D’Angelo broke his decade and a half streak of reclusiveness last December when he released his well-received third studio album, Black Messiah.
Since then, as the one of the last Mohican of neo-soul, D’Angelo toured the world and promoted his musical messages via live television appearances. Unsurprisingly, it has been more than ten years since the 41-year-old singer has given a television interview but all that changed during an hour-long sitdown with PBS and The Tavis Smiley Show last week.
While topics shifted between his hiatus and Black Lives Matter (“I’m not trying to be like a poster child or anything of the movement, but definitely a voice as a Black man — as a concerned Black man and as a father, as well,” he admitted), it was D’Angelo’s biggest contribution to pop culture history that offered up the biggest revelation.
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“Untitled (How Does It Feel),” the lead single to his sophomore effort, Voodoo, won a Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance and its video (featuring a presumably butt booty ass naked D’Angelo) made ladies swoon all the way up to Black Messiah‘s release.
“It would bother me a lot of times live when we were touring for Voodoo and I had this amazing band…and were doing a lot of amazing stuff musically and a lot of ladies would just be screaming, ‘Take it off!,'” he recalled. “I kind of felt like, for a lack of better thing, a male stripper.”
Of course, being a young, Black male on the road with six-pack abs, D’Angelo admitted he wasn’t “mad at that” with a hearty laugh.
Check out D’Angelo’s two-part interview with Tavis Smiley on the next page.
H/T: Huffington Post
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Photo: PBS
