>And while I like D'Angelo I never really took to his stuff,
>although I liked Black Messiah more than I thought I would.
>
>To me both artists are genius in their craftsmanship more than
>their ability to break 'new' ground with their music or
>subject matter.
>
>I consider a genius to create a *new* way to organize music or
>a new way to contextualize music.

This distinction is really murky though for at least two reasons. First, "new" is incredibly ambiguous when it comes to musical creation. It's of course subjective to the listener (what is new and radical to one may not seem new or radical to another) but more than that, "new and iconoclastic" exists in this strangely immeasurable space. Totally random but I am reminded of a quote from a religious historian, "... the shift from orthodoxy to heresy may be no more than a shift of emphasis." Which is to say that the new can be far more subtle than we expect even if its effects, in the short or long term, are extensive and unprecedented. We notice the new that is explosive, obvious but that does not describe all things new.

(And why our obsession with new-ness as some criteria for brilliance and greatness? That is another post.)

All that said... I've given my take on what makes D truly unique in my mind before but I'll give a quick version here. I am speaking here mainly of the innovations that come w/Voodoo and later expanded on by Black Messiah. D's uniqueness is about a total inversion of what we expect in vocals.

In music we normally expect a clear melody with harmonies playing a supportive role in the background, or at least a definable leading line. D has not wholly forsaken this - there's still often a leading melodic line - but even from an early point, with Brown Sugar, he's challenged and rethought the way vocals are traditionally structured. It's not even that he's simply inverted them, emphasizing harmony over melody (although this is part of it). He actually scrambles the entire melodic/harmonic project and makes the whole collection of layered vocals the thing, and those layered vocals are never a static thing -- they are very frequently themselves moving, rarely repeating themselves, shifting/swapping parts and emphases, etc.

This is why it's often hard to hum with a song on Voodoo or Black Messiah straight through... if there is a melody, it's at one point or another pushed back into the muddy waters of vocal harmonics that he's built layer by layer. One Mo Gin is a good example of this, where it actually has a pretty clear melodic line in the verses but the chorus is just this dense cluster of voices that sort of/kind of has a melody but on the other hand doesn't at all... instead it has layered moving vocals that *suggest* a melody but never fulfill it, never flesh it out or highlight it. The Root is another good example.

This is why the muddiness of D's lyrics actually make sense to me conceptually. That muddiness/mumbling actually tracks in some ways to how far D has pushed this aspect of his vocals... several tracks on Black Messiah are, to me, even more radical in this regard than Voodoo, and you can't make out half of what he's saying on that album at all lol.

This isn't without precedent. I think we think of Prince when we hear D's dense vocal layers and he does a bit of this vocal inversion but it was never a hallmark for him, almost more incidental (think of the vocals on the closing refrain of "Condition of the Heart"). Riot/Fresh-era Sly is closer imo (think the vocals on Just Like a Baby); a lot of p-funk vocals too. But again, D centers this approach to his entire aesthetic. It's arguably his music's most definable and defining characteristic and I think he pushes it much further than others have. (It might also be the most misunderstood, or at least underappreciated, for reasons that I won't go into here...)

I'll stop there even though I kind of want to talk about this all day... lol. I don't think it's mere craftsmanship though. I think there's a lot of vision behind it - conscious or unconscious - and is why his music in some ways is unlike anything else. It's extremely unorthodox and pushes his music into territory bordering on the avant-garde if you listen to it from a certain perspective.

-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~