Features
Untitled (An Oral History of D'Angelo)
Longreads Or Whatever
By Dan Buyanovsky
143 points on reddit
291
Illustrations by Anna Khachiyan
On a May afternoon, D'Angelo, sitting calmly with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, stared into Questlove's eyes, expressing disapproval.
Moments earlier, Quest, a frequent collaborator, had hopped onstage during a Red Bull Music Academy-sponsored talk hosted by author Nelson George, and brought up D'Angelo's third album, now 14 years in the making. George and D skirted the topic and quickly called an end to an otherwise positive chat, providing no updates on what has become the Chinese Democracy of our time. For D'Angelo's countless, endlessly patient fans, this was nothing new.
Born Michael Eugene Archer, D’Angelo is one of the true enigmas of modern music. His two albums, 1995’s breezy Brown Sugar and 2000's virtuosic Voodoo, transcended the traditional notions of soul, hip-hop, and pop, and positioned D as a symbol of hope for urban music (the critic Robert Christgau referred to him as “R&B Jesus"). Soon enough, however, he quickly found himself bristling against the pressures of fame and notoriety.
Following the release of the video for “Untitled (How Does it Feel)," which established D’Angelo as a sex symbol, and the tumultuous Voodoo Tour that followed in its wake, the artist sentenced himself to a decade-and-a-half sabbatical filled with legal troubles, obsessive work on his still-unreleased third album, and scant public appearances.
In an attempt to shed some light on both D’Angelo the artist and Michael Archer the man, I embarked on a quest to talk to his friends, collaborators, and critics about a creator who made sense of a pre-Y2K world by channeling funk and feelings into timeless music, despite never quite learning to make sense of himself.
To outsiders, D can be seen as lazy and unreliable, with enablers like Questlove who drop in every two to three years to give us false promises of a looming album. But by all accounts from the people who actually know him, he's the opposite. For over a decade, he's been stuck in his own hell, working hard to find the sounds only he could hear and deliver an album of the highest possible quality to his fans.
THE PLAYERS
Robert Christgau: Self-anointed “Dean of American Rock Critics,” who worked for over three decades as the music editor of The Village Voice, and has since been published in Esquire, Rolling Stone, Newsday, and more.
Jocelyn Cooper: Former music executive who signed D'Angelo to his first deal as a songwriter and producer. Currently a partner of Afropunk Festival.
Tina Farris: Tour manager for The Roots and Assistant Tour Manager for D'Angelo.
Lee Foster: Partner/General Manager of Electric Lady Studios, where D'Angelo recorded Voodoo and his unreleased third album.
Gary Harris: Former music executive instrumental in the release of D'Angelo's debut album via EMI Music.
Mark Jenkins: Physical trainer who worked closely with D'Angelo in the late 1990's.
Alan Leeds: D'Angelo's tour manager and Prince’s former tour manager.
Kevin Liles: Music industry veteran who signed D'Angelo to a management deal via his KWL Management.
DJ Premier: Legendary hip-hop producer and one half of Gang Starr. Produced "Devil's Pie" on D'Angelo's Voodoo.
Questlove: Close friend of D'Angelo's and frequent collaborator on Voodoo and the forthcoming third album. Also the drummer of The Roots.
Redman: Veteran rapper. Appears on Voodoo's "Left & Right" as one of the album’s two guest vocalists.
DISCOVERY AND DEBUT
In 1993, an 18-old Michael "D'Angelo" Archer, then a member of hip-hop group IGU, was discovered by Jocelyn Cooper, A&R at Midnight Music, who went on to sign D as a songwriter-producer. Within a year, he scored a gig writing and producing R&B group Black Men United's "U Will Know," and quickly established himself as a behind-the-scenes wunderkind. Meanwhile, the musician was quietly pursuing a solo career, toying with song ideas in his Virginia bedroom and recording sketches to a 4-track. Those recordings would form the backbone of his debut solo album, Brown Sugar, a versatile effort that showcased a new take on R&B. Littered with marijuana references—which would go on to garner him plenty of love in the hip-hop world—soulful courtship ballads, and a tongue-in-cheek slow jam about the imagined double homicide of his girlfriend and friend who was fukking his girlfriend, Brown Sugar was an introduction to an undeniable talent. D would go on to tour the record, though as he was still building his confidence as a performer in his own right, delivered his music largely from behind a piano.
Jocelyn Cooper: [D'Angelo] was the first writer that I signed in 1993. He was in a group called IGU, and the members of IGU came to my office and played some music, and I loved it. I asked them who the producer was and they all came back with [D'Angelo] a couple weeks later. He was just so unique. He sat down and played the piano for me, a couple ballads, in my office. It was amazing and it just had a mix—it was hip-hop and it was funk and it was soul. I had the privilege of going down to Virginia and seeing him in his home and in his music room, which was this little closet where he had produced all these amazing sounds and samples on an EPS-16+. I mean, he had no money. When he first started, we got him a lot of covers in film and in television, and he was producing records before his album came out. He had a number of other covers that were released before Brown Sugar came out.
Kevin Liles: To hear his vocal arrangements and the way he produced and wrote, it was just a fresh sound. He was just an all-around musician, and he just wanted to make great music. And when you find art, you want to put it in the Smithsonian Institute, you don't just want it in some obscure place and pigeon-held to a certain sound, you want the world to see it. That's what attracted me to him.
Questlove: I had lost faith in modern R&B. What was lacking for me was musicianship. Not since Prince had any black singer floored me musically the way D'Angelo did. There were plenty of great singers, but their music was mundane. From his keyboard patches to his sloppy, human-like drum programming, I felt like I had a kindred spirit and I wanted to be down.
DJ Premier: I met D'Angelo because we were labelmates. Me and Guru used to always run through the new stuff that was coming through. When Arrested Development came, we were the first to hear them. Then same thing with D'Angelo, like, "He plays all the instruments and he could sing and he looks like he's from the street with the braids, and this that and third, and he's got a really soulful voice." They played us his demo and "Brown Sugar,” and then I saw that he was referencing smoking trees. At that time, we were all avid weed promoters.
Redman: I hadn't heard nothing like "Brown Sugar" in my life. Talking about bud. I felt was ballsy to do in R&B, and it was fukking fabulous. He mixed it as a female. It was genius. I became a fan, just from the marijuana relation that he had. And then the music on top of that, when the album came out and I heard more songs, lyrically and as an artist, he's fukking ridiculous. Grounded with his sound, expertise on his singing notes, music complements everything, he complements the music, the band, the vibe, everything was just fabulous.
Robert Christgau: I had my doubts. I thought he was good. I thought he was better than Maxwell, who would get the same kind of talk at more or less the same time, but not quite as loud or as enthusiastic.
Alan Leeds: I actually first saw [D'Angelo] on a show I was doing with Morris Day & the Time in Houston. I got a chance to see D and I was reasonably impressed, but anybody who saw his first appearances… he wasn't really touring, he had a small band that was quite good. But he basically sat at a piano, wasn't very animated. And I kind of went away looking at him as a modern day Donny Hathaway, because I didn't see a lot else.
Cooper: He'd been performing since he was three years old. I knew that it was going to blossom into something else.
VOODOO
Following Brown Sugar and its subsequent tour, D'Angelo was embraced by a community of like-minded musicians responsible for a creative renaissance in hip-hop and R&B. Most important among them was Questlove of The Roots, who would go on to serve as the spiritual director of D's second album, Voodoo. Recorded entirely in New York’s Electric Lady Studios, Voodoo stood as the creative centerpiece of a collective movement that also birthed Common’s Like Water For Chocolate, Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun, and The Roots’ Things Fall Apart. Marked by loose instrumentations delivered by a team of virtuosic talents, stream-of-consciousness songwriting, and obsessively layered background textures, Voodoo was a singular statement from an artist firing on all cylinders. The help didn't hurt either, as D and Quest employed an all-star case of session musicians to help bring their vision to life. Over four years, producers J Dilla, Q-Tip, and DJ Premier, rappers Method Man and Redman, bassist Pino Palladino, guitarist Mike Campbell, trumpeter Roy Hargrove, and many more contributed to the album, which won the 2001 Grammy for Best R&B Album and has since gone platinum.
Cooper: [The transition between Brown Sugar and Voodoo] was really about the sound engineer and Questlove, who came into D's life around that time. Being able to experiment with Quest and have money to just stay in the studio and really do his thing, he evolved as a performer and as an artist and as a songwriter.
Questlove: It is important to note that we never once said, “This is an official track.” Actually, correction: "Send It On" was the only official track made. Everything else was created through hours of jamming and sourcing. These jams would last for about five hours. The engineer, Russ Elevado, would keep note of what parts we were excited about on a DAT recorder. After the sessions we'd sit back and listen. Sometimes we would cut and paste ("The Root," "Greatdayndamornin’"), but most times we'd re-record until perfection was achieved ("Chicken Grease," "The Line").
Lee Foster: It seemed to me that my co-workers were D'Angelo and Badu and The Roots. They'd been holding down [Electric Lady] for a few years at that point. I remember it being really communal. You would see Questlove go back to a D'Angelo session, and D'Angelo go upstairs to a Badu session, and Nas would come through. Mos Def was here a lot. Common was here a lot. They were a group of people who had decided absolutely that this was the sort of mechanism to help them create and record and document what they were doing. And they just took it over.
DJ Premier: Electric Lady, it's Jimi Hendrix's studio. You walk in and D'Angelo's got the atmosphere set up. He had The Isley Brothers' album cover posted up. He had Prince's 1999, the inside insert of him and The Revolution. Then he had Jimi Hendrix albums and Grand Central Station and Sly And The Family Stone. All these dope bands. And he said, "I leave all that up so I can be inspired and make that type of funky music."
Questlove: I didn't know we were making history, but something was abrew at Electric Lady. Soon thereafter, every artist wanted to record in that area, just hoping for a little bit of inspiration.
Foster: There were times when [D'Angelo] would have the whole [Electric Lady] building locked out. He would have all three rooms as his, and the upstairs room felt like when you walk in to a daycare and there's just toys everywhere. There was every single instrument you could imagine, just laying on the floor. He could literally just walk around and grab things. I was just like, "Is this normal?"
Redman: They called our manager [about working with D on "Left & Right"], but when our manager told us, it wasn't even a question. He ain't even have to ask us. It was like, "Yo, D'Angelo said it. Yes." It could've been like, "D'Angelo asked for you to carry his bags for the next tour." I would've been like, "Yes!"
DJ Premier: The first song I ever heard him play from Voodoo was "One Mo’gin" and I was like, "Yo man, it's so funky." He understands how to apply the funk. That's not something everyone can attain. It's like George Clinton said, "Funk not only moves, it can remove." I'm from that planet of Once Upon A Time Called Now… and not everybody can come from that planet. Believe me—D'Angelo is not from Earth.
Questlove: At the time when Voodoo was released and I saw James Hunter's harsh three-star lead review in Rolling Stone, I had to come to grips with myself that not everybody would understand this vision. As an artistic achievement, I felt absolutely vindicated when we started playing the record for people and saw their initial reactions. I must note that it went over a lot of people's heads. I suddenly realized that there's a difference between those that use music for art purposes and those who use it for general background purposes.
Christgau: Voodoo, both the women in my household—my daughter and my wife—loved the way the bass was used in that record, and they were really quite vocal about it.
Untitled (An Oral History of D'Angelo)
Longreads Or Whatever
By Dan Buyanovsky
143 points on reddit
291
Illustrations by Anna Khachiyan
On a May afternoon, D'Angelo, sitting calmly with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, stared into Questlove's eyes, expressing disapproval.
Moments earlier, Quest, a frequent collaborator, had hopped onstage during a Red Bull Music Academy-sponsored talk hosted by author Nelson George, and brought up D'Angelo's third album, now 14 years in the making. George and D skirted the topic and quickly called an end to an otherwise positive chat, providing no updates on what has become the Chinese Democracy of our time. For D'Angelo's countless, endlessly patient fans, this was nothing new.
Born Michael Eugene Archer, D’Angelo is one of the true enigmas of modern music. His two albums, 1995’s breezy Brown Sugar and 2000's virtuosic Voodoo, transcended the traditional notions of soul, hip-hop, and pop, and positioned D as a symbol of hope for urban music (the critic Robert Christgau referred to him as “R&B Jesus"). Soon enough, however, he quickly found himself bristling against the pressures of fame and notoriety.
Following the release of the video for “Untitled (How Does it Feel)," which established D’Angelo as a sex symbol, and the tumultuous Voodoo Tour that followed in its wake, the artist sentenced himself to a decade-and-a-half sabbatical filled with legal troubles, obsessive work on his still-unreleased third album, and scant public appearances.
In an attempt to shed some light on both D’Angelo the artist and Michael Archer the man, I embarked on a quest to talk to his friends, collaborators, and critics about a creator who made sense of a pre-Y2K world by channeling funk and feelings into timeless music, despite never quite learning to make sense of himself.
To outsiders, D can be seen as lazy and unreliable, with enablers like Questlove who drop in every two to three years to give us false promises of a looming album. But by all accounts from the people who actually know him, he's the opposite. For over a decade, he's been stuck in his own hell, working hard to find the sounds only he could hear and deliver an album of the highest possible quality to his fans.
THE PLAYERS
Robert Christgau: Self-anointed “Dean of American Rock Critics,” who worked for over three decades as the music editor of The Village Voice, and has since been published in Esquire, Rolling Stone, Newsday, and more.
Jocelyn Cooper: Former music executive who signed D'Angelo to his first deal as a songwriter and producer. Currently a partner of Afropunk Festival.
Tina Farris: Tour manager for The Roots and Assistant Tour Manager for D'Angelo.
Lee Foster: Partner/General Manager of Electric Lady Studios, where D'Angelo recorded Voodoo and his unreleased third album.
Gary Harris: Former music executive instrumental in the release of D'Angelo's debut album via EMI Music.
Mark Jenkins: Physical trainer who worked closely with D'Angelo in the late 1990's.
Alan Leeds: D'Angelo's tour manager and Prince’s former tour manager.
Kevin Liles: Music industry veteran who signed D'Angelo to a management deal via his KWL Management.
DJ Premier: Legendary hip-hop producer and one half of Gang Starr. Produced "Devil's Pie" on D'Angelo's Voodoo.
Questlove: Close friend of D'Angelo's and frequent collaborator on Voodoo and the forthcoming third album. Also the drummer of The Roots.
Redman: Veteran rapper. Appears on Voodoo's "Left & Right" as one of the album’s two guest vocalists.
DISCOVERY AND DEBUT
In 1993, an 18-old Michael "D'Angelo" Archer, then a member of hip-hop group IGU, was discovered by Jocelyn Cooper, A&R at Midnight Music, who went on to sign D as a songwriter-producer. Within a year, he scored a gig writing and producing R&B group Black Men United's "U Will Know," and quickly established himself as a behind-the-scenes wunderkind. Meanwhile, the musician was quietly pursuing a solo career, toying with song ideas in his Virginia bedroom and recording sketches to a 4-track. Those recordings would form the backbone of his debut solo album, Brown Sugar, a versatile effort that showcased a new take on R&B. Littered with marijuana references—which would go on to garner him plenty of love in the hip-hop world—soulful courtship ballads, and a tongue-in-cheek slow jam about the imagined double homicide of his girlfriend and friend who was fukking his girlfriend, Brown Sugar was an introduction to an undeniable talent. D would go on to tour the record, though as he was still building his confidence as a performer in his own right, delivered his music largely from behind a piano.
Jocelyn Cooper: [D'Angelo] was the first writer that I signed in 1993. He was in a group called IGU, and the members of IGU came to my office and played some music, and I loved it. I asked them who the producer was and they all came back with [D'Angelo] a couple weeks later. He was just so unique. He sat down and played the piano for me, a couple ballads, in my office. It was amazing and it just had a mix—it was hip-hop and it was funk and it was soul. I had the privilege of going down to Virginia and seeing him in his home and in his music room, which was this little closet where he had produced all these amazing sounds and samples on an EPS-16+. I mean, he had no money. When he first started, we got him a lot of covers in film and in television, and he was producing records before his album came out. He had a number of other covers that were released before Brown Sugar came out.
Kevin Liles: To hear his vocal arrangements and the way he produced and wrote, it was just a fresh sound. He was just an all-around musician, and he just wanted to make great music. And when you find art, you want to put it in the Smithsonian Institute, you don't just want it in some obscure place and pigeon-held to a certain sound, you want the world to see it. That's what attracted me to him.
Questlove: I had lost faith in modern R&B. What was lacking for me was musicianship. Not since Prince had any black singer floored me musically the way D'Angelo did. There were plenty of great singers, but their music was mundane. From his keyboard patches to his sloppy, human-like drum programming, I felt like I had a kindred spirit and I wanted to be down.
DJ Premier: I met D'Angelo because we were labelmates. Me and Guru used to always run through the new stuff that was coming through. When Arrested Development came, we were the first to hear them. Then same thing with D'Angelo, like, "He plays all the instruments and he could sing and he looks like he's from the street with the braids, and this that and third, and he's got a really soulful voice." They played us his demo and "Brown Sugar,” and then I saw that he was referencing smoking trees. At that time, we were all avid weed promoters.
Redman: I hadn't heard nothing like "Brown Sugar" in my life. Talking about bud. I felt was ballsy to do in R&B, and it was fukking fabulous. He mixed it as a female. It was genius. I became a fan, just from the marijuana relation that he had. And then the music on top of that, when the album came out and I heard more songs, lyrically and as an artist, he's fukking ridiculous. Grounded with his sound, expertise on his singing notes, music complements everything, he complements the music, the band, the vibe, everything was just fabulous.
Robert Christgau: I had my doubts. I thought he was good. I thought he was better than Maxwell, who would get the same kind of talk at more or less the same time, but not quite as loud or as enthusiastic.
Alan Leeds: I actually first saw [D'Angelo] on a show I was doing with Morris Day & the Time in Houston. I got a chance to see D and I was reasonably impressed, but anybody who saw his first appearances… he wasn't really touring, he had a small band that was quite good. But he basically sat at a piano, wasn't very animated. And I kind of went away looking at him as a modern day Donny Hathaway, because I didn't see a lot else.
Cooper: He'd been performing since he was three years old. I knew that it was going to blossom into something else.
VOODOO
Following Brown Sugar and its subsequent tour, D'Angelo was embraced by a community of like-minded musicians responsible for a creative renaissance in hip-hop and R&B. Most important among them was Questlove of The Roots, who would go on to serve as the spiritual director of D's second album, Voodoo. Recorded entirely in New York’s Electric Lady Studios, Voodoo stood as the creative centerpiece of a collective movement that also birthed Common’s Like Water For Chocolate, Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun, and The Roots’ Things Fall Apart. Marked by loose instrumentations delivered by a team of virtuosic talents, stream-of-consciousness songwriting, and obsessively layered background textures, Voodoo was a singular statement from an artist firing on all cylinders. The help didn't hurt either, as D and Quest employed an all-star case of session musicians to help bring their vision to life. Over four years, producers J Dilla, Q-Tip, and DJ Premier, rappers Method Man and Redman, bassist Pino Palladino, guitarist Mike Campbell, trumpeter Roy Hargrove, and many more contributed to the album, which won the 2001 Grammy for Best R&B Album and has since gone platinum.
Cooper: [The transition between Brown Sugar and Voodoo] was really about the sound engineer and Questlove, who came into D's life around that time. Being able to experiment with Quest and have money to just stay in the studio and really do his thing, he evolved as a performer and as an artist and as a songwriter.
Questlove: It is important to note that we never once said, “This is an official track.” Actually, correction: "Send It On" was the only official track made. Everything else was created through hours of jamming and sourcing. These jams would last for about five hours. The engineer, Russ Elevado, would keep note of what parts we were excited about on a DAT recorder. After the sessions we'd sit back and listen. Sometimes we would cut and paste ("The Root," "Greatdayndamornin’"), but most times we'd re-record until perfection was achieved ("Chicken Grease," "The Line").
Lee Foster: It seemed to me that my co-workers were D'Angelo and Badu and The Roots. They'd been holding down [Electric Lady] for a few years at that point. I remember it being really communal. You would see Questlove go back to a D'Angelo session, and D'Angelo go upstairs to a Badu session, and Nas would come through. Mos Def was here a lot. Common was here a lot. They were a group of people who had decided absolutely that this was the sort of mechanism to help them create and record and document what they were doing. And they just took it over.
DJ Premier: Electric Lady, it's Jimi Hendrix's studio. You walk in and D'Angelo's got the atmosphere set up. He had The Isley Brothers' album cover posted up. He had Prince's 1999, the inside insert of him and The Revolution. Then he had Jimi Hendrix albums and Grand Central Station and Sly And The Family Stone. All these dope bands. And he said, "I leave all that up so I can be inspired and make that type of funky music."
Questlove: I didn't know we were making history, but something was abrew at Electric Lady. Soon thereafter, every artist wanted to record in that area, just hoping for a little bit of inspiration.
Foster: There were times when [D'Angelo] would have the whole [Electric Lady] building locked out. He would have all three rooms as his, and the upstairs room felt like when you walk in to a daycare and there's just toys everywhere. There was every single instrument you could imagine, just laying on the floor. He could literally just walk around and grab things. I was just like, "Is this normal?"
Redman: They called our manager [about working with D on "Left & Right"], but when our manager told us, it wasn't even a question. He ain't even have to ask us. It was like, "Yo, D'Angelo said it. Yes." It could've been like, "D'Angelo asked for you to carry his bags for the next tour." I would've been like, "Yes!"
DJ Premier: The first song I ever heard him play from Voodoo was "One Mo’gin" and I was like, "Yo man, it's so funky." He understands how to apply the funk. That's not something everyone can attain. It's like George Clinton said, "Funk not only moves, it can remove." I'm from that planet of Once Upon A Time Called Now… and not everybody can come from that planet. Believe me—D'Angelo is not from Earth.
Questlove: At the time when Voodoo was released and I saw James Hunter's harsh three-star lead review in Rolling Stone, I had to come to grips with myself that not everybody would understand this vision. As an artistic achievement, I felt absolutely vindicated when we started playing the record for people and saw their initial reactions. I must note that it went over a lot of people's heads. I suddenly realized that there's a difference between those that use music for art purposes and those who use it for general background purposes.
Christgau: Voodoo, both the women in my household—my daughter and my wife—loved the way the bass was used in that record, and they were really quite vocal about it.
