gq:
The D’Angelo Outtakes:
More From GQ’s ExclusiveOver at GQ.com, our correspodent Amy Wallace posted some of her favorite bits with the soul singer that didn’t make the final story. They’re all worth reading if you’re a D’Angelo fan, but we re-read this one a couple times:
Even his first album, Brown Sugar, had been audacious—with its references to “Chocolate Thai,” has often been presumed to be an ode to the powers of good weed, while “Shit, Damn, Motherf*cker” was as dark and ominous as anything since Sly & the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On.” But D’s onstage persona was more muted—it simmered, but didn’t burn. D’Angelo looks back on that time with some discomfort. A perfectionist, he wishes he’d had more of an active interplay with the audience. But it all took off so fast, he says. He was confused, he says, by his sudden notoriety, even as he, Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu and others were credited with launching the “neo-soul” movement (a label he hates). “It counteracts the very fucking idea of what it was in the first place,” he says. “It’s black music thinking — it’s black music manifested outside of the box. And when you label it neo soul, you’re putting it right back in the box. How about you just call me soul music?”
That argument was just one of many D was having in his own head. “I tried to fight, I guess, what typically fame quote-unquote does to people,” he says. “I didn’t want to stop being, you know, the rambunctious mug that I was, because that’s what made my music what it was. It happens to the best of them, you know: At some point in everyone’s career, it was like the music lost its bite. I’m like, ‘Well, how do you avoid that?’”
“You’re some kid from wherever, you get signed, you come out with a record, and boom, you’ve got money and instant success and there’s really no template to follow,” he says, recalling how Gary Harris, the EMI exec who’d signed him, gave him a copy of Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye, David Ritz’s commanding biography. Hungry for guidance, D devoured it in two days. When B.B. King first met the 22-year-old D’Angelo, Vibe magazine reported in 2000, the bluesman remarked that D had an old soul. Says Harris today: “He’s the oldest young man you’ll ever meet.”
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landmark piece on...where yours truly is quoted,
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cool
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once wats the basest soulman on the planet
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