Pay It Forward: keiyaA on D’Angelo

keiyaA reflects on the potent influence of D’Angelo’s Black Messiah album, and how it inspired her to rethink what Black music is on her current album, hooke’s law (XL).

The first time I came across D’Angelo’s music was my mom, probably, or seeing it on VH1 or MTV. I remember it was (Untitled) How Does It Feel from Voodoo, which makes me sad now that I think about it, because he had such a deeply personal relationship with his body and hated being a sex symbol, and for a lot of people, it was the default to be like, “D’Angelo is fine as hell.” But I cringe at that now, understanding it more and having my own relationship with body image. But yeah, I remember being in the laundromat with my grandad and little brother, and there were a bunch of TVs on, and you could see his six-pack on all the TVs.

When you grow up in a Black household in the early 2000s, there’s a 75 percent chance there’s one neo-soul era album, one Soulquarians album that makes it into rotation, and for my mom that was Erykah Badu and D’Angelo, and so I heard it in the house all the time, but also on the radio, going to school… I didn’t really think much about it, until he dropped Black Messiah. I was 21, 22, in college, and there was a friend who saw him at Afropunk and talked about how there was such a mixed response, because so many people wanted to hear classic D’Angelo from 14 years prior. What he came out with was, in my opinion, some of the funkiest, grooviest music on Earth, but super psychedelic and super funky and super rock-influenced, in a way that’s like the rock Black people invented. 

It sat me on my ass because I was towards the end of my tenure at jazz school, and I was feeling disillusioned because I had a lot of different tastes that didn’t fit in this world; my teachers and friends were telling me to reject a whole part of my inspiration and just make jazz-influenced jazz, basically. Seeing D’Angelo and that big-ass ensemble wearing leather and having guitars – it felt like the Blackest thing I’d ever seen, and it made me feel like I had to go back to the drawing board. Like, there’s so much I don’t know about Black music.

I was in DC when the news of his passing became public, opening for Ravyn Lenae. I was just walking around Georgetown, listening to D’Angelo talk about “Carbon pollution is heating up the air/ Do we really know? Do we even care?/ Acid rain drips on our trees and in our hair/ Are you there?” And I’m like, this stuff is so important and so relevant today and yesterday, and will
be tomorrow.

Obviously D’Angelo is very revered, but even post-death… people still post his shirtless body. I’m like, “Did we not listen to what he had to say?” More emphasis needs to be put on Black Messiah and what he’s saying. He taught me there’s a way to be deeply Black and deeply referential to Black musical history, but also to speak about what’s important to our people and our society, and to yearn and make it really soulful and beautiful. With my experiences of fatphobia and colourism, I probably experience the other side of the spectrum of being a sex symbol, but it’s part of the same umbrella of Black bodies, the spectacle, and the value judgement we place on aesthetics – and how that directly ties to consuming our art and our humanity and our self-image.