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About a week ago I was on a comedian’s IG and he posted a gospel group performing D’Angelo‘s classic, “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” They actually did quite a nice interpretation of the song. While there’s a certain level of humor in the creative license that the church takes with certain songs, I was taken aback by an overwhelming majority of the comments expressing that there was a level of blasphemy in taking a song with a clear sexual connotation and using it for worship. That was funny to me because these people clearly must have never heard Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye and other soul progenitors who walked this line to create an entire genre.
While Marvin may be credited as the one who most overtly made the sanctified sensual, I have to add Aretha to that list, hands down. This album in particular is a great example. I know she had a way with dancing with the press around this subject and she quite ingeniously led the critics on a wild goose chase when they’d try to get her to confirm it verbally, but shit, all you gotta do is listen. This album was recorded two years before she’d officially “come back” to the church to record her seminal Amazing Grace. Spirit In the Dark is so blatantly sensual and so essentially gospel, it can almost make you blush. I know I used to on this break right here when she says, “That’s how you do it / Now get on up to it / Ride Sally Ride / Put your hands on your hips ‘n cover your eyes.”
And the moves that accompanied that break were anything but holy in my house! Soooo… I rest my case. I urge you to check out the whole song. It’s a blues, really. Starts with Aretha’s signature gospel piano opening…a slow, sensual groove that picks up to a mid tempo funk groove. By the time it nears its end, there is an entire holy ghost break. Or listen to the vamp on “Pullin’” (same album)… Chiiiile.
D’angelo is from the CHURCH. So no matter what he does, you gone hear the church. So when the church decides to claim the song, y’all can’t be mad LOL… the sanctified and the sensual are quite interchangeable, whether we wanna deal with that or not. But I guarantee all your faves dealt with it.