About

Brown Sugar is the debut album of American recording artist D'Angelo, originally released in 1995.

Production, instrumentation, arrangements, and songwriting were primarily handled by D'Angelo, who employed both vintage recording equipment and modern electronic devices. Brown Sugar contains themes of love and romance, and features a fusion of contemporary R&B and traditional soul music, along with elements of funk, quiet storm, and hip hop music.

Upon its release, Brown Sugar received acclaim from music critics and earned D'Angelo several acco-lades, including four Grammy Award nominations. Regarded by music writers as a pivotal album in neo soul, the album provided commercial visibility to the musical movement, amid the prominence of producer-driven, digitally approached R&B.

The song "Brown Sugar" was nominated for the 1996 Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal Per-formance and Best R&B Song. The album was also nominated for Best R&B Album. "Lady" was nominated for a 1997 Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance. – Wiki

“No matter how delicate or dusty sounding a track may be, D'Angelo flips the script with B-boy savoir-faire: He makes the nasty rhythms bubbling underneath his multilayered love songs seem old and new at the same time. Call him an ndegéocello (Swahili for "free as a bird"), a rebel soul. …

Like his fellow retrolutionaries Me'Shell NdegéOcello, Joi, Omar and Dionne Farris, he's shattering the conventional definition of "black music." …

Brown Sugar is a reminder of where R&B has been and, if the genre is to resurrect its creative relevance like a phoenix rising from the ashes, where it needs to go.”  – Rolling Stone

More about D’Angelo:

“D’Angelo is an American R&B singer-songwriter, producer, and instrumentalist. He was one of the most influential musicians during the rise of the neo-soul movement, often drawing comparisons to his influences, Marvin Gaye, and Prince.

1995’s debut Brown Sugar had already strategically positioned D’Angelo—born Michael Eugene Arch-er and Virginia-raised to a Pentecostal preacher father—as the next Hendrix-like deity in black music, after Prince and maybe Lenny Kravitz. But since its release, D’Angelo had become distracted by weed and weightlifting, shaken by the deaths of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. and debilitated by sophomore pressure. In the interim he’d fathered two children, switched managers and jumped to a new record label. He wanted to be like Sly Stone, George Clinton and Al Green. And most of all, he wanted to be like Jimi Hendrix.

What happened next only added to D’Angelo’s myth. Having hit mega-stardom with the single “Un-titled” and its intensely sexual video, a follow-up was slow to come. So slow, in fact, it still hasn’t ar-rived. Though he’s since made guest appearances and even toured in 2012, his silence – both musically and in his refusal to talk to the press – has only helped his cult of status grow. Even if he never releas-es another album, he’s already given us so much.

He was one of the most influential musicians during the rise of the neo-soul movement and his im-pact on the movement continues with the recent release of his amazing follow up to "Voodoo," "The Black Messiah."” – Light in the Attic

Item description: