It took maybe the final three weeks of 2014 before I truly realized that D'Angelo had released an album. That sentence alone sounds like a Christmas miracle but there we sat, enjoying our lives with a brand new D'Angelo album to dissect and enjoy.
Wait -- let us backtrack. D'Angelo is an enigmatic singer whose 1995 debut album covered plenty of old soul while mixing in a bit of laid-back lounge refrains and effortless cool. The tag "neo-soul" was attached to it. Five years later, he appeared in front of us, shirtless with chiseled abs and crowed about being in the mood for love, sometimes subtracting lyrics for elongated adlibs and ooohs. His signature moment, "Untitled (How Does It Feel)," may have single-handedly sent boys on the verge of adulthood to the gym so they could look like D'Angelo for their ladies, complete with lip curl, sexual desire and seduction. All of it.
The video became a cultural landmark, a proactive twitch up your spine; the song became a mocking tool whenever you wanted to rib on someone. It preceded his second album, Voodoo which turned 15 last week. That album went on to sell more than 3 million copies and made D'Angelo not only a star, but also a star stuck with a creative albatross thanks to that video -- and stuck being a sex symbol.
He's R&B's mythical phoenix. A formerly reclusive singer who, for the first time ever, is playing Saturday Night Live this weekend. Everybody, thanks to Black Messiah. wants a piece of D'Angelo again. And we've had a month to sit with this album, this analog, retrosuperfuture piece of music for a month. And we asked ourselves something to the tune of:
Is it good? Is it great? Can I listen to it with my mother but also my lady? These are basically the only two people in the history of mankind for whom R&B is truly made. Because one of them is going to convince you -- indirectly or right in your face -- why you should have some sense of "soul" in your life.
The questions pick up again: why the hell is he mumbling throughout it? Holy hell, I think that's a Sly Stone reference; there's definitely some There's a Riot Going On here. It's only 50 minutes, and why isn't there a real slow jam on here? (There's two, actually.) These questions all deserved answers and got them. Every critic immediately rocketed it up his or her year-end lists, with good reason; it topped our sister paper the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop poll too. The album is damn good.
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