Fans have waited on a new D'Angelo album for more than a decade, and he finally returned to the mainstream with Black Messiah at the end of 2014. Despite the lengthy wait, several reports indicated that he rushed the album out in order to provide as swift a response as possible in the aftermath of the "Black Lives Matter" protests spurred by the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. During the second song of his Saturday Night Live performance this weekend, the R&B legend rocked a hoodie in memory of Trayvon Martin while his band The Vanguard sported shirts reading "I CAN'T BREATHE" and "BLACK LIVES MATTER."
D strummed away on an electric guitar while he and his backup performers created a dissonant choir of sound.
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Here is the December Messiah report from the New York Times:
D'Angelo and RCA, partly inspired by the nationwide protests over the police killings of unarmed black men, had moved up the release of "Black Messiah" and spent the past month working many all-nighters to decide everything from the track list to the album art, according to interviews with D'Angelo's collaborators and confidants.
After a grand jury didn't indict a Ferguson, Mo., police officer last month in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, D'Angelo called his co-manager Kevin Liles. "He said: 'Do you believe this? Do you believe it?' " Mr. Liles said. "And then we just sat there in silence. That is when I knew he wanted to say something."
D's 2000 album Voodoo was received with international praise and is widely regarded as one of the best soul/R&B records of the modern era. It is understandable that fans thought he would never return -- it had been 14 years, after all -- but Black Messiah is another critical triumph, scoring an impressive 95 on Metacritic.
