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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
D'Angelo's potent sensuality sneaks into dreams and turns day into steamy night.
Feb 2, 2000 | There are people who'll try to tell you that there's sex everywhere in mass culture -- in movies, television, music, books and advertising -- and if we allow that they're talking about sexual signifiers, they're not wrong. There's plenty of cleavage in ads; in television, there's no shortage of wink-wink, nudge-nudge innuendo; in pop music, there are more coochies to pop than time will allow.
But signifiers, by their very nature -- forget the fact that the word itself is so ugly -- are anything but sexy, and thus they have no power other than what we grant them. It's a great blessing that people who sell sex, or who use sex to sell anything, are considered the enemies of propriety in our culture. With all attention focused on them, the true sensualists can get down to business.
And D'Angelo can release another record.
It's the true sensualists who subvert the order of the culture, who sneak into our dreams and make us behave -- or want to behave -- in ways that go against the grain of "proper" society. True sensuality is rarely an obvious feature of the mass culture. The whole point of sensuality -- the unnameable something that's actually much dirtier, much more beautiful and much more potent than, say, cleavage in a liquor ad -- is that it has to creep up behind you. It moves slow. Light kills it; it can't exist in the glare of day. But it can turn day into night in an instant.
D'Angelo made his audience wait -- and wait -- for "Voodoo," the follow-up to his 1995 debut LP, "Brown Sugar." Why rush twilight? In fact, why rush anything? From the first track, "Voodoo" is a record that insists you come to it. Sometimes it's very overtly about sex: It wouldn't carry that parental advisory sticker if it weren't. And it does have its share of signifiers. What else would you call a lyric like "I'll even kiss you way down there"?
But like the records made by the young Prince, or by the older Marvin Gaye, "Voodoo" is so deeply sensual that it goes far beyond the mere concept of sex. It's the kind of record that shows much more than it tells. D'Angelo has drawn a line between himself and the current hip-hop aristocracy: He's adamant about not categorizing himself as a hip-hop artist, and his liner notes for "Voodoo" (biting, perceptive and articulate, they make for pretty good reading by themselves) damn his peers for their devotion to making money at the expense of mastering their craft.
It's telling, too, that he's one of the few R&B artists who's likely to pay tribute to Jimi Hendrix in the same breath as Sly Stone, Gaye and Prince. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he hears Hendrix as the sensualist he was, not as a freak who made weird rock 'n' roll primarily for white people. Hendrix may have been a freak, but only in the sense that people with any grasp of the nature of eroticism are often viewed as such: It's the punishment you get for being able to bend a note just so, for being able to re-create with strings the gentle shudder that works its way up the curve of a spine when it's touched just the right way, by just the right fingertip.
Little wonder D'Angelo sees Hendrix as a giant, "a sonic Bill Gates," vested with the right kind of riches and an unfathomable amount of power. But even if you don't read the liner notes, you can hear in the space of a heartbeat how D'Angelo is really a soul artist in the old-fashioned sense. He's preoccupied with sex, absolutely, but his simmering fervidness is a way of life, not a form of macho posturing. And "Voodoo" isn't a concept record in the same way that Beck's "Midnite Vultures" is. That record's show-biz seductiveness is precisely what makes it appealing. "Voodoo" is seduction without calculation (and yes, there is such a thing), heavy petting that lures you to the moon before you realize you've even left the ground.
