PONDERING D

           The following is an essay that aired on KChung 1630 AM radio (Los Angeles area) on August 5, 2012. Thank you to Khalil Huffman for soliciting and broadcasting it.

            Pondering D’Angelo seems never to lose its novelty for me, even in the past dozen years of the man’s conspicuous absence. And so to have him mounting a comeback invariably leads me to one more go-around, now in celebration instead of in a lament. I’m honestly not sure, though, whether it’s wise, because the act of devoting this kind of ponderous attention to him might inadvertently replicate the person-stripping gaze that Michael Eugene Archer was subjected to when his undeniably hot self beamed into cable boxes nationwide in the early 2000s. I’m talking here, of course, about the video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)” which tends to overdetermine any discussion of Voodoo, the last record he bestowed upon us, or, well, discussion of anything having to do with D’Angelo. Which is why I want to say at the outset here, before I indeed recite an entire radio commentary about the video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel?),” that were you to wipe that video and perhaps even that majestic song from the historical record, Voodoo would still be an album of such depth and density that even after you’re done listening to this D’Angelo retrospective, you’d be well served pulling the album off the proverbial shelf and putting it in your rotation again.

            But that said, we return to “Untitled,” which for better or worse is a big part of understanding why D’Angelo has been out of sight, except in momentary blips of soliciting undercover police officers or looking like Ol Dirty Bastard in mug shots. If you need a refresher on what exactly happened, you’re probably best off firing up your internet and reading Amy Wallace’s recent GQ article that’s prompted all this discussion about D’s comeback. The short version, though, goes like this: Voodoo comes out in 2000, the video for “Untitled” is released thereabouts as well, D’Angelo becomes the object of intense erotic attention, he starts to feel a little iffy about that when he plays live and has “take it off” shouted at him one too many times, and then once he’s off tour he gradually checks out, deliberately puts on weight to hide behind, and generally escapes into alcohol and coke.

            This is a standard rock star narrative, but there’s a lot about it to engage with, most of all the fact that, as a few writers have pointed out recently, D’Angelo’s experience mirrors the kind of objectification that women have to contend with every day. In her essay on D’Angelo on the site ThinkProgress, Alyssa Rosenberg writes that in the usual script, the one that got flipped on D’Angelo, “women’s bodies are dressed up for others’ use, whether it’s to bring visual pleasure or physical pleasure to the people who see them or touch them. Men’s bodies are presented as being for their own use, as sources of strength they can use to save the world, to fight injustice, to perform feats that are impressive and valuable in their own right.” And in responding and expanding on Rosenberg’s writing on Jezebel, Lindy West really drives the point home, writing that “D'Angelo was subjected to the level of physical scrutiny that's built into every woman's life and then immediately went insane” and that “it makes [her] feel proud of women in a dorky way. Somehow, we handle it without taking an 11-year hiatus from our jobs.”

There’s a cliché out there that if men could live for a day in women’s shoes, being subjected to the kind of bodily scrutiny and violence that women learn to live with, then the world would soon become very different. That hypothetical isn’t that useful in the day to day existence of anyone trying to undermine gender oppression, but there’s still a useful page to take out of that book. Pardon my momentary descent into theory here, but if our present day gender order still holds masculinity as an invisible norm, as a rational essence in utter control of male bodies that, as a result, frequently renders those bodies powerfully invisible, utilitarian, or even asexual at times, well, if that’s the state of affairs we’re dealing with, then part of how we might undermine this order is to present bold, even explicit images of men with their particular, attractive, scary, ugly, sexed, unique bodies, making eminently public the fact that anyone of any gender possesses a body, a thing that acts and can be acted upon, a thing with quirks, pains, pleasures, and vulnerabilities. There’s a part of me, then, that wants to imagine that when in the video D’Angelo offers up a full, vulnerable display of his bodily capacity to feel pleasure and be beautiful, that he also offers up a hitherto unrealized feminist media tactic of exactly the sort I’m talking about. But the aftermath of this rare display, those “take it off,” money-throwing responses, had an interesting net effect: it was as though D’Angelo had in fact also offered himself up as a sacrifice to a gender progressive future. He became a kind of male feminist Jesus, dying so that we might all have the chance to be washed clean of sin and reborn into a patriarchy-free paradise.

            Okay, so that’s a little over the top, but it actually does segue well into what I want to say next. Because in coming down from this flight of fancy, the smart analysis we see in Rosenberg’s and West’s essays—and, well, my own analysis too—comes up a tad short. That supposedly universal, unmarked, “normal” body isn’t just male, he’s a bunch of other things too—upper middle class, of moderate build, lacking physical disability, straight, and, well, white. Rosenberg’s statement that “Men’s bodies are presented as being for their own use” gets a lot dicier when you start to discuss images of black male bodies. Black bodies in the US have, of course, literally been considered the property of others, but that’s just the first in a line of controlling images so generously applied. Black men have been surveilled as one or another form of perpetual criminal suspect, whether thief, pimp, hustler, or rapist, and black women in turn have contended with a whole image series of their own, from mammy through jezebel to the welfare queen and onward. This isn’t to say that all black people are immediately categorized as one of the above images by the mass media and affixed firmly in place thereafter, that the media are entirely unable to view black people—or people of color in general—as without nuance or complexity.

But still, there are a lot of images ready to be affixed to those with black skin, and not just quote-unquote negative ones either. As Chris Rock astutely puts it in the GQ article, “I always say Tom Hanks is an amazing actor and Denzel Washington is a god to his people. If you're a black ballerina, you represent the race, and you have responsibilities that go beyond your art. How dare you just be excellent?” Lest we think this is coming only from the African-American community, earlier in that article we find mention of Robert Christgau no less, who stated in a concert review in 2000 that D’Angelo “was r&b Jesus, and I'm a believer.” My feminist Jesus has a longer lineage, apparently. Stepping back, we can see that D’Angelo became ensnared in that complicated, ambivalent position of the “Race Man,” that image of a black individual of exceptional, transcendent talent who seemingly takes up the mantle of representing, to black and white people alike, the greatness that black people as a whole are capable of, and a figure who, in an odd way, is almost expected to singlehandedly effect social change. The “Race Man,” as Hazel Carby points out in her book of the same name, is an immensely problematic idea, not in the least bit because the concept itself, down to the name, marginalizes the intellectual and cultural work of black women, whether straight or gay, as well as gay men, or, well, pretty much anyone who deviates from a hetero masculine norm. Now, as an aside, it can be debated whether we’ve seen more instances of the “Race Woman” in recent years, and with Frank Ocean’s game-changing discussion of his relationship with a man, one also wonders whether we’ll see a non-heteronormative subset of the Race Man trope being applied to him as well.

But in any case, in a move that might be even more insidious than this marginalization, what the Race Man trope does is allow for the achievements of a single person to be used to avoid addressing the structural inequalities affecting black and brown people worldwide. Instead, the black genius of a D’Angelo figure is used to imply that those inequalities are over, or at least over-ish, or to magically avoid those inequality questions altogether. From yet another angle, the Race Man is used as a figure to pin one’s own hopes to, to see his work and successes and get a vicarious boost in light of structural factors working to dash one’s own hopes of even a more modest success.

            Now, I don’t want to attempt to psychoanalyze the man of the hour here, but it seems worth noting that all of these images, all of this history—the perpetual suspect, the object of sexual suspicion, the musical wunderkind, the Race Man, the r&b Jesus—this many-headed hydra of objectification would’ve been something D’Angelo was dealing with already, as a black man and a talented musician and performer, before the business with the “Untitled” video came along. But throw into the picture another objectifying gaze—the one that dubbed him a next-level beautiful sex god—and it doesn’t seem so surprising that a sensitive, arty, introspective person might find himself massively overloaded, viewing himself through the eyes of others, and to say to himself, consciously or not, that he needs to do something drastic to reclaim his personhood. Which is why I find myself strangely admiring D’Angelo’s dozen year absence—it was, in a sense, a form of resistance. The doubling of his weight, the obliteration of drugs and drink, the avoidance of the public eye when, like it or not, it’s your bread and butter—all of this can be seen as an unhealthy, unadvisable, and entirely understandable way that D’Angelo negated attempts to be controlled. Like so many coping mechanisms and ways of apparently shoring oneself up against the outside world, the consequences were immense, and I’m overjoyed that instead of hearing news of D’Angelo’s death in that car accident or an overdose or another similarly painful-to-hear story of wayward genius, we have instead an apparently healthy and focused D, who’s found new ways to face the world but who can still slay everyone with “Untitled” at the BET Awards this year. This is the kind of tentatively happy ending I can get behind, and yet there’s still a desire to draw out, if you’ll pardon the pun, an object lesson from all this. But what is that lesson? Has what I’ve said here just been a long-winded way of saying “Leave D’Angelo Alone,” or is there something more to be gleaned from this that might save someone somewhere, whether artist or civilian, from some of the pain of unexpected objecthood? Perhaps if there’s anything to be learned from this, it’s about what can happen when layer upon layer of objectification is applied to a particularly sensitive soul, and to see in that a magnified version of what might happen to anyone, of any race or gender, when faced with this kind of scrutiny of both body and mind. D’Angelo becomes a case study of what we do to each other and what, for everyone’s health, we could stand to do less of. It’d seem, then, that the best thing I can do here after this immense focus on the body and mind of one man is to, well, shut up, to let D’Angelo sing, and let the results speak for themselves as they unfold. But if it’s not clear enough already, I’ve still got to say it: welcome back, D’Angelo. We missed you.