Why Sisters Are Excited About D' ANGELO

Ebony, April, 2000 by Kimberly Davis

ANGELO wants you to feel what he's feeling. Whether feel pleasure from the soulful vibes of his hit CD Voodoo or excited by the 26-year-old's raw sexuality, D'Angelo wants you to take it stroll through his life and experience a few beats from his heart.

"My work is a part or my life," the Richmond, Va., native says. "Each song is a page out or my day."

After half a decade, out of the spotlight, Michael (D'Angelo) Archer is back--flexing his well-toned musical muscles and stirring up the ladies with his unique tenor voice and lyrical styling reminiscent of the thoughtfulness of Marvin Gaye, the coolness of Curtis Mayfield and the urgency of The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.

D'Angelo has the delightful combination that creates "cool" talent, style and sultry good looks that excite the Sisters and generate envy among the Brothers.

The musician who found his shot at fame during the amateur competition on the legendary Showtime at the Apollo has Sisters thrilled because he is the entire package--a multilayered musician with tattooed, rippling muscles and a sense of the type of music people want to hear.

After he burst onto the scene in 1995 with his double-platinum debut album Brown Sugar, the fans and the music world eagerly awaited what the gifted musician would come up with next. The pressure to finish the second CD was almost stifling at times, and when several release dates came and went, people began to wonder if D'Angelo was hitting a permanent writing wall.

"I felt pressure," he says, and he wrote about it on a song called "The Line" on his latest CD. "But I held on. It was important for me to hold on to what I was believing in, to what I was thinking about. I was just trying to make some good music, some good songs."

D'Angelo's sophomore effort, Voodoo, was recorded with live instruments at the late Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios in New York's Greenwich Village. It is a delicious blend of blues, soul, jazz, hip-hop and funk that forms what some have called "neo-soul," but what D'Angelo says is just "good music." He is credited with bringing that style to the forefront, paving the way for other artists such as Maxwell, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, Macy Gray and his ex-girlfriend Angie Stone.

And even "neo-soul" seems inadequate, because on a tune like "Spanish Joint" the singer/songwriter expressively captures a bit of the Latin genre, with the help of Roy Hargrove on trumpet and as co-arranger.

It's his collaborations with other musicians that define D'Angelo's mellow, complete-album sound and has fans anticipating a hot show when a tour kicks off this spring.

If D'Angelo is the fire, then artists like hip-hop drummer Ahmir (?uestlove) Thompson of The Roots, Hargrove, Q-Tip, Method Man, Redman and writer Raphael Saadiq are what make the flames burn brightly.

"There's strength in numbers, especially with what we were doing," says D'Angelo of his collaborators. "We all share like-minded visions, so it's important for us to network, to get together and to talk and vibe and play together.

"At Electric Lady, we would meet and we would be recording, and you never knew who would drop in ... It's not just me doing this thing, trying to be artistic and make strong, artistic Black music. You've got a lot of cats who are really trying to do that."

It is the blue-light-in-the-basement style that lends D'Angelo's music more credibility. Critics say his work is challenging, rewarding and refreshing, that he's a step or two ahead of everyone else working in the industry today, coming up with new sounds before we even tire of the old ones.

"I'm just trying to do my thing, thinking about Black music and the roots of it all," says D'Angelo, who began playing piano as a youngster in the church and whose talent as a keyboardist, guitar player and all-around instrumentalist infuses all of his work. "Black music is the root of every genre of music. We've created some fly [music]. I'm just trying to make the connection between all of this music that traces itself back to blues and the gospel and everything else."

D'Angelo says he's not a throwback to the `60s and `70s; he's just continuing the work from that time when Black culture and music were changing, edging toward revolution on the backs of masters like Gaye, Mayfield, The Artist, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Miles Davis, George Clinton and Hendrix.

"I consider myself very respectful of the masters who came before," says D'Angelo, who divides his time between Richmond and New York. "In some ways, I feel a responsibility to continue and take the cue from what they were doing musically and vibe on it. That's what I want to do. But I want to do it for this time and this generation."

This generation has been hit with a sound that can be computer-generated, cookie-cutter cute and overproduced. By contrast, D'Angelo's work features live instruments. The result is one long "vibe" session that downplays "the hit single" in favor of a context-driven album. D'Angelo says this generation is ready for the change.