Shit, Damn, Motherfucker

D'Angelo, My father, and the cleansed purpose of low-level street violence

Low-level, high-stakes street violence used to be a social imperative. If someone offended you, betrayed you, or stole from you in any way, especially if they tried to conceal the ordeal in half-truths, retaliation was a given, and part of the twin codes of honor and silence that came with manhood, or simply being human. Snitches were nowhere, vengeance withheld ruined a man’s reputation and sense of self, as did being a narc. The spirit was the only alibi, and if possessed with the lust for unjust justice, its efforts to be released were excused or disregarded as an intact survival instinct. Gradually, the reflexive get-back was bred and hybridized out of black social life, it seems. People were cautioned to mediate or meditate those drives away, and crimes of passion were relegated to the cinematic and fantastic. We learned to police our fantasies and our pleasures too became increasingly lukewarm and susceptible to revisions that diminished their presence and replaced it with pantomime of the memory of itself. I miss the ancient ways, old school ways, where scores were settled face-to-face between battling parties and avatars were corpses walked backward into the apocalyptic future. I miss them cause their lore and law are in my DNA. 

When I was a baby, my sister Debby was a young adult living alone in Los Angeles. She had fled from home at sixteen, for her safety and sanity, and when she returned to L.A. after a couple of years of community college, she called one of my dad’s best friends, the football player Rosie Grier, who helped her rent an apartment and get on her feet. She found a job at a call center and made it through, but living alone and young and beautiful, she attracted a stalker, who would follow her home from her commute and harass her with hostile devotion. My dad was in Iowa with my mom and me but on a visit to Los Angeles, he rented a stunt hotel room, had her lure her pursuer there, and beat and pistol whipped him within an inch of his life.  He never bothered her again. I miss the ancient ways, old-school ways. Law enforcement would have sent my sister into the stagnant spiral of bureaucracy, culminating in the protection of paperwork that means nothing against the desperation of men determined to hunt. Rosie Grier is the cousin of Pam Grier, and I’ve always pictured my sister imbued with the stoicism and ennui of Pam’s depiction of Jackie Brown during that era, doing menial labor with her gaze affixed elsewhere. And her father’s heroic villany finally exhibiting itself in the way she needed, a moment of rescue by the same person she’d been rescued from. I’ve witnessed the spirit of this version of our dad return and knock people over mid-stride, in the middle of the road for me, or set someone ablaze who I’d been foolishly watering and draw me a map to their ashes only to laugh them into confetti— the muffled rituals we share with the undead.

—

D’Angelo understands where the expression of disgrace lyrically leans over a precipice and into explicit transgressions. On his 1995 debut, Brown Sugar, the song “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker,” is a startling, unflinching blood-soaked confession and remorseless interrogation of an unfaithful lover and her cuckold; the lyrics kill them both, and drag them into the light as he’s taken into the custody of his soul as saint, and the law, as criminal. Vengeance is the only occasion when a victim is allowed aggression, no longer sublimated or solvent or self-abnegating or reasonable or internalizing the evil deeds done them, because finally the wronged party is striking out and refusing to recoil. It’s chilling because we’re indoctrinated in the fallacy that all decency is meek and capable of unconditional love even in the face of betrayal. The song is a glorious litany of perverse and dangerous questions that culminate in cathartic perversion, double homicide. On the album it’s backed by an intoxicating groove so seductive that when I mentioned it to a friend on the phone the other night she said she would just sing along, and had never considered the lyrics. Music can be so enchanting that we’ll romanticize a crime scene within a neo-soul ballad for decades before realizing we’d been spellbound alongside the singer, convinced he’s sanctified and would never sell us temptations to detonate and take another’s life. The song conjures a time when people felt and loved more intensely, trusted more fervently, and didn’t hide devastation by avoiding their feelings; they weaponized negative emotions to self-soothe and transmute them. Everything was a little less professional and stifled, a lot more drastic. More like my father, less like John Legend. Listening to the song now feels like an illicit act or a test, can you hear its lyrics without associating them with anything personal, can it be fiction or delirium or pure voyeurism, or do you identify and have your own version of blackout vengeance lurking beneath learned decorum. 

By the year 2000, at Montreux, a year after D’Angelo released his sophomore album Voodoo, “Shit, Damn…” becomes black metal, or punk, refuses to cower and intensifies its commitment to glorifying the punishments it exacts. Instead of pausing in symmetrical intervals as the recorded version does, the singer screams into his wounds for the first half of the performance then surrenders them to gospel for 4 minutes of improvised vocals that escalate into renewed frenzy as if we’re in a Pentecostal church on Sunday and he’s being baptized by the blood of those he’s slain in his heart, until finally he tosses the mic and raises both hands like a charging bull, starts throwing cymbals while the band squeals irreverently, and then goes from pacing to sauntering off stage, a half-innocent, half-deranged fugitive who has won the sympathies of the audience for admitting it. What’s romantic about this approach to an anti-love song is that it doesn’t apologize for its rage and destructive tendencies, or threaten with them, the negative sentiments are revealed and then left behind along with their catalysts, which is the truest revenge, letting pain dissipate under the weight of its expression. D’Angelo composed a sonic reckoning so thorough and unflinching that if you stumble on it while reminiscing, having forgotten it existed, as I did one afternoon on a walk, it might inspire flashbacks to a time when retribution was as candid as a knowing smile between allies in long and silent war, simpler times, when screams of deliverance were one falsettoed moan away from settling the score.