Raheem DeVaughn, 46, has been known and loved in DC since his early days in the DC underground R&B music circuit. He achieved major label success starting in 2005 with his Grammy-nominated debut album and hits like “Woman” and “Customer,” then went independent in 2013.
But for all of DeVaughn’s decades in the business, his most recent albums, including November’s What a Time to Be in Love, have connected in a new way.
“The phone has been ringing like crazy,” Raheem DeVaughn says of the current state of his career. “It’s never rang this much, in fact.”
DeVaughn has received renewed media attention as he’s embraced the influences that shaped him. What a Time reaches back through the decades to the ‘60s and ‘70s to find a voice that can address what DeVaughn is seeing right now, perhaps the only voice expansive enough to capture the chaos of the present: Marvin Gaye, the R&B legend behind the early ’70s masterpiece What’s Going On.
“Back then Marvin was talking about war, and global warming before we knew what global warming was, and the pollution of the sea,” DeVaughn says. “I want to make music that brings people together but also speaks to social change.”
Looking Back to Look Ahead
DeVaughn’s track “What Marvin Used to Say” off What a Time, which received a music video this past March, made that influence clear. The video–with groovy set design and DeVaughn, in Marvin Gaye-esque beanie, crooning into the mic–hearkens directly back to Gaye’s era. The song could have easily served as a straightforward tribute, but DeVaughn instead uses it to weave a lament for the state we’re in: the death toll of the pandemic, systemic racism felt both personally and nationally, the increasingly everyday threat of global warming.
“It gave me an opportunity to talk about the things that are currently going on in this country and the planet,” DeVaughn says. “But it also gave me an opportunity to pay homage to one of the greats.”
The video continues after the song ends, with DeVaughn holding up his fist in solidarity as a recording of Tamika Mallory, one of the organizers of the Women’s March, plays. She bluntly puts the responsibility for the violence in cities seen in the wake of George Floyd’s murder back on historic white power structures.
“Sometimes, just as we show the beauty of the world, you have to be able to identify and recognize the ugly too in order to change them,” DeVaughn says. “That was what that moment was about.”
An Artist and a Fan
It was the potential for that kind of move, the ability to create beautiful music that sends a no-holds barred message, that made DeVaughn a fan of Gaye’s since childhood. It was the lyrics that grabbed him.
“To hear this crooner-sex symbol make records that weren’t about intimacy, that weren’t about sex,” DeVaughn says. “It really stuck out to me that he had these socially conscious lyrics, songs like ‘Save the Children.’”
That balance between love songs and socially conscious songs has been a formula that DeVaughn says he’s pursued his whole career, stating that it can be a “cross to bear at times.” After he worked with Ludacris on “Bulletproof” in 2010, a track that suggests the government’s responsibility for violence and destruction overseas and at home, he says he read predictions that there would be fallout.
“I read an article that insinuated it was artistic suicide…I guess my line was drawn in the sand then,” DeVaughn says, maintaining that having gone independent has helped him preserve the integrity of his message. “It’s not as glamorous. It’s not as commercial or gimmicky. It’s the way of an artist creating that uprising of awareness for social change.”
Taking on the Mantle
Now, he’s taking the next step in moving Gaye’s legacy into the 21st Century, cementing the connection with a tribute to Marvin Gaye and the fiftieth anniversary of What’s Going On on August 14 at Wolf Trap, the beloved performing arts center in Fairfax County.
“I’ll be performing Marvin records. In fact, all the songs from What’s Going On will be performed at some point during the performance. If not by me, then by some of my artist friends that are coming to join me,” DeVaughn says. (The performance will feature a cast of national and DC favorites, including Daley, Eric Roberson, and Chuck Brown Band, the ‘godfather of go-go.’) “It reflects on the fact that he made it fifty years ago, and there are still a lot of the same issues that are going on right now. But also reminds [people] that the world is still a beautiful place through it all.”
It’s also the start of the next phase of DeVaughn’s career. He’s following that performance with an entire album exploring the Marvin Gaye catalog.
“It makes me a student to be able to unlock some of the previous catalogue and study it. And as I do it, I understand some of the similarities in the way I record, with the overdubs and the lush harmonies and arrangements,” DeVaughn says. The hype is there; he’s already secured help from classic names like Ghostface Killah (Devaughn describes himself as the “Nate Dogg of the Wu-Tang Clan.”)
It’s not just about Marvin, however, as DeVaughn looks to the past to find his future. DeVaughn points to Bob Marley, Sam Cooke, and Curtis Mayfield as other socially conscious artists whose legacies he wants to uphold–people whose messages he wants to pass on.
“I definitely plan to be that artist that carries the torch of the catalogue they left behind,” DeVaughn says. “Those are like scrolls, man.”
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