that.

I love Black Messiah stuff. as this beautiful album.

And I'm not saying that D'Angelo 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'm 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.

Just a couple of quick questions and I'll let you go.

You talk about D'Angelo only appearing when he has something to say.

D'Angelo doing Sometimes It Snows in April after Prince died.

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 Stevie Wonder at every major memorial, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, whoever.

I think about Erykah Badu after D'Angelo passed.

She's doing shit, damn, motherfucker.

She's talking about the second time you die is the last time someone says your name and she says D'Angelo's name.

How do you manage the enormous power of that performance, the in memoriam you know, tribute performance often, you know, days, hours in the case of Whitney Houston, you know, after we lost that person.

Yeah.

I also think about Mahalia Jackson who sang at many funerals.

And then when she died, people showed up to sing at her funeral.

And then Aretha kind of carried that torch of singing at many funerals.

And then when Aretha died, I mean, It was like a concert.

It was an hours-long concert.

It's like nine hours.

Yeah.

There's something beautiful about that immediate aftermath that says, 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 loved someone as a person um, you have perhaps prepared for the, we're already prepared yourself for the world without 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 of my heart and mind that would be able to find some kind of language eventually after someone I love died.

The language is already there.

How long it would take me to access it, I can't say.

But what I love about these performances is 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.

And because, like when I think about Prince's loss, I not only think about Prince, but I think about that D'Angelo performance.

And then I think about how much of D'Angelo is tied to Prince's making.

And then I think about the large web of prints and everyone who has perhaps pulled something from him and made something.

And so these kind of things, these big moments 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 D'Angelo at the Grammys.

I was like, I don't really watch the Grammys ever, but that was, I watched a clip of that.

Good idea.

And yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I, I was very moved by the Lauren Hill performance and it also made me, it was also heartbreaking in a sense because Lauren Hill is another example like D'Angelo of, and there are many, but just, these are black artists who, had to confront, I think, expectations that 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 watching that Lauren Hill performance was really moving, because it did feel like Lauren Hill, both as a musician and a person, not only had access to D'Angelo as a human being, but had access to the world that he was trying to navigate because um, 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.

Um, And they are trying to survive in the aftermath of the world's failures.

And the fact that they did for a while and triumphed every now and then in those attempts at survival, I think is incredibly impressive.

Yeah.

So absolutely the last thing.

And I wonder if this is related.

Just following you even on Instagram, I've noticed that you celebrate people's birthdays regularly.

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.

D'Angelo is February 11th, by the way.

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.

And I know I have a I have like a fraught relationship with getting older.

And I think that my not to get too deep here, but I do think my relationship with getting older is tied to grief and tied to the amount of people I have, for example, outlived.

Right. 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 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 distinctly aware of the fact that I could have been born at any point in history, right?

Any point.

And it's pretty fucking sick that I got to be born in a time where I could hear D'Angelo or Stevie Wonder or Prince or Aretha Franklin.

There's a world we're in.

I could have been born at a point where I heard none of this stuff.

And 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 I'm in awe.

This is maybe a small and silly thing to be in awe of, but I'm in awe of the fact that D'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 so you know I think that's as a music fan.

That's one of the most perhaps childlike things, 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 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 got to intersect with my own life.

And so I think the birthday celebration is a good reminder for me to have some gratitude for the passage of time, but also to have gratitude for being situated in a lifetime line that has afforded me real brilliance that I have access to.

Yeah.

Hanif, 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 it's a pleasure as always.

Thanks so much to our guests this week, Hanif Abdurraqib.

Thanks to our producers, Justin Sales, Olivia Creary, and Chris Sutton.

Additional production by Kevin Pooler.

Animations and graphics by Chris Calliton.

Additional art by Matt James.

And special thanks to Cole Kushner.

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.

[The Weight of Genius and the Sacred Ritual of Tribute: D'Angelo, Prince, and the Art of Saying Goodbye]-[D’Angelo—“Untitled (How Does It Feel)”]

📋 Summary

The Burden of the Tribute

The D'Angelo Mythos: Yodas and Treats

The "Untitled" Paradox

The Sacredness of Survival

Conclusion: Gratitude in the Timeline

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Weight of Genius and the Sacred Ritual of Tribute: D'Angelo, Prince, and the Art of Saying Goodbye]-[D’Angelo—“Untitled (How Does It Feel)”]

📋 Summary

The Burden of the Tribute

The D'Angelo Mythos: Yodas and Treats

The "Untitled" Paradox

The Sacredness of Survival

Conclusion: Gratitude in the Timeline

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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