Black Messiah, Part 1

by Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.

These are, in fact, the times that try (wo)men’s souls. But there’s always “a word.”

I came across this way of talking about weary days and keeping hope through my affiliation with black Methodists, Baptist and Pentecostal churches of the late 20^th century. As the messages of Civil Rights bellowed through the public and private air, a magical atmosphere of creativity distinguished these church cultures. In music the congregants experienced a special power from the intense experiments that took place in the arenas of sound and its effects on the politicized (saved) body.

At times, tensions, musical and otherwise, could be thick in these churches. Frictions shot through sonic experimentation, particularly in the kinds of styles that exploited fissures between tradition and innovation. But the discussions did not solely center on aesthetics. Rather, they were coupled to other discussions about literal biblical interpretation, gender and sexuality policing, the blasphemy of commercialism, and garden-variety intergenerational conflicts.  Officials sought to lock down social arrangements in the church by controlling cultural expressions. Avant-garde performance aesthetics, then, became a crucible for discussing many non-musical concerns. In other words, the protected boundaries surrounding the edges of musical genre (in this case, gospel music) provided a place for people to talk about themselves collectively and individually. We see this same pattern outside the church as well.

These debates left some musicians scarred, as they were often the targets of personal attacks or the butt of indirect jokes and hurtful sermon illustrations. Even as they stood as symbols of cultural continuity, as examples of aesthetic beauty, as vessels of healing, and as portraits of fortitude, they could also be considered lightning rods of controversy. Many of these musicians were very young when their gifts became apparent. Despite living at the nexus of an electrifying field of rigorous creativity and intense ideological scrutiny, some of them thrived and went on to widen the world’s perception of music. Think, for example, of a pinnacle like Aretha Franklin and work your way down the densely populated, riff-ridden mountain.

I was on a panel recently with the forward-looking and gifted bassist, composer, and vocalist Meshell Ndegeocello when she asked in my ear “did you ‘come up’ in the Pentecostal church?” I had belonged to and played in this aesthetic system as a young adult and definitely absorbed its ways. She said she could tell because of the chord progressions in one of my compositions, which had just been played for the audience. “I did, too, that’s how I know.” Although an operatic soprano sang the song, the traces of many lessons in black Pentacostalism shone through—the joy, pain, struggle and fulfillment. It’s in the approach, in the semiotic codes. Fellow initiates can somehow always hear it. Since the 1920s when this music culture was first recorded and circulated, musicians of all backgrounds now deploy these codes routinely as elements of their styles. But, well, there’s something about a church girl or boy doing it when they’ve been exposed to the magic.

Michael D’Angelo Archer is one such artist.

One of his most obvious spiritual and musical ancestors, Curtis Mayfield, was as well. Mayfield’s “message-oriented” style was born at the crossroads of hardship and hope during the long Civil Rights era. His greatest hits such as “Keep On Pushing” and “People Get Ready” are saturated with an old-time gospel message with which churchgoers would readily identify. Like D’Angelo, Mayfield cultivated his talent in the sanctified church under the ministry of his maternal grandmother. Despite doctrines that held women in subservient positions, in many Pentecostal churches, because of their sheer numbers, women dominated these spaces culturally, but men also thrived. Music brought the eternal power of God into the time and space of the sanctuaries, and it transformed the congregants. A higher power had anointed or gifted chosen ones with profound musical abilities. All of this taken together goes a long way to explain the uplifting themes and protest bent of songs written by artists from this tradition.

In a revealing essay from 2000 by dream hampton, we learn about D’Angelo’s background in a Pentecostal atmosphere in which people had palpable interactions with the spirit world. Music and this kind of spirituality—a view into other dimensions of reality—went hand-in-hand. Both the Holy Ghost and demons could be “caught” and then possess a congregant, a dramatic act that left quite an impression on the young D’Angelo. How could it not? Musically precocious, he learned the piano by ear, listening to the likes of The Mighty Clouds of Joy and Mahalia Jackson together with secular hits on the radio.

He eventually became his preacher father’s pianist and organist.  Chosen and anointed, he moved to other instruments and ultimately fell under the sway of Prince, an artist with whom he strongly identified because of his disciplined, yet flamboyant, musicianship. And yet another stylistic tributary in his musical arsenal—hip hop—separated his music from being totally derivative from anything that had been heard in the market when his first hit appeared some twenty years ago.

When his project Brown Sugar broke it was greeted by audiences as fresh and different, both “retro” and responsive to the contemporary soundscape. As the thumping beat-driven New Jack Swing of the late-1980s and early 1990s seemed to unplug, the tracks now showcased an accompaniment that featured “real” instruments together with elements of hip hop inspired production values. It’s not beside the point to remember here that the “real thing” emerged in other 1990s discourses as well: the real jazz vs. smooth jazz debates and the “keep it real” mantra of hip-hop culture were hot topics. Like New Jack Swing, the art of traditional gospel singing, for the most part, remained the emotional focal point of the gospel songs. But in an interesting reversal, gospels musicians reveled in jazz-fusion and New Jack Swing techniques in their accompaniments.

The format was perfect for someone with D’Angelo’s background. Although, as dream hampton points out, his contemporaries like Raphael Saadiq and Mint Condition worked in similar veins.  As such D’Angelo may have been greeted by the public not so much as a musical messiah, in my view, but as a John the Baptist figure who predicted the good news that something of a new musical era in the pop industry had dawned. It’s important to remember here that while church musicians certainly embraced elements of hip hop music into their sonic toolboxes, throughout the late-twentieth century and the millennium they’ve remained grounded in traditional approaches to sound organization. It was the industry-driven music that needed a musical transfusion, and D’Angelo played a significant part, endowed as he was with “power from on high” and a keen sense for the sonic avant-garde that he’d inherited from church.

D’Angelo’s spiritual and musical beginnings, however, only begin to explain what makes him special. Black Messiah (2014), his latest project with his band the Vanguard, first caught my attention because of its overwhelming reception among fans and critics. I was particularly struck by the hot pitch of the celebrations among those of D’Angelo’s generation. There was something different about it. Was it the music “itself,” as musicologists often call the syntax and grammar of a piece of music? Could it be the times that have “tried our souls,” given the contemporary era of protest culture we’re collectively working through? Although there was word that the release date of Black Messiah had been moved up to coordinate with the Black Lives Matter and I Can’t Breath movements, that doesn’t go far enough to explain the power of the project, to predict the historical importance of it, nor to think about where it fits into this artist’s quest for musical relevance beyond the moment. “Protest” can only be one of the ways to understand why so many different people find D’Angelo’s work artistically compelling today. This is particularly true of a project with apparently a relatively lengthy gestation period.

This series of essays will be my attempt to grapple with the rhyme, reason and soundtext of Black Messiah. Where does it fit into his larger output? Who and what are D’Angelo’s sonic relationships that might provide a robust contextual understanding of the man and his music. We’ll go track by track (with reference to previous projects) to understand where this music fits into the larger narrative of the “neo-soul” orbit and beyond.

Clearly, D’Angelo’s sense of musical searching and adventure is driving all of this interest. What I’ve discovered in my desire to “get it” (not everybody does) is that, in my estimation, he’s a musician that’s developed a sustainable and highly personal sonic signature, one that like the church culture that nurtured his gifts, exploits the fissures between innovation and convention. Salamishah Tillet, an always insightful interlocutor, captures this tension beautifully when she wrote on her Facebook timeline after seeing his recent concert at the Apollo Theater: “One of the best shows I’ve been to in a long, long time. Almost 3 hours with double encores, it was both a throwback and prophetic for a time when black love could be bold, baaaad, and gorgeous on stage.”

D’Angelo puts in good work balancing two musical value systems. Within the broader musical culture of black Pentacostalism in which he cut his teeth, he experienced a ritual  environment saturated with sound. Music in the black Pentecostal church services morph seamlessly from processionals to prayers, from offerings to formal “song” events, from sermons to benedictions. Song is a sub-category of sound in these services. In the other value system, song denotes a discreet object, a unit of sale. For the most part, they conform to formulaic structures designed for immediate emotional impact and rapid consumption. The historic black church has produced a slew of “un-authored” songs from oral traditions. But the industry uses another sense of collective authorship. Teams of hook and verse writers together with specialized production staffs write material for artists who then publicly present them as access to their personhood. Yet there are commonalities. In one system, the collective promises a platform for individual transcendence. In the other, an industry imposes a machine with a sole and expressed purpose to generate and mange a money trail.

Through his gifts and strategic collaborations, D’Angelo has gained a following of devoted listeners in tune with his idiosyncratic, polyglot sound. What, we should ask, are the building blocks of his artistic voice?

Next Up: Instruments of Desire: D’Angelo’s Sonic Signature

Guthrie Ramsey is Editor-in-Chief and founder of Musiqology.com. Follow him on Twitter @DrGuyMusiqology

In the meantime, check out his full set at last year’s AFROPUNK FEST.