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This essay originally appeared in issue #3 of The Pitchfork Review, the 180-page, full color quarterly magazine of music journalism that is published by Pitchfork. A gift pack of the magazine's first year is available here, hand-wrapped and ready for the holidays (until 12/17); subscriptions are available here.
It holds true that the more irresistible a narrative is, the greater the odds it veers closer to apocrypha than fact. The unraveling of D’Angelo, and the artistic drought that came in its wake is one such story. The story may not be objectively true, but it’s much like D’Angelo himself in the music video often cited for cracking his mirror and derailing his auspicious career. The story of D’Angelo’s decline is seductive, unusual, and instructive in any conversation about how black men express themselves physically through music.
The conventional wisdom on why D’Angelo hasn’t released a new studio recording in 14 years has its roots in a SPINfeature from August 2008. Stark and unflattering, its title—"D’Angelo: What The Hell Happened?"—seemed the only suitable header. At that time, the public’s image of D’Angelo wasn’t his star-making turn in the video for "Untitled (How Does It Feel)", in which he appeared nude, forged from chocolate diamonds, and displayed as if on a rotating cake stand. As indelible as that image was, it couldn’t compare with his then-recent mug shot, in which he appeared 40 pounds heavier without a cell of muscle, and with his face trapped in the 1,000-yard stare typical of men arrested for soliciting a prostitute. The SPIN piece drew a straight, bright line between the former D’Angelo and the latter. The theory was simple: turning into an overnight sex symbol shattered D’Angelo’s psyche and made him feel insecure about his music. He withered away under the heat of the lecherous gaze.
It’s a story about a man getting a ground-level view of the objectification generally used to oppress women. It’s almost poetic. But the question underlying the story is why the "Untitled" video got such a frenzied response in the first place, and that’s because it featured a rare sight: a black man dancing sexually. Contemporary black pop is perhaps more graphically sexual than ever before, but yet there remains a woeful lack of room for black men to express themselves sexually through movement.
The D’Angelo video seems like an odd place to begin a discussion of sexual dance, considering how relatively still D’Angelo’s performance is, but it’s actually a perfect example of sexual dance.
Broadly, sexual dance is the body moving to music in a way that is designed to titillate, especially by focusing on specific areas of the male or female anatomy. Movements are austere and usually rhythmic. Sexual dance is done in immodest clothing. Sexual dance emphasizes rapture over technique and form over function and is inherently submissive—designed to invite the lecherous gaze. The dancer tacitly forfeits the right to be viewed as more than a collection of jiggling flesh. Not all male movement associated with sexuality qualifies as sexual dance. For example, the pelvic thrust set to music is not sexual dance. The austerity of movement is there, as is the focus on a specific part of the anatomy, but the submissive quality is lacking. Pelvic thrusting says, "Look what I can do," whereas sexual dance says, "Imagine what you could do with this."
By these standards, most of the dancing seen in black music is not sexual dance. When Chris Brown dances, or Usher or Ne-Yo, there can be a sexual tone, but the dance is too technical, too clean, and too choreographed to be considered sexual dance. It’s an expression of showmanship and virtuosity, not sexuality, and it’s only sexual in how it evokes the broader idea of black physicality and athleticism. It’s a type of movement required of any aspirant to the Michael Jackson template of black pop stardom, and as much spectacular movement as Michael did, very little of it evoked sex.
A prominent, pre-D’Angelo example of hostility toward black male sexual dance is Hammer’s infamous 1994 video "Pumps and a Bump", often credited as revitalizing Hammer’s career as much as it is destroying it. The video is set in the pool area of Hammer’s 40,000-square-foot mansion, which later became a symbol of excess. But the symbol of excess most people were focused on in the "Pumps and a Bump" video was Hammer’s package, which bounces around as he gyrates in an indiscreet zebra-print Speedo.
The video was deemed too graphic, amid accusations that Hammer’s full erection was on display, and an alternate video was shot with a fully clothed Hammer. The issue came up when he appeared on Arsenio Hall’s talk show. Bashful and chastened, Hammer clammed up when Hall asked him to settle the Speedo debate. I interviewed Hammer in 2009, and when I asked about the video, his response was noticeably defensive. He told me men who were uncomfortable with and insecure about seeing him in that swimsuit created the backlash. "The problem was that men weren’t interested, but their wives and girlfriends were a little too interested," he said.
A more recent example came this spring, when openly gay rapper Fly Young Red released a video for his single "Throw That Boy Pussy", which quickly went viral. The video is straightforward in its novelty, musically and visually akin to a Soulja Boy video, except that Fly Young Red is gay, hence the big-bootied bodies on display belong to men. The male dancers, clad in tied-off tees and booty shorts, gyrate and twerk while Fly Young Red talks gender-flipped shit over the beat: "Clap that ass in a split/ Lemme see you clap that ass like a bitch/ Yeah I’m trying to get you back home/ So I can see you clap that ass on this dick."
The online comment threads on the Fly Young Red video reflect a wide spectrum of reactions. There’s outrage, amusement, support, and some genuine confusion—not to mention a good bit of internal dissent, with gay men debating the video’s appropriateness, and expressing a certain level of shame that outsiders were judging their cultural nuances. And of course, there’s plenty of religious shame. Perhaps the best comment of the bunch reads, "I just want to let everyone know that if you didn’t immediately repent after watching this, it’s still not too late to do it now."
There’s a narrower range of responses to another video featuring black men dancing sexually, Sissy Nobby’s "Beat It Out the Frame". In one portion of the video, Nobby, who ranks high among the boss bitches of N’awlins sissy bounce, exhorts his male fans to "pop dat dyck up," and they comply, whipping their packages around in silhouetting mesh shorts.
The relatively muted response to that video has two explanations. First, New Orleans bounce is a music scene with a good amount of sexual fluidity. Second, the aforementioned portion is a small part of the video, which except for that snippet, features twerking black women. So while Sissy Nobby is gay, the "Beat It Out the Frame" video isn’t necessarily gay. It’s inclusively sexual. If your thing is watching people sling their mounds to and fro’, "Beat It Out the Frame" has something for you. Still, it’s worth noting that in the online discussion of the video, that small section elicits the most conversation. It’s no easy feat to steer a conversation away from a black woman’s ass, but the men in Sissy Nobby’s video manage to steal the show.
Black men have little room for error when it comes to dancing sexually because that type of movement is not compatible with the way people process black male sexuality. Black men’s bodies are commodified to the same extent that black women’s bodies are, but in different ways. Black women are sexually objectified, while black men are sexually weaponized. Black men’s sexuality is expected to have physicality, a domination and a brutality that isn’t present when a man is dancing sexually by himself. There’s room for that when a man and a woman dance together, as it gives the man the opportunity to pulverize his partner with pelvic thrusts in a manner that, while inspired by sex, doesn’t resemble actual sex. But for a man, without a partner, to put his body on display through dance requires a level of submission that is as undesirable to black men as it is to their audiences.
There is a reasonable cultural and historical basis for black men resisting this type of dance. There’s a deep, painful historical context around black men’s bodies being put on display, robbed of their agency, and evaluated exclusively in terms of their function. His strength and his potency can make it difficult for a black man to willingly give in to the urge to shake his ass, which is an acknowledgment of complete submission. To do it with an audience watching is a feat, especially when that audience is expecting something different.
Black men are often complicit in their sexual weaponization. "Beat It Out the Frame" is a perfect example of this, with a sexual overture expressed using violent language and a premium placed on a black man’s physicality, stamina, and potency. "Throw That Boy Pussy" is exhilarating and transgressive, but when Fly Young Red specifies that he wants to see you "clap that ass like a bitch," it’s clear the video has its foundation in the very same rigid, binary ideas of sexuality and gender expression it means to rebel against.
To the extent black male sexual dance exists, it’s often done as mockery of or in tribute to black women’s sexual dance, and YouTube is teeming with examples. By couching the dance in irony, black men create a space to enjoy it by distancing themselves from what that type of performance signifies. The ironic stripper performance has become such a common framework through which black men approach sexual dance. That’s why so many people had no other way to process the Fly Young Red video other than to assume it was meant to create an absurdly comic effect.
While the American culture grows incrementally more accepting of subversions and reinterpretations of sexuality, relationships, and gender identity, attitudes about the sexuality of black bodies seem to have been frozen since 1965. You can fault Miley Cyrus for choosing to surround herself with jiggling black dancers in her recent live shows, but you can’t call her inefficient. Cyrus needed to shatter America’s wholesome image of her, so she used one of the most incendiary symbols known to man.
That said, black women, just by virtue of existing in a heteronormative culture, have tools of sexual expression in their arsenal that black men don’t have. Given the general hostility to black men dancing sexually, it’s a dynamic that is unlikely to change soon. That’s a shame, given what a potent tool the body can be to undergird the tone or message of a song.
It certainly doesn’t help that D’Angelo became a cautionary tale about the dangers of vulnerable, sexual body movement. His story is a fascinating slice of pop psychology, but one that comes with unfortunate subtext. To be black, and to be a man, and to be naked, and to be sexual, and to be submissive, and to be given to rapture, is to know you possess a weapon so powerful, you may never be able to wield it safely.