The Retrographer, Issue 93 (August, 2 0 2 2)

September 19, 2022

Louis Cole, JID, Yasiin Bey, Steve Lacy, Ice Spice, Soccer Mommy, Madison Cunningham, Cass McCombs, Dougie Poole, zannie, Frankie Cosmos, D’Angelo, and more!

The Retrographer, Issue 93 (August, 2 0 2 2)

Bulletins

Ten Songs for August, 2 0 2 2 | Listen to these songs on Spotify and YouTube

“I’m Tight”, Louis Cole (Spotify / YouTube) – Louis Cole once said, “When you’re ugly, there’s one thing you can do, say ‘fuck the world’ and be real cool.” Now he waits nearly three minutes into this single to expand: “You think I’m weird, but I’m still fucking here - that’s why I’m tight.” And he’s right! 

“Stars”, JID and Yasiin Bey (Spotify / YouTube) – Destin Route is, simply, one of the most able rappers alive today. He’s nimble, precise, witty, unique, charming, somehow both energetic and relaxed. FKA Mos Def provides “the word from our ancestors” over a softened beat change.

“Bad Habit”, Steve Lacy (Spotify / YouTube) – Lacy’s music doesn’t sound as bizarre as it did; he’s gravitating to a more classic soul songwriting, finding Stevie Wonder’s “Tuesday Heartbreak” and a twinge of emo in his distinctively plastic-wrapped instrumentation.

“Munch (Feelin’ U)”, Ice Spice (Spotify / YouTube) – Drill is changing faster than can reasonably be tracked, finding new variants in every city around the world. Ice hails from the origin, the Bronx, with a hit that has captured the rap business’s attention all the way up to Drake.

“Shotgun (Magdalena Bay Remix)”, Soccer Mommy (Spotify / YouTube) – Sophie Alison’s last album could be dark and listless, so Magdalena Bay uses this remix to paint a pulsating dancefloor around her, undulating octave bass and blooms of synths in her midst.

“Life According to Raechel”, Madison Cunningham (Spotify / YouTube) – Life after death, but not your own. Loss wears the clothes of many other emotions, longing, regret, nostalgia, doubt. The heart never stops calling the lost back home, but “there’s always something left unsaid.”

“Karaoke”, Cass McCombs (Spotify / YouTube) – McCombs has tapped into many different sounds in his long and variegated career; now he takes the songbook itself to describe a relationship that doesn’t feel real.

“High School Gym”, Dougie Poole (Spotify / YouTube) – Halfway between a drum machine and a kit; between a bass and a synth; between the past and its memory. It sounds like a dream but “when I wake up crying, we’ll I’m all right.”

“doppler”, zannie (Spotify / YouTube) – It’s easy to imagine zannie seated before their keyboard composing this piece: It’s spare, simple, classic. When the chorus hits, it immediately becomes larger than the sum of its parts.

“One Year Stand”, Frankie Cosmos (Spotify / YouTube) – Greta is growing up. “I’m going to start letting you put spinach in my eggs.” She’s letting love in. “I’m Olive Oil and you’re Popeye.” She’s looking ahead. “I’m not worried about the rest of my life because you are here today.”

One Album for August, 2 0 2 2

“Live at the Jazz Cafe, London”, D’Angelo (EMI, 1998) (Spotify / YouTube) 

By 2000, Michael Eugene Archer – known worldwide by then as D’Angelo – landed his second platinum album. Voodoo reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on the back of its sultry third single “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)”. D’Angelo, then 26 and ripped, accompanied the song with an iconically sexy video where the singer, nude from the pyramidalis up, emoted every moment of the video’s abridged four-and-a-half minutes like every second was an act of making love.

A phenomenon ensued. An instant sex symbol, D’Angelo’s shows became spectacles: Rapturous crowds demanded more striptease than music. But the man behind D’Angelo was shy, retiring, laconic, and only recently rounded with baby fat that belied the maturity of his music; When Archer suffered the breakdown that drove him into a decadelong hermitage following the tour, he cited the hysteria he ignited as the cause. Commenting on the issue in the song “Back to the Future (Part I)” from his 2013 comeback Black Messiah, he sang, “I been wondering if I can love again / So if you're wondering about the shape I'm in / I hope it ain't my abdomen that you're referring to.”

D’Angelo became the first sex idol of the 21st century after years of study. He is the son of a Richmond, Virginia Pentacostal minister, and started out playing piano and singing in the church. But he was a musical prodigy, and branched out once he began winning talent contests locally, and then ultimately at Amateur Night at the Apollo. He dropped out of high school, formed and wrote music for groups, and ultimately got a solo contract from EMI to make his iconic first album Brown Sugar.

Like so many artists growing up in the 1980s, Archer was inspired by and enamored with Prince. In a deeply religious household, Prince’s often profane music took on special significance: A visionary libertine, gifted with otherworldly talents keen to express and transgress. Prince wasn’t alone in Archer’s esteem: He made study of Stevie Wonder, Funkadelic, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Al Green, Sly Stone; a host of psychedelic soul artists defined by their live shows as much as their iconic records. By Voodoo, D’Angelo and Questlove, his producer, drummer, and closest collaborator, dubbed members of this pantheon “Yodas” after the ancient sage from Star Wars. Just as Luke Skywalker submitted to endless hours of study at the knee of the diminutive green guru, D’Angelo and Questlove dedicated years of rehearsal and documentary review to the artists who they sought to emulate and internalize, learning and performing their songs to initialize their own creativity.

But D’Angelo wasn’t ready to bear the mania he invited by so effectively meeting his iconoclastic idols’ examples. Just before his retreat from public life, he paired the perfect Voodoo with one of the greatest live bands ever assembled, the Soultronics. With the protean tightness of James Brown’s band, the playful psychedelia of Funkadelic, the musical mastery of Prince’s bands, and an enigmatic sexiness all his own, Robert Christgau called D’s group of this time “the best funk band in the universe” and “the greatest concert I'd seen in years” when he caught them in March, 2000.

But alas, no official releases exist of this band. Questlove toured with D’Angelo as his drummer and claimed that one of the great regrets of his career was that he didn’t make a formal live recording of this ensemble, but luckily bootleg recordings and videos survive to corroborate the claim. That band and the album it set out to promote represented D’Angelo’s triumph over his idolatry and aspirations, but it broke him too. He had taken his tutelage as far as he could bear.

D’Angelo’s story is not about perfection achieved, or even of the Icarusian fate that befell him. It is about continual appreciation, study, and growth, and for that reason his little-known and only official live album, recorded in London in 1995 two months after Brown Sugar was released, does his legacy justice even if it doesn’t reach the mythic peaks of his later work. Rather, it describes the position of permanent apprenticeship D thrives in. Live at the Jazz Cafe, London is somewhere between D’Angelo’s budding and bloom, and carries all of the unique attributes that make him one of the great soul artists in history.

Note: The original release was just six tracks, with a seventh (a cover of the Ohio Players’ “Heaven Must Be Like This”) added as a bonus track for the Japan edition. The version you’ll find today is twelve tracks, and while the bonus track was peeled off, it’s available on a greatest hits.

D’Angelo opens the show initiating the audience to his language of adulation. Rather than laying out the first (and only, to that point) single from his record, D’s band starts with Mandrill’s “Fencewalk”, a vamp for the backup singers to warm the crowd up; He’s not on stage yet, in classic James Brown stagecraft, but the crowd commotes when he comes on to segue into Ohio Players’ “Sweet Sticky Thing”. The group works through one verse and one chorus, D’Angelo’s pinched high range sitting in with the backing vocalists or just riffing among them. He is not forcing his way into the center of the listener’s attention, but rather carefully building the environment the rest of the show will rest upon. The band transitions from the cover into one of D’Angelo’s songs seamlessly, as if the two aren’t even separate compositions.

More important than appreciating his own works is assenting to his view of musical greatness by appreciating his choice of covers as if they were his own. It must be what it’s like to hang with the man: He plays a record and knows if you get him by whether you get it. The music speaks for him; He’s able to preside over his fans through vibe, not banter. This is evident through how the record sounds, but watch him performing for BET a year later: even at 22, he needed little more than a sideways glance from those dreamin’ eyes to put the assembled in the palm of his hand.

He then opens a trio of his own compositions: The lascivious “Jonz In My Bonz”, shapeshifting into a slow, chugging halftime groove to close; the amorous “Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes Of Mine”, wooing the already smitten audience like the reporters he’d later meet; and the vengeful “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker”, a dissociative rage fantasy about what else, a crime of passion. All three are smoky and cool and flow canonically from the covers that preceded them. That’s the trick: Frame this music to the listener in the same way that it arose for the composer in order to establish continuity between them. While it’s true that, with just one album out, D’Angelo had more to build a setlist on by relying on covers, but the set isn’t demystified by such practicality: This feels like the most entertaining set D’Angelo could design, all while welcoming the crowd to his musical worldview.

His rendition of “Cruisin’” is now iconic; it was Brown Sugar’s only cover. But D’Angelo’s take on Al Green’s “I’m Glad You’re Mine” is the album’s centerpiece for the concision with which it encapsulates its performer’s worldview. Green was another godly man seduced by sex and secular music, another lothario whose allurement drove fans insane enough to break him. D’Angelo pours his diverse musical vision into this single song, from his subtle impression of Green’s purr to guitarist Mike Campbell’s invocation of Hendrix’s “Who Knows”. Its swirl of references simply frame D’Angelo’s singular musical perspective.

The performance’s closing passage begins with a 9-minute, exploratory “Lady”, simmering and patient, more laid back than the album version and more free to work the core riff as far as the band wanted to take it. Here, D’Angelo’s sense for arrangement shines, as he cues backing vocals without a backbeat for minutes at a time, before letting the floodgates open with a slick walking bassline over hits on the ride cymbal. His encore opens with Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “Can’t Hide Love”, a live staple, and an almost 11-minute take on his album’s title track that lets the band stretch out in every direction without losing any of its sturdy foundation.

And yet – this was not the singular band D’Angelo would one day assemble. They hadn’t found Questlove’s drunken toddler swagger, or Pino Palladino’s melodic thump, or Charlie Hunter’s heartrending riffs. Within only a few years, D would build a band that stood alone in soul music, occupying a lane often imitated but never duplicated. Here, at the tender age of 21, he was a young master discovering the greatness that lay within him through the work of others.

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