183. D'Angelo, "Brown Sugar"

 


Since I came to D'Angelo late (2014's Black Messiah, an album I absolutely love), I was unfortunately unaware of this album when it came out and although I don't like it as much as Messiah, I can certainly appreciate the bomb it set off when it landed out of nowhere in 1995.

When he started recording this album, D'Angelo had already had some modest success, writing one song that landed in the top 5 of the R&B charts, but I don't think anyone expected what came next.  Unusual for the time, this album is almost entirely a D'Angelo creation, in that he wrote the songs, played almost all the instruments, and sang all the vocals.  

Recorded largely in New York City, this album just feels city.  It's a mix of jazz and R&B and soul - in fact, it pretty much kicked off what came to be known as "neo-soul" - and maybe even trip-hop?  The title track, a not-very-veiled ode to smoking weed, has jazzy piano and quiet organ and that snappy snare that cuts through.  "Cruisin'" is ostensibly a cover of the 1979 Smokey Robinson track, but it strips the Smokey version down to the studs and rebuilds it as a wholly new thing.  

The centerpiece is really "Shit, Damn, Motherfucker," which sounds like it could be a slowed-down Sly and the Family Stone song, a languid groove with an earwormy chorus that will have you quietly singing "motherfucker" to yourself as you fill up the Britta or whatever.  "When We Get By" is maybe the most overtly jazzy song on the record, with richly layered vocals (all of them D'Angelo) and the piano and (I'm assuming) stand-up bass and rimshost you associate with a smoky Manhattan jazz club.  The album closer, "Higher," is almost a straight-up gospel song, except it's D'Angelo's love and he who are going to walk the streets of gold, not Jesus.

It's interesting that D'Angelo saisd his biggest influences at the time he wrote this were hip hop artists like Tribe Called Quest, Rakim, and KRS-One.  This isn't really a hip hop album, but you could imagine a lot of the tracks being backing tracks for a group like Tribe.  

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Certainly.

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