NYU Music Professor Gives D’Angelo An A+
The artist did his homework on “Black Messiah”
By Jeff Peretz, Visiting Professor of Music Theory, Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the Tisch School of The Arts, New York University
Fourteen years in the making, D’Angelo’s Black Messiah scratches all the itches that you’d expect a D’Angelo record would: A steady backbeat. Sexy falsetto lead vocals layered atop more sexy falsetto background vocals. And long, hard to grasp, vamp-like song form structures.
Coming as it did — a total surprise — a lot of folks have been compelled to offer their thoughts about Black Messiah upon first listen, especially because, well, it’s their job to do so. But Black Messiah is the kind of record that reveals itself almost as slowly as D’Angelo works in the studio. To really hear its sonic complexity takes at least five listens. To get your head around what your ear is hearing takes ten. To get your heart around what your head deciphered takes at least fifteen. To finally realize the type of earwormy, sing along-ishness that it took all of eight measures for you to get from Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” takes even more listens still. In this way, Black Messiah blossoms like Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Radiohead’s Kid A or Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back.
So what took him so long? What has D’Angelo been doing with all this time? Save the tropes about addiction and recovery, creative blocks and record label shuffles. To me, it’s manifestly apparent that he was just doing his homework. Quite simply, what sets this record aside from anything else that’s come out in the past ten years is the level of musicianship and research that went in to it. Why does it sound so fresh? Because no one in R&B can make a record at this level anymore.
The industry’s shift to cut-n-paste style production since D’Angelo last released an album has had a profound effect on the music-loving public’s collective attention span. Whereas the Dr. Luke and Max Martin type of pop songs all but scream “here comes the chorus” (or, in some cases, “the drop”), we must actually pay attention to Black Messiah to recognize its subtle, hidden structures, something many listeners who came of age in the days and years since Voodoo simply don’t know how to do.
So let me help: I’m going to show you the entrance into an album I believe will stand up to time as Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life do. As with a great wine, the first order of business is to detect the geography, geology and climate of what we’re tasting, or in the case of music, what we’re hearing: the who what and when of influence that went into the record.
On Rhythm
First and foremost what sets this record apart from anything else in the past decade is its rhythm. While being as danceable as any contemporary four-on-the-floor, boots-and-pants EDM-style pop hit, Black Messiah does something that those records don’t: It swings. My colleague Jason King has written at length about the unique “out-of-jointness” of D’Angelo’s groove on Voodoo — influenced in many ways by hip-hop and especially by the off-kilter rhythmic work of J Dilla. It’s one thing to adjust notes in relationship to the beat when you’re on a computerized digital workstation. It’s quite another thing to pick up your instrument and make that happen like these guys do. On Black Messiah, the musicians return fire and then some. Whether it’s bouncing along on a single chord like Sly Stone’s “Everyday People,” as on “Back to the Future Part 1”; or strolling through the complex harmonic landscapes of “Really Love,” the relationship between the half-time groove of drummer Questlove (who, I should mention, is also a colleague at NYU) and Pino Paladino’s evenly paced bass notes creates a flow that allows D’Angelo to add layers of musical information on top without the groove collapsing. Listen, for example, to the way that Questlove’s hi-hat interacts with the bass on “Betray My Heart”: Quest’s groove is essentially one beat for every two notes from Pino. So the hi-hats essentially become the backbeat for the bass, and what this does is deliver a few feelings all at once: Quest’s drums like Philly Joe Jones, the original swinging drummer from Miles Davis’ first great quintet; Pino’s bass dancing around them in a pattern that evokes both the fleet-footed Fred Astaire and the good-footed James Brown. This plays off D’Angelo’s Funkadelic-esque vocal layers, transforming them into something reminiscent of the horn sections of Duke Ellington’s big bands of the 1940’s. Each vocal cluster is like its own horn section working in call-and-response to the lead line. Listen for this in “Sugah Daddy.” See what I mean? Homework.
On Harmony
Now let’s talk about the music. The way individual notes blend is called harmony. And harmonically speaking, D’Angelo certainly isn’t the first R&B savior to write songs with the sophistication of jazz standards, but he is the first to reinvent them for a post hip-hop world. Almost every song on this record features “extensions” — extended chords that contain not just the standard 3 notes (triads), but 4 and 5 note chords that literally extend harmony up into the 7th, 9th, 11th and 13th note of a scale. But here’s the thing: D’Angelo rarely actually plays those extra notes on his instrument — be it piano or guitar. More than often, they are simply implied by a walking bass line (“walking” being a metaphor for how a bass melody progresses up and down a scale). What the interplay between the instruments forces us to do is fill in the aural blanks, a skill for which most casual music fans in 2014 simply have no frame of reference.
What harmony we do hear is usually provided by D’Angelo and friends’ sparse guitar playing. Their carefully placed, Jimi-like “hidliahs and didliahs” are like sprinkling pepper into soup: Too much and it ruins the taste, too little and what’s the point. But D’Angelo and crew get it just right, allowing the music to breathe. On a record where he’s got a lot of shit going on, D’s refined “comping” (meaning chord choices that complement the melody) do just that: complement and expand the sound, shining some daylight between the notes. That’s exactly why D’Angelo can muster those dense harmonies without his songs feeling muddy. The harmonic information is spread out over a wide musical range, and everything falls where it should. Homework, again.
On Melodies and Lyrics
The melodies and lyrics on Black Messiah roll out in spectacular fashion. These aren’t nursery rhymes people. They are a higher form of expression. When most folks write songs they typically use formulas, sometimes consciously, mostly unconsciously, emulating patterns that have worked for other writers and composers — in easy-to-hear chunks of two-, four- and eight-bars. And then you have songwriters like Stevie Wonder or John Lennon & Paul McCartney, for whom songs seem to emerge from their consciousness fully-formed, and not always in the neat little packets of information of standard song form. Take, for example, Lennon’s song “Happiness Is A Warm Gun.” That song goes everywhere: First it’s four beats to a measure, then five. It switches styles, bends back upon itself a number of times. Things happen when they need to, not when you expect them to. That’s what makes great songwriting exciting. And then The Beatles then had to learn that shit and actually play it. When I hear D’Angelo’s writing, I’m hearing the same kind of dropped-from-heaven songs that defy formula. Take “Really Love,” which at first listen seems like a deft homage to the jazz classic “Autumn Leaves,” with lyrics (co-written by Kendra Foster) worthy to stand among the best American standards. But D, as usual, goes left. He doesn’t say “I’m really in love with you,” because that shit doesn’t fit the funk. Instead, he’s like, “I’m in really love with you,” and if he wants to say it three times after a particular verse and two times after another, he doesn’t let traditional song structure stand in his way. With enough listens, even the sharpest of turns winds up feeling like the smoothest way to get from point A to point B, the mark of an unmolested musical idea brought to fruition just as it was conceived. Homework, son.
The influences on this record are too numerous to reference here. A more enterprising writer could riff on the Thelonious Monk chromaticism of “Sugah Daddy”, or the Stylistics-style sitar on “Another Life” and “The Charade.” Certainly the stutter-stop triplet groove on “Prayer” owes a buck or two to “Up for the Down Stroke”; as does the McCartney-like innocence of “The Door.” The beauty of this complex record is that the more you listen, the more you get let in on its secrets and become part of the study group. My homework assignment for you: Keep listening.
Jeff Peretz, p/k/a Sidd Still, is a multi-instrumentalist and producer who has recorded and/or performed with Mark Ronson, Lana Del Rey, Rock Wilder, Daniel Merriweather, Tim Robbins and Stanley Clarke. He is a Visiting Professor of Music Theory at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the Tisch School of the Arts. His books include Zen and the Art of Guitar, Guitar Atlas: Cuba and Guitar Atlas: The Middle East.
If you enjoyed reading this, please click “Recommend” below.
This will help to share the story with others.
