I don't know about anybody else but I miss the D. This guy has only released two albums, "Brown Sugar" in 1995 and his masterpiece,"Voodoo", in 2000. The guy's a meticulous genius who takes a long time in between albums... but it's been 8 years now! And D's been on hard times lately; he's been busted with drugs a couple times, spent some time locked up and has gained
a ton of weight.
Here's a recent picture.
D'Angelo is so talented, it's such a shame that he's not active in the music game right now. Dude would be schooling these new cats with their choreographed dance moves and their Timbaland starter beats. He's our generations Marvin, Curtis and Prince, no doubt. John Mayer, who I think is a pretty cool guy even though his music is lame, wrote a great article about D. Peep it here:
DEAR D'ANGELO, My name is John Mayer. You might know me from that "Your Body Is a Wonderland" song, or perhaps our mutual friend, Roots drummer? uestlove, mentioned me to you. I'm writing to ask you to put out a follow-up to one of the few records to change my life forever, Voodoo.
When Voodoo came out in 2000, I stood in line at Tower Records in Atlanta at midnight to get it. Turns out, it set the gold standard for modern "neo" soul music. It's 2004, and I'm no less excited by it today than I was when I played it full blast in my mother's Plymouth Voyager on the way to my bullshit job. I drive a nicer car now, but I still listen to Voodoo and wonder what my albums would sound like if I took a bite off your style and what R&B would be like if you came back.
In contrast to the present age of gunmetal-gray hip-hop, with perfectly aligned beats and blips, Voodoo throbs. It's skin in the place of plastic. Questlove's drums serve as an atomic clock, while Pino Palladino's bass playing taunts the drums by showing the bar line just how late it can wake up and still arrive to work on time. I'm not even going to detail your impeccable vocal layering. You know what you did.
Yes, Voodoo isn't laced with perfect pop hooks, but then again it's so devoid of them that I never assumed you were worried about appeasing radio anyway. Its beauty is simplicity, a Japanese rock garden of hip-hop and R&B, and it's because of the negative space that I can still listen to it. There's nothing frivolous to get stuck in your head, so there's nothing to want out.
If you haven't recently committed any of yourself to tape, I'm begging you to put your suit and cape back on. Your contemporaries aren't going to ask you to come back; they're scared of having to be perched next to you. Only a lanky white boy like me can call you out of hiding. And if you need any help with those tunes, you know who to call. Questlove's got my number.
He wrote that a couple a years ago but now he's REALLY due. Come back D!
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