"Brown Sugar" – D'Angelo

**Adam Maness** (0:00)
1995 R&B is all drum machines and digital production, slick Polish, safe. Hip hop and soul are living in two different houses. All of a sudden, a 21 year old from Richmond, VA walks into a New York studio with a Fender Rhodes, a Hammond organ, and a head full of Marvin, Prince and Tribe. He plays almost everything himself, writes it, produces it, arranges it. Nobody asked for this record, but it would build a bridge between those two worlds. His manager announced it as the birth of neo soul, but D'Angelo never claimed that term. He just said I make black music, this is brown sugar and he's got someone he wants you to meet.
Let me tell you about this girl. Maybe I shouldn't. And the name was Brown Sugar. See, we've been making love constantly. That's why my eyes are shaved. The way that we kiss isn't like any other way that I be kissing when I'm kissing. What I'm missing. Won't you listen? Brown Sugar babe? I can't high off your love. I don't know how to. I'm Adam Maness. And I'm Peter. Martin and you're listening to the You'll Hear It podcast. Music Explorer. Explorer brought today by Open Studio Go to Open studiojazz.com for oh, your jazz lesson needs Peter big day. Big day. This is going to be fun. We're going back in time. In fact, we're going so far back in time that I got a little confused what decade it was. I did say 1995, right? Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. But then I realized, I mean, this, this is 1995 right here. This is Scream in the middle of the 90s. You how many? You how many Toyota Celicas I got in the passenger seat of where? A copy of that CD D Angelo's Brown Sugar was kind of broken. The case was broken. It was sitting on the floor of the Celica. Yeah. And it had the Celica also, by the way, it had ground effects. It had a had a wing on the back. Some McDonald French fries. Hell yeah. Smelled like weed. You know the whole. Thing half of this was kind of ripped up, but it been looked you. Know absolutely there was. What a. Time and it and by the way CD was on the floor, didn't even that Celica didn't come with ACD player had a tape deck with that. Convertible ox. Yeah, yeah, maybe it maybe it had dogs. Oh, 95 was great because we weren't really like Y2K. Maybe was just a little like a, a joke, a glimmer. We weren't freaking out about it yet. Not. Yet. Not yet. But I got confused 'cause I pulled out. You know what this is, my friend? Well, of course you know 'cause you were robbed there. But this was my very first. CD player? Where did you find that? Thing, this is the Sony. Well this is actually this is the same model. This is not the actual player. I found it on a little place called eBay. I can send you a. Link that is commitment to physical media this. Is the D50 though? This was the actual 1st and I was so excited for this episode but then I realized I got my decades wrong. I bought this in 1980 Five, I was going to say that's a little bit bulky for 95 Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was sort of piggybacking on our Michael Jackson bad, which was one of my first early non jazz C DS. Man, do you remember when this album came out? Brown Sugar. Oh. Absolutely. It blew me away. I, I remember it's one of those moments. It only happens occasionally in your lifetime where you hear music and you're like, oh, I don't think I've ever heard anything quite like this. This is like a new thing for us. I, I totally agree. I mean, it just, and you know, records that as soon as you hear like that intro, that it just takes you back to a place, man, what, what, what, what a wonderful thing that we have with this. And I mean, one thing about this is it it, it is something new and it does like it was like, whoa, but it was also something backwards. It feels familiar. That's the the genius about D'Angelo and actually all three of the studio albums is They both feel like something totally fresh that you've never heard before. And it also feels like something from your childhood somehow. Like it feels like something that's been around forever. It feels like something that is very familiar to the culture and yet it has this this air of freshness, this new combination. It's the mark of I think any true genius And I'll I'll throw the G word out for D'Angelo. I truly one of the great musicians. I'll put a. Capital on that G, my friend. It's really, really good and I love this album so much. To me, this is like the classic announcement of a brand new mega talent and you know, we were so excited about this. It's what really caused Voodoo to be such a massive hit as people were so excited to see what was next from, you know, the artist that made brown sugar. That, that that anticipation for Voodoo was so incredible. And it man did that pay off. Absolutely, and this was a time still maybe the tail end of it kind of. But when you were expecting, when you were, you know, coming out with great records and and getting hits and stuff like this did to have another record that next year, right, Maybe even nine months later. And he was five years till Voodoo came out. So that was an eternity then. I mean, it still would be, but I mean, this is something that's exciting I think too like this thing of like, what does it harken back to Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Those are sort of obvious things. But I think for folks that maybe came up kind of Gen. Xer type types like us and a little older and a little younger too. It was, you know, Prince, right, who was ever present still there then, of course, in the mid 90s and before this, but was so influential on this, but also the connection to hip hop, which I think D Angelo doesn't get enough credit for the first track here, Brown Sugar that we're going to dig into a little bit deeper. Even then we just did. I think it's such a an example of that. And with Ali Shaheed Muhammad, that connection with Tribe called Quest. But the grooves all over this record are like they're hip hop grooves, but he's singing soul and background. And he wasn't the first to bring these disparate elements together. But I mean, he sure was the first to like put it together and then his manager coined it Neo soul, which he didn't like and none of them liked it. He never claimed it. He never claimed it. But whatever it was, it was this, this soul jazz. We're going to talk for sure. We always talk a little jazz, but there's. Jazz musicians on this album too, but we. Have jazz some some of the greatest 90s or or anytime jazz musicians on this room. Let's listen to a little more brown sugar, and then I want to talk about the 90s a little more. So maybe let's listen to this open track. Get it in our ears. Let's do it big fat B minor 6 to start it out. Come on.