The Soul Savers by Tom Moon Two new voices—one on the fast track, the other in the shadows—are at the forefront of the movement that hopes to return black pop to its roots
Michael D’Angelo Archer has every reason to be enthusiastic. His single, “Brown Sugar,”
has been bumped into MTV’s coveted regular rotation—dazzling stuff for a 21-year-old
home-studio recluse from Richmond, Virginia. The album of the same name is selling well.
His Manhattan debut is four days away, and thanks to the EMI publicity machine, the likes
of Russell Simmons, Robert De Niro and Beverly Peele will attend.
But right now, sitting on a tattered leather couch outside the rehearsal studio in Manhattan,
on his first break from a ten-hour session, he’s looking back—at the four decades of music
that got him here. As the rest of his band, handpicked from the ranks of New York session
musicians, scatters to grab some food, D’Angelo calmly rolls a joint and talks about his musical
heroes—not the mack daddies and the power-ballad pushers currently ruling the charts,
but the old school, three generations removed and seriously out of fashion. Marvin Gaye.
Charles Brown. Otis Redding. Sly Stone. Solomon Burke. The Meters.
“That raw, dirty groove---that’s my shit,” he says. “Nobody plays that anymore.
That was raw soul. Dirt bucket.”
All day long, in the thick of the marathon rehearsal, D’Angelo has been paying
homage to these titans—slipping in and out of different styles like a comic
riffing through a repertoire of impressions: the rhythmic kick of the early, house-
rocking Louis Jordan, the grit of the Meters, the earthiness of Gaye, the attitude
of Prince. His voice has that neediness that all the greats have; he’s an Al Green
beggar who wears his hair in neat cornrows, a B-boy harmonizer stuck on phonics.
But it’s never a send-up: Even when D’Angelo stretches, his own loose vibe
prevails. This individual can sing. Desperately. He makes you listen. He’s
challenging you to listen. It’s unconventional territory—far from what’s considered
commercially viable. D’Angelo claims not to care: The music has to change.
“Artistically, the whole black music scene, the soul music scene—which isn’t called
soul anymore, it’s called R & B, but it’s just black pop—is not happening,”he says.
“It’s stagnant.”
D’Angelo is not alone in this belief. A handful of like-minded emerging artists
are unwilling to accept the rigid, painfully dull love-song conventions that have
been so good to Whitney Houston and Toni Braxton and even TLC. They’re
determined to reclaim the soul of black music by following the script Wynton
Marsalis wrote a decade ago in jazz: Return to the basic building blocks and
study the masters.
There’s the hip-hop producer Michael Levy, of Basehead, and the thoughtful
bassist Me’Shell NdegeOcello, and the young New Orleans piainst Davell Crawford,
a purist who links the barreling piano rolls of Professor Longhair with Bo Diddley—
style horns and stately gospel triads.
And then there’s one other—the man who most clearly shares D’Angelo’s vision,
if not his commercial success: the floppy-dread locked British singer Omar Lye
Fook—better known simply as Omar—whose U.S. debut album, For Pleasure,mixes Motown-style songcraft with agitated beats and the slippery
smoothness of the Blackbryds. Stevie Wonder is said to have flipped when he
heard Omar, who at 27 has collaborated with Motown legends Lamont Dozier
and Leon Ware, as well as the pioneering ‘80s producer David Frank.
At a time when the undifferentiated pleasantness of artists like Babyface seems to be
the order of the day, For Pleasure is the work of a songwriter who values
classic form, a singer whose phrases are instinctively seductive.
The differences between the Chinese-Indian-Cuban-Jamaican Omar and the Virginia-
bred D’Angelo are as pronounced as their bloodlines. The son and grandson of
pastors of the Apostolic Faith Church, D’Angelo comes from pure gospel. Omar
subscribes to no organized musical religion; his strength is austere British understatement
--soul by omission. Where D’Angelo fixes on Gaye, Omar worships Wonder.
D’Angelo concentrates on vocal improvisation; Omar, on songwriting.
And where D’Angelo’s career is already being plotted by EMI, Omar’s label,
RCA Records, has yet to figure out how to market him. Despite Omar’s track
record of UK hits, the promotion types can’t seem to match him with a stateside
audience. He’s too slick for pop radio, too pop for urban radio.
But the two think alike. And when the conversation drifts to the current lack of
integrity in black music, Omar echoes D’Angelo’s bitter condemnation.
“Basically, it’s gotten into a corner where it’s just sex,” he says. “In order to sell,
it has to sound and look a certain way.”
This may explain why, as Omar slogs through Detroit on a U.S. tour with little
hype, no MTV video and a sound that melds hard hip-hop pulses with “ohh-sha-la-la”
choruses, the crowds are erratic and sparse.
D’Angelo’s spin doctors have already named him the Son of Soul. Omar has no catchy
nickname. Just the soul.
These days, the label “soul” may be a liability. There’s little of it in the music to
which it refers. The Whitney Houstons and the Boyz II Men clones—even on that
plateau, that which passes for soul is really just quickbuck disposable grooves,
done lavishly. Bottom-line thinking has trapped black pop in its pleasant, fastidiously
produced rut. It’s ruled by formula, produced by people who pay lip service
to groove and regard emotion as something to be manipulated. It’s the home of the
power ballad, the production-number anthem, the kicky little street
jam that sounds just like ten other street jams.
Who to blame? Start with the songwriters and the producers. It’s still possible,
as Nirvana proved in rock, to bring new ideas to familiar structures. Yet in black
pop, any break with conventional wisdom is sooner or later punished. Just ask
Prince or Terence Trent d’Arby. Because a handful of veteran producers shape
the output of scores of artists, there’s cartel-like control of the charts—and everybody
in the loop is making too much money to get experimental. Consider Boyz II Men:
After a critically hailed debut that applied delicate Stylistics-style harmonies to
New Jack street jams, the group enlisted hotshot producers and came up with songs
that seem better suited to selling coffee creamer.
Where most black pop operates on endlessly repetitive two-chord vamps and
sing-along tag lines, D’Angelo and Omar write genuine songs. With memorable
choruses. And bridges that function the way Cole Porter’s did—connecting the
verses, amplifying the theme, providing harmonic contrast. The compositions
may be funky, but funk is never an end point. It’s a common ground, and
from it, D’Angelo and Omar lead listeners away from the tiresome mechanics
of sex to more universal concerns—in Omar’s case, perseverance, self-esteem,
postbreak psychological survival, themes built around a rhythmic palette
influenced by the syncopation of the islands. Omar’s father is Chinese-Jamaican,
his mother Indian-Jamaican.
“The bass lines in reggae are kind of similar to the bass lines in Latin music,” he says.
“I want to create something where you might be hearing three or four different
styles, but you don’t know where one starts and the other stops.”
This demands a wide frame of reference, and it assumes that the audience is
receptive to these “outside” influences, which Omar discovers in Detroit, is a big
assumption.
Pontiac, Michigan, has a ghost-town look after dark. This night, the business of
soul seems positively thankless. Omar might be thinking about Motown legends,
but he’ll be dealing with the reality of Detroit’s lean, downsized present. The
factories aren’t hiring young people, who may not be inclined to spend $5
on an unknown on a Monday night. RCA has been moving slowly on a decision
about a second single. This three-week club tour may be Omar’s last shot
at stirring up interest. The absence of hype hurts.
He may have good word of mouth with musicians, but
it doesn't matter much if he doesn't win converts.
He’s been working at it for six years on the road: “We’re at the point with this band
where we could play in front of people waiting to see Bon Jovi and win them over.
But I still do stuff that makes me wonder sometimes—that’s part of it, too. You have
to take chances.”
Then, as he strides from his bus to the club, he is stopped on the street by a man toting
his young son: Amp Fiddler, one of the keyboardists for George Clinton’s P-Funk All-
Stars. He’s out to catch the rare appearance of a soul newcomer to a town owned by
veterans like Wonder and Anita Baker.
“We walked by the club, and my son says, ‘We have that man, Daddy,’” he tells Omar.
“He recognized the CD, which we’ve been playing a good bit at home.”
They talk about the road life—the time they played together in Kobe, Japan, just before
the earthquake—and although the exchange lasts only a few minutes, it’s all the sustenance
Omar needs.
“You see that? Here I was all depressed about a Monday-night gig in the great soul
city of Detroit that’s gone to seed, and along comes a guy from fucking Parliament/
Funkadelic who wants to hear my music. That’s all I need right there. I don’t care if
three people show up.”
Once the show begins, his more traditional funk selections animate the dance floor,
while the less overtly backbeat-oriented songs seem to mystify the crowd. It’s a
loose, effortless pulse, but it’s not exactly what they’ve heard before. He’s all about
restraint and delicacy, and this may be a risk. Years of go-for-the-jugular hooks have
spoiled listeners. This Detroit crowd is appreciative, from a distance. They don’t
know exactly how to respond.
Lamont Dozier, who cowrote the suitelike “Outside” with Omar, think the British singer is
ahead of the curve: “It may be too hip. It comes as sort of a sophisticated approach, which
may confuse people. right now the audience is bombarded with a lot of stuff that shouldn’t
even be in the arena….The tastemakers might love the easy stuff, and they know it’ll sell,
but the music itself suffers when that’s all there is.
“Omar’s writing tunes that do more—they take you on a little journey.”
This is not simply about singing. This is about artists nailing their vocals skills to
serious and thoughtful songs: “We need D’Angelo right now—he connecting on the
gut level with kids, but he’s also slipping some musical medicine in there for people
who know,” says Michael Bearden, who should know what it is we need. He’s Madonna’s
musical director, and he’s working with D’Angelo on this tour. “Chaka [Khan] goes through
a thousand tapes a month and still can’t find stuff she wants to sing. She needs somebody
like D’Angelo.”
D’Angelo’s chief critic remains a legal secretary in Richmond who bought him his
first keyboard. She has watched his career closely.
“When he first started writing,” says his mother, Mariann Smith,”he’d write a song and bring
it to me right away. He’d run it by me first. And he knows I will critique him. I’ve always
given him the opportunity to express himself, but I’ll tell him what I think.”
Smith still has her Marvin Gaye collection, which goes a long way toward explaining
the Gaye influence in her son’s work. D’Angelo won’t deny it. In fact, when Gaye was killed
D’Angelo’s subsequent nightmares about the singer prompted him to seek therapy, where he
came to understand the particular affinity he had for a mentor he’d never met. Both were sons
of preachers; both were consumed by their music. The therapy, D’Angelo says, allowed him to
go from being unable to listen to Gaye to seeking inspiration from the late icon.
“I don’t think being called a ‘son of soul’ is weird,” D’Angelo says. “It’s natural. Anybody
who’s coming up now is a son of that stuff, or should be. We’re just doing what the fathers
were doing back in the day.”
His songs are streamlined, his arrangements spare. There is ample room for vocal embellishment—
his forte. The songs are punctuated by Amen cadences and churchy call and response;
unlike others who have graduated from gospel, he lets the basics of church music
inform his pop songwriting. He credits Prince—and the erratic stuff Prince has
recorded since changing his name to a symbol—with providing a valuable lesson:
D’Angelo says he’s just trying to write songs he finds believable. “Brown Sugar” is a love
song—to marijuana. The slow, rueful “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker” chronicles a husband’s
violent reaction to an unfaithful wife. “Everyone can relate to that,” D’Angelo says. “Even
if it didn’t happen to you, you can feel it.”
Inside the rehearsal stuido, D’Angelo is patiently guiding new backup vocalists. He fired
two of three singers the day before. For most young artists, four days before a big gig, such
chaos would induce panic, but he is calm. He is also fussy: Background vocals may be
perfunctory window dressing for many, but not for D’Angelo. In his scheme, the usual
cooing and ahhing is replaced by knotty phrases, think harmony, unusual accents.
It’s clear that D’Angelo thrives on spontaneity. He alters lines to suit the new voices,
allows different singers to try out different parts. Later he will admit that the album
enjoying so much success sounds a little too slick to his ears: “Most of the stuff on the
album is more dressy, more buttery than what I want to do right now. I want everything
to be dirty raw.”
Five hours into rehearsal, he’s still strong, altering phrases slightly each time. He’s testing out
his moves, savoring the chance to sing with no pressure; the next room won’t be empty. And here
is where the sons of soul find themselves at something of a disadvantage. Unlike their musical
influences, who had to toil on the club circuit for years, the new breed has been plucked
young and thrown into the big leagues. They’ll never have to play with enough intensity to make
people remember their names—in D’Angelo’s case, the name is already on the marquee. Overcoming
difficult performing circumstances, winning people over despite all kinds of adversity, playing ratty
clubs—these were the early rules for the soul performer. Now little is left to chance; too often
that machinelike efficiency carries into the music.
D’Angelo has had little performance experience outside of church. He knows what to do—nobody
could concoct a record like Brown Sugar without having some sense of the way things
are supposed to feel live. But he has yet to do it, and as the gig draws near, there are whispers.
Some EMI executives who saw D’Angelo a few weeks before in Philadelphia are wondering
whether he’s up to the job. It’s almost too late: The success of the record has landed D’Angelo
on a forty-city fall tour. He will be performing constantly soon enough, ready or not.
It’s a sweaty summer Monday night in New York. The Supper Club is besieged. People spill
into the street; limos stop traffic. EMI executives are rushed into the adjoining Edison Hotel
to sneak in through the kitchen. The doorman estimates that 3,000 invitations were issued.
The club holds 900.
Inside, the balcony alone holds some of New York’s finest hip-hop talent, and they are curious.
On the dance floor, there’s anticipation. The deejay is hitting a reverent mix of ‘70s radio soul.
D’Angelo takes the stage as the “Theme From Shaft” plays behind him. He grins and holds his
hands above his head like a boxer. In the ten-round bout of star-making in the music business,
he’s survived the early going.
He sits at an old Fender-Rhodes electric piano and goes to work, singing with laconic southern
sweetness, leaping from his natural range to a perpetually pained falsetto. He doesn’t miss a
note. He also doesn’t do much to sell the songs—he’s just a guy sitting at a piano, dripping
soul. He stirs the music with curt, well-placed chordal jabs. He nods reassuringly to the vocalists,
who wrap his phrases in effortless-sounding harmony.
The crowd doesn’t know how to respond: The hip-hop contingent is into the loose, greasy
groove, and it’s possible that the moguls of black pop may sense that D’Angelo’s old-school
pulse could come back to make their tight, machine-based grooves obsolete. The critics may
take points off for D’Angelo’s lack of showmanship skills, but they have to admit this much:
The room is still when he sings. He’s got people. Not just any people—jaded music-business
people, shouting when he finishes a phrase and moaning when he moans.
One among them is conspicuous. Bouncing around the club, playing tourist and (can this be?)
taping the set with his video camera, is Omar—determined to see this like-minded peer,
who’s been mentioned in the same breath for months now, in the flesh. Perhaps he will pick
up some of the vibes that have vaulted D’Angelo to the top. He admits he can tell D’Angelo
hasn’t spent a lot of time performing. “That’ll come,” Omar predicts. “He’s got all the tools.”
They had hooked up for a few minutes in the afternoon. “It was one of those ‘I like your music.’
‘No, I like your music’ vibes,” Omar says. “We definitely have listened to some of the
same records.”
But Omar is nowhere to be seen as D’Angelo leaves the stage. The new vocalists nailed every
nuance. The band followed his whims as if they’d been working together for years. Things
weren’t exactly perfect, but the mistakes gave the music the raw edge he’s been looking for.
It’s more than a successful launch; it’s an arrival. After an endless parade of aspiring crooners
who live to uphold the status quo, now comes D’Angelo, arguing for the earthy and gritty music
he loves. If his style onstage is tentative, he nevertheless manages to interest people in the
possibilities of soul again.
Two days later, a daily tabloid will print a list of luminaries who were among hundreds unable
to get into the packed Supper Club, and the list will include the likes of Martin Scorsese and TLC.
It all bodes well. And two months hence, D’Angelo will return to the city for two critically
acclaimed and well-attended nights at Tramps. Omar’s future is less certain. For the time being,
there is only one place where they’ll keep crossing paths. In the past.
NOTE: This article originally appeared in GQ magazine, November 1995. All rights reserved.
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