The D’Angelo Cycle

The D’Angelo Cycleby I. Augustus Durham | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Preface: 1) I vividly remember preparing for school, sixth grade to be exact, when “Brown Sugar” came on my parents’ analog radio—that was probably the first time in my short-lived life I underwent sonic hypnosis; and 2) a Facebook “friend” some years ago suggested an album release by Justin Timberlake could save R&B . . .
As an English PhD candidate, my lens on the world is mediated through a “trained” reading, albeit close. Hence, when contemplating D’Angelo’s discography, culminating contemporarily in Black Messiah, I cannot help but think of his work as the construal of a trilogy on par with Sophocles’s Oedipus Cycle. Although the overarching premise of this Greek tragedy and these albums are not similar, the fact that Black Messiah, in the recorded chronology, aligns with Antigone—the eponymous shero who bucks empire, even as its “criminal”, retrieving her brother’s body to give him a proper burial, thus disallowing him to be the delicacy of carrion—appears quite an arresting analogy. But enough about the literary. For now.
Black Messiah is an intriguingly paradigmatic project partly because one wonders when the album was finished; the liner notes referencing Ferguson, Egypt and the Occupy Movement signify that the album may have been in the laboratory until, at the earliest, mid-August 2014. Though “true” fans “knew” “Really Love”, “Sugah Daddy” and “The Charade” from YouTube clips of various performances throughout the quasi-15-year hiatus, my interrogation, and likely that of others, is: did you record material post-August 9, and if so, what? Likewise, why now? Being a PK, like D’Angelo, I could conjecture that the liturgical calendar may have offered some level of time management even though that apparently did not #matter.
The coming of the Messiah—Jesus—connotes the season of Advent, the ubiquitous waiting for the coming of a salvific other to break in to the world humbly: amidst a political project to kill all the two-year-old and under male children as an edict of Herod, the savior arrives in a manger, which is a generous way of saying the Prince of Peace, whose parents seek refuge due to the King of War’s dictum, is born amongst animals and their excrement, a generous word for shit. Therefore, peculiarly, the only other time this album could have been released, in my opinion, would have been the morning of April 5, 2015.
If Black Messiah confirms the law of threes, this trilogy is quite generative because we stand as witness to how a hallucinogen transports us to a space where people stage the fantastical around practices they do not comprehend, only to come down from said high and recognize there is work to do. The album’s vinyl promo gives us insight into how the Messiah works: the A-Side is prototypical R&B—it gives life in the lushest of manners, reminiscent of D’Angelo’s meticulous homework a la Prince (“The Charade”) or the church (“1000 Deaths”)—while the B-Side is the work of a mad scientist who, borrowing from a banal Dreamgirls theme, invests in creating a “new sound”, whether through whistling (“The Door”) or polyrhythms (“Betray My Heart”). But I think the vinyl ordering gets it wrong: there is a C-Side—“Another Life”. In fact, I believe the two most important tracks on the album are the Messiah’s stigmata: “1000 Deaths” and “Another Life”.
Though we should be grateful to METROLYRICS, D’Angelo’s glossolalia—“speaking in tongues”—is not a foreign concept to the attuned ear because that very tongue-tying is characteristic of black music insofar as he joins a dialectic pantheon from Nina Simone to Marvin Gaye to Michael Jackson! In fact, we embrace such speech because we ostensibly become the interpreter the tongue needs to edify the universal body. This conjuration is effectually the momentous occasion of what I call ghostolalia: a call to the spirits to come sit in the lushness. Therefore, lyrically, these two tracks are perhaps the most difficult to understand because the music itself, the arrangement, is doing as much work as the listener’s discernment. There are moments in “1000 Deaths” and “Another Life”—the vocal transition from the chorus to the second verse (2:30-3:25) and the background vocals on the bridge (2:55-3:55), respectively—that are, in no uncertain terms, genius!
As someone who sang extensively once, I realize D’Angelo makes completely counterintuitive moves but in so doing, he provides room for ecstasy, Big Boi’s eargasm. The in-breaking of music humbly. What these two tracks exhibit, via Mark Anthony Neal remixed, is the newness produced by a(n) (old) black man emerging from exile. And is this not what Khalid Abdul Muhammad recounts regarding Jesus’s temptation by Satan, or what Kendrick proposes the “white man” says: the road to success is easy but usually, that path is the compromise of your “calling”? And so while there is still a sermonic preoccupation that the white messiah, in as (non-)essential a way possible (?!), can “save” “us”, s/he may not make “us” “free”, and D’Angelo already concedes that Yehushua don’t want no cowards.
And that’s just the music! When compounding the lyrics—the hearing eye—with the music—the seeing ear—we are stunned. “Another Life” signals this in the most self-effacing way because it gestures to promised (un)fulfillment: in this life, maybe I love you enough that we should not risk a life together for fear that I will let you down or that forces outside of us will always seek to end we. So then let us manufacture another life, in the now, where I can only imagine the potential that you might take a gamble on the risk that is me. The lyrics are apropos for today because those recently outlined in chalk could have been someone’s boy or girl in a life yet to come—D’Angelo, when did you record these songs?
And maybe that is it—in all the ways people do not “understand” him, perhaps the mad scientist is calling us, no longer to arms but bodies, for the sake of literacy: in a world where everyone “reads” others, often for filth, few acknowledge that we have discarded as “trash” the criminality once placed on some of us for our ability to read as a revolutionary act.
Therefore, coming full circle, Black Messiah may be declaring to the empire, whether the music industry or some deity,  I am retrieving the body of my (he)art so that I may properly bury it with the hope that such a ritualized homegoing, or better still homecoming, can be resurrective. Let me embalm and dress and lay it to rest among others in that cloud called Elsewhere. A soldier only dies just once. “Another Life”, what I have called in another space the lovechild of Brown Sugar and Voodoo, is the hope of a music to come recalling a music of yesterday, not unlike the whistling in “The Door” winking at Otis Redding, or “Till It’s Done (Tutu)” as the millennial truncation of What’s Going On in one track—what is new was old and vice versa.
Welcome back D’Angelo! How was the wilderness?
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I. Augustus Durham is a third-year doctoral candidate in English at Duke University. His work focuses on blackness, melancholy and genius.