D'Angelo (1974 - 2025)
As the days lived increasingly outnumber those yet to live, I find myself more and more convinced that music has things to teach us. Duh, yeah, it often teaches us the wrong things: the saccharine, the maudlin, the rote. But in its best instances music can teach us new ways to be and think and feel. It can teach us that C follows from B, which follows from A is not an inviolate rule of the cosmos, but a matter of convention. And like the easiest most useless music, convention is a schema constructed in some studio by forces with only their own best interests in mind.
But music. This two word phrase insistently flicks my skull. But music… I already know I will have to use it repeatedly like a mantra throughout this eulogy for the great D’Angelo, gone way too soon. But music can slide into the tiny gaps in convention, in conventional thinking, in conventional feeling. It can prise open the tight little reality that we’ve come to accept as eternal and universal; the reality we drive around in throughout our lives, windows up, air conditioning on, stereo blasting our music. But music can crack those windows and allow us – force us – to see and hear and smell a world that exceeds our claustrophobia.
No doubt, it takes a unique sensibility and conviction to realize that the hermetic joints of our vehicle are both shields and apertures. Even when closed, the hinges, bridging the gap from outer shell to inner life, offer paths of resistance and escape. D’Angelo drew us a map and led us, candle in hand, through the darkness of the in between. Uniquely, his escape was not out nor away, but in, deeper, closer – not to a fiction of the true – but to a genuine confrontation between the irresistible urge for landing squarely on the spot assigned to us and the equally irresistible compulsion to swerve just a little. Like Epicurus’s clinamen, such a swerve is the very stuff of creation: of creating a self, a world, a song, a style; love, hate, convictions, laughter. The clinamen, in short, is life itself; not safe from discomfort or pain, but deeply embedded in the irresolvable contradictions of maintaining a commitment to love and justice and morality and happiness within conventions determined to eradicate the same. Life happens when the former collides with the latter. As Epicurus wrote,
But if [atoms] were not in the habit of swerving, they would all fall straight down through the depths of the void, like drops of rain, and no collision would occur, nor would any blow be produced among the atoms. In that case, nature would never have produced anything.
It's all been done before. So they say. The world is Epicurus’s drops of rain. Every song, every story, every picture, every thought, subject to inexorable gravity, emanating from its unique source, landing at its intended telos, its target, its audience. But every now and then someone comes along who swerves, someone who just feels shit differently and can translate that exceedingly elusive feeling for others. D'Angelo felt musical time with more nuance than anyone else. And he knew that a whole world lived in the tiny folds and hanging interstices of musical time. Within that timespace he carved a new funk, a new soul, a new bodily experience of how we can move from point A to point B, from the newborn spank of life to the shuffling swoon of being a being.
So many – most! – of the institutions of life, the expectations, the exercises (and exorcism) of ego, the schools and families and work, exert a clamping force on the breadth of experience. But music! Music, again in its best instances, forces a little pneuma into the clenching surfaces of what life feels like. “The Root” on D’Angelo’s Voodoo opens with an inadvisably high-pitched snare drum set against an ever-so-slightly-off kick drum. Or is it the other way around: the snare is off? We’ll never know. Because the landing point of a kick or a snare is not a solid thing. Existence is not quantized. The universe has no time signature. As time slips against itself, a third time emerges between the kick’s time and the snare’s time. It’s not easy to find. Still harder to occupy, as a player or a listener. It is a time out of time.
And here’s the little secret of music: it’s nothing but time. Periodicity. Every sound is a series of peaks and valleys arrayed through time. The specific shape and spacing of these peaks and valleys determines the pitch and the timbre of what we hear. All sound is time. All hearing is here-ing; locating perception in and on and along with a series of temporal punctures. But music. D’Angelo’s geniuses – they were most definitely plural – could all be said to be time-based. Again, a harmony is a time relation. But when employed by someone like Brian Wilson, it evades that fact and plays at being transcendental. Listen to “Till It’s Done (Tutu)” or “Prayer” – back-to-back tracks on Black Messiah. Where is the tick of the clock? Are the drums lagging behind the guitars? Are the vocals insensitive to the groove? Or are D’Angelo and his sui generis band, The Vanguard, diving beneath time like swimmers finding the contra-current beneath the wave?
And Black Messiah’s gummy guitars, sounding for all the world like pre-thoughts or afterthoughts, hardly thoughts landing in the moment of their thinking, in the stream of consciousness. They drag past and future into the present. They are both what you thought should happen and what you expect might happen, both happening as the music glides forever away from the moment of listening. This kind of experience, of being re-opened, allowed to breathe, allowed to see beyond a horizon that had always limited distance-as-perceptual-time, this is called being alive. It is distinct from going to the grocery store or popping a mint as you arrive at the party. It is not taking the car to the repair shop or booking a flight. But music, in its best instances, like D’Angelo’s Voodo and Black Messiah, is, in fact, booking a flight. It is seeing into a future, over a horizon, across time zones. The experience, past-present-future, is not simply A to B, but an alteration of rhythm, of tempo, and most importantly, of the sensation of something different occurring in and of and along with time.
To end, let’s go back to the beginning, of Black Messiah. “Ain’t That Easy” starts the album with a tangle of criss-crossed vectors. The first time I listened, I had the distinct impression that this was disobedient, mischievous music. “Ain’t That Easy” refuses to put things where they belong. There are guitars so dry, recorded direct, and so plucky in the mix. They sound like demos dropped into the final mix. Again, past-in-present. Again. The introductory main riff, the “head,” if we’re jazzers (and why not?!) lands like a pileup of cinder blocks in a future that the present construction prefigures as rubble. The result, as with much of D’Angelo’s output, music in its best instances, is a revelation – in a strictly secular sense. It is a shared epiphany. There is a method, they tell us. There is a way. But music, in its best instances, can unstitch the fabric of the right and the proper, it can unravel the time that keeps everything from happening all at once. It sounds so simple. But as Thelonious Monk, one of D’Angelo’s precursors in the musical project of multiplying, dividing, and fracturing time, once said, “Simple ain’t easy.”
It ain’t. Even if D’Angelo made it seem like it is.
