Can you believe this is his first interview in 12 years??? D’Angelo has cleaned up his act and is preparing to finally release another album and he talks about his past struggles with fame and the road to his return with GQ.
We’ve got some excerpts for you here:
R&B Singer And Mother Of D’Angelo’s Son Angie Stone Recalls When Fame Started To Take Over:
Stone remembers an event in Manhattan in September 1996 that was billed as Giorgio Armani’s tribute to D’Angelo. Stone—thirteen years older than D—was three months pregnant with their son. They headed to the event together in a limo, but as they neared the venue where D was going to perform, it suddenly pulled over. “He was asked to get into another car, where he would be escorted by Vivica Fox,” Stone says, her voice breaking slightly. The lissome Fox had just appeared with Will Smith in the blockbuster Independence Day. “It was a Hollywood moment. They wanted a trophy girl. I had to walk in behind them to flashing cameras. It started the wheels turning of what was yet to come.”
D’Angelo Turned Down Madonna:
When Madonna turned 39, she asked him to sing “Happy Birthday” at her party. One press report had her sitting on his lap and French-kissing him. In fact, two sources say that ultimately D rebuffed her advances at another gathering not long after. At that event, the sources say, Madonna walked over and told a woman sitting next to D, “I think you’re in my seat.” The woman got up. Madonna sat down and told him, “I’d like to know what you’re thinking.” To which D replied, “I’m thinking you’re rude.”
Sorry but we love that one!
The Energy Behind “Untitled” Was Less About Sex Than Food:
Paul Hunter, the director hired to make the video, says his work was misunderstood: “Most people think the ‘Untitled’ video was about sex, but my direction was completely opposite of that. It was about his grandmother’s cooking.”
I’ve stopped by Hunter’s office in Culver City, California, to hear how D’Angelo came to be filmed bare-chested (but for a gold cross on a chain around his neck), wearing only a pair of precariously low-slung pajama bottoms, looking like a wolf circling a b!tch in heat. Illuminated from every angle, he spins very slowly as the camera fetishizes his every ripple and drop of sweat. I’ve imagined a lot of things that inspired the song’s rousing lyrics (Love to make you wet / In between your thighs cause / I love when it comes inside of you), but collard greens weren’t among them. Hunter is quick to explain that he, like D, was raised in the Pentecostal church.
“When I used to sing in the choir,” Hunter says, “after the rehearsal, you go in to eat. I remembered seeing the preacher looking at a lady’s skirt one week and then, the next Sunday, talking about how fornication is wrong.” Such mixed messages about the pleasures of the flesh were intertwined with the pleasures of the palate—part of the same sensual stew. “So I was like, ‘Think of your grandmother’s greens, how it smelled in the kitchen. What did the yams and fried chicken taste like? That’s what I want you to express.’ ”
The video may have looked like foreplay, but it was actually about family, Hunter insists—about intimacy. Later, when I tell D’Angelo this, he says, “It’s so true: We talked about the Holy Ghost and the church before that take. The veil is the nudity and the sexuality. But what they’re really getting is the spirit.”
That’s interesting right?
Hit the flip for more D’Angelo quotes about the cost of fame and how he self destructed…
“One time I got mad when a female threw money at me onstage, and that made me feel fawked-up, and I threw the money back at her,” he says. “I was like, ‘I’m not a stripper.’ ” He was beginning to sense a darkness beckoning. He recalls a particular moment onstage at the North Sea Jazz festival in 2000. The band was in the middle of “Devil’s Pie,” his song about the spell fame casts upon the weak—Who am I to justify / All the evil in our eye / When I myself feel the high / From all that I despise—when he felt an ominous presence in the crowd. “That night I felt something that was like, whoa,” he tells me. E-vil.
On the last day of the eight-month tour, Questlove says D’Angelo told him, “Yo, man, I cannot wait until this fawking tour is over. I’m going to go in the woods, drink some hooch, grow a beard, and get fat.” Questlove thought he was joking. “I was like, ‘You’re a funny guy.’ And then it started to happen. That’s how much he wanted to distance himself.”
D’Angelo on battling his substance abuse during his hiatus:
“I didn’t really think I had a problem like that,” he says, taking a hit off a Newport. “I felt like, you know, all I got to do is clean up and I’ll be fine. Just get in the studio and I’ll be fucking fine.”
…on his arrest for soliciting sex from an undercover officer:
“It was just me making a stupid decision, a wrong turn, on the wrong night. I’m not the role-model motherfawker. Look at all the isht that I’ve been in.”
D’Angelo’s Connection To Marvin Gaye:
Later, when I reach Janis Gaye, Marvin’s second wife—and a longtime D’Angelo fan—I tell her about the dreams D had of Marvin, and she isn’t surprised. Her own children dreamed of Marvin on the night he was killed, and D is just a few years older. “Marvin is a protector, and I’m sure there was something in Marvin’s spirit that saw something in D’Angelo’s spirit,” Janis says. I tell her about Rock’s stern admonition that D needs to step it up, and she agrees. She even has a suggestion: “He should go to Marvin’s Room, the studio that Marvin built,” she says of the famed studio on Sunset Boulevard where Gaye recorded many of his hits. “Go in and take his fifty songs. Not to sound kooky or out there, but Marvin will help him to choose.”
Read The Full Article HERE — it’s incredible, we promise!
Photo credit: Gregory Harris/GQ
