The Hardline According to MML

Monday night, me and the missus caught Sananda Maitreya (formerly Terence Trent D’Arby) perform at La Maroquinerie in the 20th arrondissement. I flew easyJet to Milan back in February to speak to Sananda for The Believer magazine; he’s lived in Italy for years now with his wife, an Italian architect. What I saw at the club is not easy to describe.

Or maybe it is. The conflict for me is that I don’t enjoy Sananda’s 2006 double album, Angels & Vampires – nowhere near the way I like TTD material like “Let Her Down Easy,” “If You Go Before Me,” “Seasons,” etc. – and all Sananda performed at La Maroquinerie was Angels & Vampires songs. The bassist and drummer backing Sananda are an Italian duo known as the Nudge Nudge (Enea Bardi, Nik Taccori); Sananda played lead guitar. The concert began with a woman warning us all in French not to expect any D’Arby songs, and we were off. After a few soulful moderate rock tunes, including an obscure Rolling Stones cover, D’Arby thanked the mostly white audience for allowing him to be seen as an artist instead of a nigger. (“You’re welcome!” someone shouted.)

Well. Sananda is a rock star, and even before our interview, I was well aware of his enmity for being boxed in as a soul singer by his old label Sony. The raw Sam Cooke inflections of his singing voice, as well as his café-au-lait skin tone, made it a knee-jerk reaction for a racist record industry to market and promote him to an R&B market instead of pop/rock. There can only be one Prince, Living Colour or Lenny Kravitz at a time according to their logic.

The entire issue is really too complex for a blog post, because other things get swallowed into the debate: have blacks en masse ever commercially supported artists like Martin Luther, Apollo Heights, Tamar-Kali and the legion of others? Is marketing and promotion completely at fault, or would most black people just rather hear R. Kelly than TV on the Radio?

Sananda and the Nudge Nudge preached to the converted, an audience that ate up “South Side Run,” “It’s Just My Pain,” “Sometimes You Gotta Cry,” “Boolay Boolay” and more feeling they got their euro’s worth. “We Are the Living” generated the most heat all night. In the end, I’m down with the name change and the expatriatism and the fresh start/clean state, sure. Personally, Angels & Vampires doesn’t grab me, but I don’t count Sananda out. Lennon had that valley between Imagine and Double Fantasy. Sananda is still a pioneer of bucking record companies for the Internet-direct MP3 model that Prince, Radiohead, Saul Williams and others have all also been fooling with. I’ll see what Sananda sounds like given a few more years of this freedom.

Below: two actually cool Angels & Vampires selections: “Reach Out” and “Share Your Pain,” live outdoors in Milan.