D’Angelo: ​“I feel like I’m part of a revolution”

It’s gone 5:45pm on a sweltering New York afternoon, and D’Angelo is running late for a six o’clock recording session with Lauryn Hill. As he stretches out on a plush white couch in the swanky W hotel in midtown Manhattan, a record company publicist hustles a photo­grapher and his equipment out of D’Angelo’s spartan room. Sublimely cool in jet black skullie, white vest, dark, baggy pants and workboots, the artist kicks back and visibly savours his cig­arette, unconcerned by the chaos around him.

Lesser men would be sweating at a missed date with the Queen Supreme, the lady with the soul-gold Midas touch. Especially as the track they’ll be recording is the final hurdle in the long, slow haul towards the completion of his second album, Voodoo. But not the preternaturally chilled D’Angelo. For one, he and Hill are old friends, past collaborators – they duetted on the quiet-storm, late-night croon of Nothing Even Matters on The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill – and avowed kindred spirits. ​“When I first heard D’Angelo,” Hill has said, ​“I was like, ​‘Oh my God!’ I was just so happy, ​’cause he set it down for real music, real soul.”

For two, D’Angelo is talking about his music. And, for the then 21-year-old sensation who appeared in 1995 with Brown Sugar (“composed, written, arranged, produced and performed by D’Angelo,” read the sleeve), talk­ing about his music is far more important than braving rush-hour traffic. ​“The song with Lauryn,” he says, in a husky, smoke-scarred voice, ​“is going to be very, very sexy. Think black love.” His words would seem cliched soul boy stuff if it weren’t for the fact that, on Brown Sugar, D’Angelo practically revolutionised ​‘black love’.

Where most R&B singers traded in tired-come­ons and champagne and caviar date-dreams, D’ Angelo returned to the organic, rootsy, real­ life-driven soul of his spiritual forebears: Al Green, Prince and Marvin Gaye. With Brown Sugar, you could smell the sex. Brimming with salacious steam, the album opened with the title track, D’ Angelo confiding: ​“I met her in Philly and her name was Brown Sugar/​See we be makin’ love constantly/​That’s why my eyes are a shade blood-burgundy … ” Not afraid of being perceived as ​‘unmanly’, he covered Smokey Robinson’s falsetto-driven classic Crusin – and took the song into even further polysexual heights with his high-pitched croon (the lady-man soul of Armand Van Helden’s Flowerz owes as much to D’Angelo as it does to deep house). And the Afrocentric, spirit-first, earthly-pleasures-second ethos of Brown Sugar paved the way for the success of new soul artists like Maxwell, Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu.

Nearly five years later, hip hop and R&B are still catching up with the challenges D’ Angelo threw down on Brown Sugar. And D’Angelo is only too aware of it. ​“To be honest,” he says, taking a puff on a Newport cigarette, ​“I feel like I’m part of a revo­lution. The Roots, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, [Slum Village producer] The Ummah, Mos Def and Common are all comrades in this fight.” He pauses to take another drag. ​“The fight, our fight, is to bring the music back to what it’s sup­posed to be about, which is the craft and skills, not money and all this other bullshit. The ques­tion is: are we gonna take the path of artistry? Or are we going someplace else?”

If Brown Sugar created the boilerplate for the stripped-down soul of Erykah Badu, Voodoo will most likely leave a much more complex, less easily decipherable legacy. The lusty twang of an electric guitar on Untitled recalls the sexy minimalism of Prince’s Adore from Sign O’ The Times. The sparse percussion and spangly chimes of The Root brings to mind Songs In The Key Of Life-era Stevie Wonder, albeit with a tribal, Fela Kuti-influenced twist. And the wah-wah funk and hip hop cut-and-scratch of Left & Right brings the singer’s B‑boy obses­sions to the surface, as well as providing some of the most explicit songwriting about sex D’ Angelo has ever penned. ​“I love it when we do it,” D’ Angelo joyously croons, ​“up and down, left and right.”

If D’Angelo can seem overly dramatic – or even self-righteous – about the state of music, then you probably haven’t turned on the radio in America lately. Platinum culture returned to the States with a ferocious intensity in 1999, far surpassing the peak of Puff Daddy’s It’s All About The Benjamins days in 1997. Jay-Z’s recent American hit Girl’s Best Friend is a love song written not to a girlfriend, but diamonds. Destiny’s Child’s summer smash Bills, Bills, Bills has the woefully crass chorus, ​“Can you pay my bills?” R Kelly’s last single, Did You Ever Think?, asked, ​“Did you ever think that you could be this rich?” And on No Scrubs TLC famously derided men who aren’t blessed with expensive cars or jewellery.

​“It’s like, how much further can we go?” D’Angelo asks, frustration cracking his mellow demeanour. ​“I don’t know how many more watches and diamonds and cars we can talk about.” He stops and pensively scratches his muscular right arm, decorated with a tattoo of his star sign, Aquarius. ​“I think the public is get­ting sick of this shit!” he says, suddenly angry. ​“I’m telling you, I feel the pulse of the people, and they’re ready for something new.”

D’Angelo’s pulse-taking abilities haven’t failed him yet. In the context of 1995, when R&B was deep into its bump ​‘n’ grind phase, Brown Sugar was a staggering debut. Here was a sparsely instrumented affair that fused the singer’s two life-long obsessions: the rugged beats of hip hop auteurs like Marley Marl and Pete Rock, and the early-Seventies soul heyday or Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson. D’Angelo’s otherworldy falsetto cut against R&B’s insistent machismo. The album’s hip hop-­meets-soul sound — helped to life by collabora­tors like co-producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest – seduced America’s usually genre-devoted music-buying public.

D’Angelo attributes the spare, rimshot-heavy sound of Brown Sugar (which he calls ​“some funk/​soul shit”) to one of his favourite albums, A Tribe Called Quest’s Low End Theory. ​“It’s a certain groove,” he says excitedly. ​“And if you hit it, ain’t nothing else matter. It will transcend time.” Despite the fact Brown Sugar sounded like nothing on radio or MTV, it went on to sell more than 1.5 million copies in America.

D’Angelo crowned his superstar soulman status one hot summer night in 1995 with a gig at New York’s swanky Supper Club. Martin Scorcese, Prince and TLC were all in atten­dance. The event was so star-studded that D’Angelo himself was kept waiting at the front door, stopped by security guards who refused to believe that a young, African-American male could attract such a frenzy of high-powered admirers. ​“Not getting into my own show,” D’Angelo says with a laugh, ​“that was crazy. But having Prince there – man, that felt good.”

Twenty-five year old Michael D’An­gelo Arthur was raised the son of a preacher in Richmond, Virginia. Not surprisingly, the singer found his earliest inspirations in the church. ​“Growing up in the church, I saw that music was just as much a part of the ministry as the preacher opening up the Bible and preach­ing,” he says. Before his father could teach young D’Angelo musical notation, he had already taught himself. ​“I’ve been banging around on instruments since I was three,” he says, only mildly boast­fully. ​“And I’d joined the church choir by the age of five.” Like his idol Prince, D’Angelo had mastered bass, guitar and keyboards before he was an adolescent.

D’Angelo would listen to Al Green, Cameo and Earth, Wind And Fire on Richmond radio stations, but what got him making music was not classic soul or funk but a contemporary — new jack swingmeister Teddy Riley. ​“Teddy was the first person to fuse R&B and hip hop. Guy’s Groove Me was the first thing that really had that sound. The whole scene at Uptown Entertainment with Bobby Brown, New Edition, Keith Sweat and Al B – I used to be in love with that shit, man.”

As a teenager in the late Eighties, D’Angelo did whatever he could to get into the music business. He made beats for his cousin, who was a rapper; sang in talent shows (by the time was 18, he’d been three-time winner of the legendary Amateur Night at The Apollo, a well established proving ground that had launched the careers of, among others, Lauryn Hill); and produced a Richmond-based rap group called IDU. Like many newcomers, IDU sent demos to labels in New York and Los Angeles. One tape ended up with Jocelyn Cooper, an executive at Warner Bros publish­ing. Cooper wasn’t interested in IDU – she wanted to know who the kid behind their pro­duction was. So she invited D’Angelo up to New York and hooked him up with an A&R man at EMI, Gary Harris.

Just as EMI ushered D’Angelo to stardom, it was the label’s demise in America in 1997 that contributed to the five-year wait for his new album. While many artists would cheer at gain­ing freedom from a major label, D’Angelo mourned the company’s end. ​“EMI was a very cool place to be,” D’Angelo says with a hint of sadness. ​“They gave me the freedom to be who I wanted to be. Me and Gary Harris really got along; he understood me. He was puttin’ me on to a lotta shit I didn’t know about then. He had faith and confidence in me, and I had the same in him.”

The same year, D’Angelo had a very public split with his manager, Kedar Massenburg, the powerful music business impresario responsi­ble for launching the careers of Erykah Badu, ex-DeBarge frontman Chico DeBarge, and up-and-coming teenage rapper A+. The week of our interview, Kedar was recruited to be the CEO of Motown Records. D’Angelo refuses to comment about Massenburg, but music indus­try sources attribute their falling out to a clash between Massenburg’s highly aggressive man­agement style and D’Angelo’s laidback attitude towards his financial success.

D’Angelo bounced back with a new label (Virgin) and a new manager (Dominique Tre­nier) in 1998. But the messy, behind-the-scenes music industry drama further delayed what was already a long wait for D’Angelo’s second album. Early in 1999, it looked as though the project’s release was imminent. D’Angelo appeared on the cover of hip hop magazine XXL, with the brash coverline ​‘The Second Coming’ announcing his return. But by the summer, there was still no new recorded work from D’Angelo, save the slinky, understated, DJ-Premier produced Devil’s Pie on the soundtrack to Hype Williams’ Belly; a faithful cover of the Prince B‑side She’s Always In My Hair from the Scream 2 soundtrack; his sweet backing vocal contribution to Method Man’s Breakups 2 Make-Ups from the rap­per’s Tical: 2000 album; and the Lauryn Hill Miseducation… duet.

Developments in his personal life intruded, too: on February 28, 1998, D’Angelo had a son, Michael. Though D’Angelo won’t reveal the name of his son’s mother (“she’s an old girlfriend” is all he will say), he speaks raptur­ously about his child. ​“Seeing him come into this world was a turning point in my life. I can’t even explain what that does to you, but you look at the world through different eyes. You breathe differently. You’re not living on this Earth just for you.“

Michael’s birth proved to be a catalyst in get­ting D’Angelo to return to the studio. ​“Shortly after my son was born, I wrote the first song for this album, Send It On. I wrote a lot of songs to him.” You’re not alone if you think that all this birth-as-artistic-rebirth sounds a lot like the To Zion-inspired Lauryn Hill. ​“I could defi­nitely relate to what Lauryn was saying on To Zion,” he says with a nod of his head. ​“But I think Lauryn was a little more direct on her album than I’ve been.”

D’Angelo describes Voodoo as ​“darker, grit­tier — a little less produced than Brown Sugar. I feel like songs get simpler as I evolve.” He has again turned to hip hop producers like The Ummah and Raphael Saadiq (the man behind the shuffling, horny beats of Q‑Tip’s Vibrant Thing). If anything, Voodoo’s sound is even more stark than its predecessor: chicken­scratch guitar-playing, wobbly bass lines and thumping rhythms from Roots drummer Ahmir ?uestlove are often all you can hear. D’Angelo says that his friendship with ?uestlove has been a valuable inspiration on the new album. ​“A lot of the early sessions were initiated by him. He’s been my copilot on this album.”

Don’t expect dubious chanting or spurious witchcraft themes on Voodoo, though; the album’s title, D’Angelo says, is ​“purely meta­phorical. The music that we’re doing is derived from the spirit, as opposed to being motivated by materialistic or physical things.” D’Angelo stops, takes off his skullie, and scratches the cornrows beneath. ​“There’s a lot of reasons why I’ve called the album Voodoo. I wrote and created this whole album at Elec­tric Ladyland, where Jimi Hendrix recorded, so I was thinking about Voodoo Chile, obviously. There were a lot of images that I was adapting into my life and into my subconscious that pointed to voodoo,” he says ellipitically, refus­ing to specify the ​‘images’ in question. ​“I didn’t know what else to name it but that.” But Voodoo​’s greater meaning has much to do with D’Angelo’s quest to rescue hip hop and R&B from its cash-rules-everything-around-me mind state.

“I feel like the public has been fed a whole bunch of shit from the music industry,” D’Angelo says, returning to his earlier topic of discussion. As if reminded of his obliga­tions, he starts anxiously collecting his belong­ings (a copy of Mary J Blige’s Mary, several packs of cigarettes, a demo tape of Voodoo). He checks his watch, and for the first time dur­ing a meandering conversation paced like an afternoon get-together on a Southern porch, a look hinting at panic crosses his face: Lauryn Hill can’t be kept waiting any longer.

“The powers that be are trying to brainwash us,” he declares, trying to cram as many words as possible into the few seconds remaining before a waiting limo will spirit him to the studio. ​“They want us to believe that certain things are quality when they really aren’t.” He stops for a moment, surveys the room to see if he’s left anything, and smiles. ​”I’m trying to unhypnotise the public, I guess.”