Afro-masochism

Some thoughts on D'Angelo's roots

We’re under so many spells, and pandering to so many inadequate languages and ideologies, that the tradition of intentional rootwork has room for negligence. Why curse people who curse themselves daily with wrong language, and who seem to enjoy it, their victimhood, their blurting out of phrases that undermine the personal will for clout. And still some singers are effortless and relentless rootworkers, and can spellbind through an insinuation trapped in a moan between phonemes and cadences, until our uprootedness yearns for repair and new grammar. 

D’Angelo is some singers, generations of gospel, soul, jazz, and Vodun had to converge with alarming deliberateness to bring his singular sense of space and tone forth in human form. His voice is so captivating he puts himself in danger to communicate the way he does, attracting enthralled and fiendish listeners who need doses of it to replenish themselves. Conjurers skillful enough to con themselves into the trance of the spells they cast on others, imbue D’angelo’s falsetto with a beauty that incites self-delusion. They flood him with phantoms so that he swoons and trembles through songs, hoping to repent his way from haunted to anointed. 

“The Root '' from his 2000 LP Voodoo, is the listless cry for rescue of this man possessed by his muse and desperate to sustain the turmoil of that attachment. His is the timbre of being trapped, captive, and enjoying it— a black mass for black masochism. Listening to him in this state of ecstatic distress is so satisfying it aches and you align with its textures against your better judgment, because discernment itself is dismantled by this music. You consent to the suffering that comes with witnessing all that beauty to reach the sublime it also promises. D’Angelo sings and the paradox of exquisite pain turns so sultry it exceeds seduction and becomes almost surgical in its effect, recalibrating your anatomy with precision. It’s too intense to be purely sensual. Even the lust it incites is cerebral for being so visceral. He proves the nerve center that unites desire and intellect, the gut feeling and the brain’s intelligence, and tells us that everything we crave as hunger is also a craving for knowledge or information. We hope to be forgiven for craving the knowledge that requires us to consume and even cannibalize one another, and throughout “The Root'' D'Angelo is explicitly vague about the outcome of the spell on him, to teach us that such redemption is improbable. Even if it arrives its effects will be inconclusive. It’s more likely that extreme pleasure will torture us into submission to it until we become its servants, and that the rootwork here is oppressive, not stabilizing, the kind that tricks us into surrender to impulses we’d normally resist. 

(D’Angelo by Anderson Ballantyne)

It defies logic and bypasses reason so well it feels malicious, like a curse introduced as a rhythm so you invite it in yourself thinking you’re welcoming secret knowledge instead of being manipulated by the symmetry of half-truths and wordless vocals. You offer your body to its mood because it seems copacetic, harmless, and potentially nourishing. Maybe rooting into this groove will help you shake off stray maneuvers and focus your energy on an upward spiral of erotics and healing. Or maybe you are feeling too vulnerable alone and vow to uproot that anxiety through unconditional devotion to another. The root is what’s withheld when everything seems entangled and professed beyond differentiation; it’s the gasps of light and murmur between rungs of a knot that indicate that a bond might be so strong in the wrong ways that it has no choice but to break and recoil after a while. The singer tries to figure out whether free will, divine will, or sorcery has inspired this yearning, and he discovers that at bottom, they are interchangeable. Rootwork is the ability to bring divinity into conversation with the mundane and settle the battle of wills by forcing them to coalesce. D’Angelo himself does this by using the style of gospel hymnals to testify indulgences too vulgar for the church. He punishes himself for his syncretism and blames the body for corrupting the soul. She done worked a root he snitches, as if a power he cannot restrain has taken hold, something elemental like the rain to the dirt, from the vine to the vine, and eternal because he doesn’t want out, he wants more. The root here is the source of all potential excess and all denial of source.  

I love this song because it marvels at the hold love and desire can have on a man’s spirit, and honors feminine magnetism, yet without a crusade to reclaim a mired love, there are no ultimatums. It doesn’t want its object back, or chase anyone. It wants the vantage it has, that of having lost your very foundation even as you carry it with you as desire. So much music that thinks itself romantic and soulful is actually flimsy and banal for fitting so predictably into the revenge-seeking or forgiveness-seeking binary. Love songs often become the lyrical equivalent of sending flowers—trite, worn, but they work in a fleeting way, and they wilt. “The Root '' elevates their potential, it simply came to amplify the power of whoever she is, without asking her for anything. It’s a praise song for the rootworkers, the women who leave such a strong impression their lovers don’t know whether to feel lucky or slighted when they inevitably leave the way miracles leave, having done their job. The singer is too busy looking for remedy for her absence to act demure. He’s maladjusted and lonely but not cruel or naive enough to return to the accomplice in his pain to ease it. Restraint makes for some of the best and most eloquent music. Paced like a horror flick “The Root '' opens up on a picturesque and optimistic ease, a smooth lightly rippling guitar steers us somewhere serene and uncomplicated. It’s not until the voice comes in that we realize how doomed the situation is to outlast its polite phase and become a pageant of disaster. She is who I identify with in the story, the anti-hero who still manages to be revered, whose worthiness seems to transcend virtue. She is the Suzanne who Leonard Cohen deifies, the defiant woman whose tenderness pierces your rigidity and affirms her own boundaries they are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever while Suzanne holds the mirror. Took my shield and sword, D’Angelo cries at a tilt, leaning out for love and he will lean that way forever. 

There isn’t much on-the-record homage for the women who disarm men of sternness that would otherwise turn them too strictly macho to experience the sucre of their very own souls. These women often risk their souls, their hearts, and their reputations, to deter us all from the cult of seriousness and procedure and restore improvisation in a world of mimicry, so that every new love can access a unique new root and territory and its own ritual-driven rootworkers. Hundreds of murmurs and sighs into his condition, D’Angelo loosens and accepts it, rides it, lets her work her magic. This is the calmest song on the album tonally, the crux of the voodoo, because everyone involved is involved as co-conspirator. At the root we realize there are no victims in love and war because anyone who wanted out would leave or dig themselves up from the grave of love, or would not be listening, or would not, like me, be romanticizing the sense of being the one who got away but never quite left. The fugitive who stays put, the root and she who works the root. The archive of inevitable passion is her soul. Maybe I’m being as vague as the song is about the details of its power for a reason, delivering my own root to an unnamed source where I left a part of myself that I can only retrieve by bluffing and pretending I left it on purpose. I’ve been with a man who believed himself under the spells of previously scorned lovers and it always felt a little shady and paranoid and real in the sense that he would speak of it and allow it in with each remark, that superstition making him alluring but willfully helpless and impossible to trust. 

So I join D’Angelo in chorus, I sing along and act as if the spell is working to clear false roots and the evidence is the grammar of the fragmented self reassembling the way a traumatic memory does, the way a D’Angelo verse blends into chorus as if it’s a laugh becoming a cry, or a divine joke mingling with divine sorrow. This is the music of de-stigmatized open-heartedness, and of reconciliation with what you’re afraid to face, in a world that loves the harsh and transactional to also remain politely non-confrontational. It presents the myth that unappreciated sweetness might alchemize into poison, that what is given and not acknowledged becomes etched into the topography of your life as your own roots, either to hold you together or strangle you depending on what you do with them. It’s also a cautionary tale, be careful who you attempt to haunt; they might end up singing about you so well you become their ghost.