"Untitled": D'Angelo and the Visualization of the Black Male Body

Abstract

“Untitled”:D'Angelo and the Visualization of the Black Male Body Keith M. Harris (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. D'Angelo performing in Untitled, music video directed by Paul Hunter. Video frame enlargement. [End Page 62] The "Untitled" of this essay signifies not only on the title of D'Angelo's popular song, but also on the un-titling of masculinity that D'Angelo signifies through his discursive play with masculinity and blackness and through the visualization of the black male body. As such, this essay is approaching three things: one is a look at the text and the black male body and another is a look at the spectatorial practices that this text engenders. Finally, in consideration of the text and spectatorial practices, I approach the question of gender ethics or ethical gender constructs as they are provoked by the visual medium of music video. For the first part, I examine the African-American male body, its pop cultural contingencies and visualization, in one recent visual text, D'Angelo's video for "Untitled (How does it feel?)."1 This text is noted not only for the nudity but also for the visualization of the black male body as an erotic object. For the second part, spectatorship provides an opportunity to foreground the relationship between the reader/viewer and the text and the [End Page 63] critical response embodied. Finally, for the third part, ethical questions are raised in the particularity of the object of music video itself. Because of the text, its formal strategies, and its dialogic construction and intertextual referentiality, I begin by situating it in a more encompassing discourse of visual culture. This discussion is formed in an understanding of music video as a discrete form and artifact; at the same time, there is the secondary understanding that this specific video is in visual exchange with photography. The video is arguably part of the broader category of visual culture. By visual culture, I rely on Mirzoeff's formulation of visual culture ". . . [as] concerned with visual events in which information, meaning or pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology."2 Visual culture, then, emphasizes not only the object—what is looked at—but also the technology and the consumption of that object at the level of the viewer and at the level of the object's relationship to other objects as objects that are seen, as objects that are visualized. Situating D'Angelo's video within the broader discourse of visual culture provides an opportunity for an exploration of the present/absent medium, photography, in the video. In this instance, I follow Mirzoeff in understanding that the "task" of visual culture is to discern the complex relations between and among images.3 I Let's begin with D'Angelo, some background and justification for discussion of him. D'Angelo, the lyricist, musician, singer and performer, first appeared on the music scene in 1995 with the very successful album, Brown Sugar. Much of his public image is constructed around his relationship to music, black male musicians (Prince, Hendrix, and Marvin Gaye, especially) and spirituality (his southern, rural Pentecostal upbringing) and sexuality. These aspects of his image are demonstrated in, for example, the "reports" of his reading Marvin Gaye's autobiography and its importance to his identity and music; his discussion of visions and dreams during the making of the album, Voodoo; and more recently, his spiritual recounting of the birth of his son.4 [End Page 64] D'Angelo is categorically a music auteur, having more control of his career, musical and lyrical endeavors, and production. As an auteur, there are expressive elements of style and content in his music which function as a signature, personal expression, and signs of individual authorship.5 Furthermore as an auteur, D'Angelo's musical ethos is one of, on the one hand, an iconoclastic and rebellious funk ethic in which there is a musical blending and experimentation among rock, soul and rhythm and blues and the demonstrated coalition of musical styles through the use of collectives and artist collaboration. Also, there is in funk a configuration of blackness as fluid and ambiguous...