D'Angelo: R&B Jesus

 

This writer is happy to admit that there are blank spots in his musical education and filigree.  Happily, despite a particular enthusiasm for what is dubbed 'neo-soul', I purchased today for the first time D'Angelo's pivotal Voodoo album - a landmark of important albums of the 1990's, envisioned in hindsight as an artistic tour de force.

Recent reports of D'Angelo's live shows this summer, after a grim baker's decade that left him at very least a shadow of his former self, have devotees slowly whipped up to the stiff peaks of a funk merengue.   With a ?uestlove produced album apparently forthcoming (the wait for Voodoo was apparently just as lagging) that same producer is hesitant to decry D'Angelo as a modern-day genius of the ilk of Prince/Gaye/Wonder/ Clinton given his sheer lack of actual output. It's worthwhile to note that the Dean of American Rock Critics Robert Christgau (who mind you articles the Kinks Waterloo Sunset as something like the greatest song of all time) who was not a definitive fan of the Voodoo album became so enamoured with his live performances (modelled undoubtedly after Prince's setlist's which he knows encyclopediacly) that he's come to refer to him as R&B Jesus:

Jesus Saves

I was at Radio City for Q-Tip, who didn't show. R&B Jesus I was just checking out. D'Angelo isn't a songwriter, not really; the Marvin comparisons are the exaggerations of r&b faithful yearning to be led out of the wilderness, and the ridiculously long-aborning Voodoo is self-indulgent and riddled with blank spots. This boded poorly for his stage ethos. Well, I joshed, at least he'll take off his shirt.
D'Angelo did take off his shirt, but I doubt even the girls who went crazy truly needed it on top of two-and-a-half unfailingly generous hours. Blank spots were nonexistent--songs averaged well over 10 minutes, and when they ended the audience had a harder time catching its breath than a band that included superbassist Pino Palladino, Roots drummer ?uestlove, three backup singers with their own lives, and appropriately breathtaking brass: trumpet luminaries Roy Hargrove and Russell Gunn, widely traveled trombonist Frank Lacy, and a sax man from Martinique who spieled in French and looked like Chris of 'N Sync.

I name these sidepeople because the best funk band in the universe deserves some props. On Voodoo, "Devil's Pie" is a touch hokey; with Pallodino vibrating the chandeliers, it instantly established that this was going to be some night. Slow ones started warm and turned torrid; "Chicken Grease" and "Spanish Joint" and "Shit Damn Motherf*cker" were seismic from jump street. D'Angelo sang and danced and preached and flexed and crooned and humped the floor and covered Roberta Flack and snapped a mike stand in two and danced and sang and sang some more. Everything meshed; all stops were pulled out. It was already the greatest concert I'd seen in years when Redman and Method Man propelled the climactic "Left and Right" through the vaulted ceiling. I flashed on P-Funk's "Sadie," Apollo 1981. What a privilege to experience such a thing again.

I saw Marvin Gaye at this venue shortly before he was murdered, and it was no contest. Gaye was fine, but self-indulgent and riddled with blank spots. Totally committed, D'Angelo betrayed neither weakness nor ego--and gave so much Thursday that Friday he canceled with a sore throat I absolutely believe was the truth. He was r&b Jesus, and I'm a believer. Travel to another city to see him now.

Village Voice, Mar. 28, 2000