D'Angelo - Black Messiah (2014)

I've often felt that capital-P 'politics' goes in and out of fashion in pop culture like waves.
Sometimes showing you have a social conscience with opinions and concerns is a part and parcel of being an artist; and to the onlooker it can feel like everything, even some instrumental music, has an inherent politics at its core.
Other times, it feels as though the wider pop sphere has little time for politics as this gets in the way of the personal. Again, I'm struggling to think of much militantly political music from the mid-late 2000s save for damp offerings by Green Day etc...

idk, a tweet in the moment might have more of an impact than a few veiled references in a song, especially considering that songs take awhile to make & release, and if they don't are often thrown together and quickly forgotten.

xp

also, just wanted to add MIA to the list of excellent, modern, political rappers.

xp Before Twitter you had to give an interview or write a song or say something during a concert to be heard. Obviously if there's another outlet to tell everyone where you stand some musicians are going to prefer that. You can't insist that only the old modes count.

And that may be why there's no volume 2 for me to do.

RT, I'm going to print out the post where I name The Game, TI, Run the Jewels, J Cole and Kendrick and staple it your head.

a$ap ferg did a ferguson song too iirc

also can we give it more than a couple of months before demanding fully thought out political statements in their music from rappers

True. How many responses to the Rodney King verdict were there by the equivalent stage? Ice Cube's The Predator didn't come out until November and the verdict was late April.

MIA is 39, she came out over 10 years ago.

what do you need? someone under 18 who has just made their first single to come out with a new 'fight the power'?

i mean, chuck d was in his early 30s when he made shut em down. would that still count?

never mind that dangelo is 40!

i can link you to some 19/20 year olds making political rap records. they're just not famous, so i guess that doesn't count?

How many responses to the Rodney King verdict were there by the equivalent stage?

what's maybe more relevant is all the LA rap about LAPD brutality/corruption that came out *before* the Rodney King incident/trial. which was quite a lot.

(not agreeing w RT btw)

Who said anything about Ferguson?

RT, I'm going to print out the post where I name The Game, TI, Run the Jewels, J Cole and Kendrick and staple it your head.

― Re-Make/Re-Model,

Again, way off, check your dates. T.I came out 15 years ago. The Game? 10 years ago, and that's really scraping the barrel I think. RTJ is just a misogynist fairly disgusting male ego trip from what I heard.

what do you need?

― StillAdvance,

I've said it enough times, anyone out in the last decade, still no one has provided.

this has been mentioned already right
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXsa6y2NJ14

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQs7CWKHM9w

xp Yeah you're right about songs before Rodney King, but there have been pre-Ferguson songs about police brutality like Hands Up by Vince Staples. Will that pass the Tanuki test?

Lil B addressed Ferguson during his lecture(!) at MIT

http://www.thefader.com/2014/11/22/lil-b-mit-lecture-full-transcript

this entire thread is evidence that people who make this complaint don't give a shit about political music, they give a shit about proving their generational point. also i intend to waste no further time arguing with or doing research for idiots like raccoon tanuki

This entire Black Messiah thread?

J. Cole doing "Be Free" in December on Letterman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0LNMviSTTg

how about kendrick lamar? is he allowed?

anyway, i think this thread needs to get back to discussing what dangelo did say, how he said it, rather than yet another discussion on the internets about rap not being political enough like it was in the good ol days.

I don't hear anything in that Kendrick song other than its title.

please post here What happened to socially/politically concious rappers for more of this

i don't like "i" as a track but if you don't see anything inherently political in a song that culminates in "i love myself" as the unironic chorus of a hip hop song in 2014, i can't help you

Anybody ever listen to Raheem Devaughan's 'The Love & War MasterPeace'?

i did, but not very much, i guess i admired it but nothing stuck much? political music and great music don't correlate unfortch

I think where Black Messiah does withstand those There's a Riot Goin' On comparisons is the way it feels way more politically resonant than, line by line, it really is. It creates a charged mood, a climate, where everything feels charged even if (a) the lyric has no political content and (b) you can't hear what he's singing anyway. The way he chose to frame this, with the title, the timing and the press release, was so smart. He wrote his own narrative.

xp
Yeah I appreciated the sentiments behind it but he's generally quite boring and inoffensive in a way that feels almost studied.

Actually, some of the political lyrics on Black Messiah are pretty lame on the page. Cries/lies is protest-singing 101. but he makes it sound so good.

"Crawling through a systematic maze to demise
Pain in our eyes
Strain of drownin', wading through the lies
Degradation so loud that you can't hear the sound of our cries"

R&B "message" songs tend to be frustratingly vague lyrically, even if the general import is clear enough. cf. curtis mayfield.

I think where Black Messiah does withstand those There's a Riot Goin' On comparisons is the way it feels way more politically resonant than, line by line, it really is. It creates a charged mood, a climate, where everything feels charged even if (a) the lyric has no political content and (b) you can't hear what he's singing anyway. The way he chose to frame this, with the title, the timing and the press release, was so smart. He wrote his own narrative.

― Re-Make/Re-Model, Wednesday, January 7, 2015 5:52 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha i was all ready for his new amerykah pt 1 but when i heard it i was happy to ascribe that to PR nonsense and take his new amerykah pt 2

there are two remotely political songs on it and one of them i find unlistenable

That's exactly it - a Part 2 pitched as a Part 1 and boy did it work.

RTJ is just a misogynist fairly disgusting male ego trip from what I heard.

No, you're thinking about the post where you called identity politics a huge clique.

btw, Modern Neo Feminism isn't political at all, it's a club. An identity club. They're not fighting for any cause.

― ..but is he a virtuoso? (Raccoon Tanuki), Wednesday, January 7, 2015 11:52 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

remind me why you guys are even dignifying this idiot by providing cogent arguments for him to brickwall with nonsense?

i wonder that too. i wondered that about geir.

i wonder something similar whenever i see the ott thread bumped, which is all the time

haha the ott thing I really don't understand since the dude doesn't even post here

well indeed, and yet and yet 100 new answers every fucking week

guys, feeding of raccoons raises their comfort level with human interaction which is dangerous for everyone involved

we'd probably warm to RT more if we could see the bushy tail.

Dont get too warm

we'd probably warm to RT more if we could see the bushy tail.

http://www.lyricsmode.com/i/bpictures/1797.jpg

Well, yeah.

The Apollo Theater Presents a Special Evening with D’Angelo & the Vanguard: Black Messiah
Saturday, Feb. 7 | 8 PM
Tickets go on sale to the general public on Wednesday, Jan. 21 at 10 AM.

this is the first time I've opened this thread…have been too intimated by the prospect of keeping up…just am curious if anyone has heard any of the songs via the radio or means other than making a decision to listen to it? I haven't: I listen to Sirius's modern R&B/hip-hop stations all day long and occasionally terrestrial like Hot 97 or Power 105 in the NYC area when I'm in the car, and I have not heard any songs via these means. Haven't tried WBLS or classic black music options.

Is this weird? is his shit too archaic, sounding old compared to, I dunno, rae sremmurd or K. Michelle or the guy who does "I don't fuck with you or anything that you do" or DJ mustard shit?

and has raccoon dude used the phrase "social justice warriors" yet?

i have not heard about d'angelo getting radio play in NYC; BLS is certainly where it would happen but I think you're right that this is "too weird" for pop radio right now. Plus, no video that I'm aware of and not much of an effort to push a single.

Racoon dude has been banned but you should check this thread out; it's his thesis statement:
What happened to socially/politically concious rappers

I heard "Really Love" on the radio every couple days now, it's slowly rising up the R&B airplay charts. it definitely sounds unlike most other stuff on the air but R&B is pretty varied right now, there's always room for outliers. i don't think it'll hit heavy rotation like "Untitled" or "Lady" or anything, though. curious what else they release as a single.

is it that its truly weird? or do you mean that in the present black radio context, he sounds old-fashioned? to me DJ mustard's shit and any number of popular R&B songs are pretty bizarre and advanced…it seems a lot of the time Dangelo's support is somewhat…rockist. Like "this is real music made with real instruments about important shit, not going to the club, strippers, etc etc."

maybe my argument is off but i dunno that these songs have the same impact, out of the context of the album, as singles on the radio. Maybe i'm being naive.

i wouldn't say 'weird' per se, although D'Angelo's vocal style started out pretty idiosyncratic and has gotten moreso. but the fact that they picked the most traditional romantic ballad on the album to work the radio and it still has a long string intro and classical guitar very heavy in the mix, it's bound to stand out a little bit. the Kem and Charlie Wilson songs that dominate 'adult' R&B radio are downtempo and old-fashioned, but still really polished and slick compared to Black Messiah.

i don't want to make an either/or thing out of Black Messiah or DJ Mustard being way more creative or authentic or whatever than the other, they're both great and brought me a lot of happiness in 2014/2015.