"Knee Deep," Paul Beatty, and D'Anjelo

Big Frank is reading a Paul Beatty novel, "Slumberland." He's just getting into it so it's a bit early for him to be weighing in with some kind of eval of it much less a book review. However, one good take-away is the music that is referenced in the novel. The main character, called Darky, creates the perfect beat, moves to Berlin, and searches for the perfect musician to lay down a track for this, who turn out to be one Charles Stone known as the shwa because his tone is upside down, backwards, and unstressed - ⟨ə⟩. In the the second chapter of this book after a riff on having given up studying jazz to become a DJ, Darky then cites the song "Knee Deep" as an example of the ease of getting even an old grandmother to ease out onto the dance floor and "shake her brittle hips and swing her pendulous tits." And THAT is why Big Frank has included the song (see above). It was put out by Jay Morris, K Monique, and Z Brownlow under moniker of The J Morris Group's Z Brownlow.

Then, really only in passing, and keeping in mind that this is 2008, and at the same time that the reader of this novel, yours truly Big Frank Dickinson, is admittedly not really up to date, unlike the city where he currently resides (not Dickinson anymore, but Kansas City where everything is up-to-date), and as a result he had last listened to D'Anjelo some years back and was not even aware that in the interval D'Anjelo had gone through a real rough patch. It was REAL rough - by 2005, D'Angelo's girlfriend had left him, his attorney had become estranged, his manger was gone, and most of his family was out of tough. Then there was a car accident and an arrest on DUI and marijuana possession charges, D'Angelo left Virgin Records in 2005 and checked into the Crossroads Centre rehabilitation clinic in Antigua. Yeah, this dude was on the proverbial slide! OK, keep in mind that it's 2008 in the book and the reference is only one word on one page, and then nothing. Well, Big Frank was not going to leave D'Angelo hanging like that.

Fast forward to ... 2014 and his release of "Black Messiah", his first LP since the 2000 release of Voodoo. From that album here is one song played live in SNL: "Really Love." He is back. Yeah, Big Frank is aware that for all you music aficionados this ain't nothing new, but to Big Frank, it's as though nothing ever really changed because he never knew until today that D'Anjelo had been on rough patch, so his having come back is equivalent (in Big Frank's mind) to his never having left in the first place (sorry D'Anjelo but truth be told that's how it is!). What it is!