Miguel’s Breezy R. & B. Confronts Our Troubled Era

When so many artists have grown outspoken, the ones who seem carefree stand out.
The singer has always seemed untroubled, but that may no longer suffice.Photograph by Jim Mangan for The New Yorker

Sex, a cup of coffee the morning after, a quality bag of weed: as the thirty-two-year-old Los Angeles R. & B. singer Miguel puts it, in a single from 2014, it is the “simplethings” that make life worthwhile. Miguel has made a career out of finding creative ways to render small pleasures in sound. But, unlike many of his colleagues in the sex-anthem industry, there’s a quality to his freakiness that feels bounded, almost safe. There are limits to yearning for its own sake. He sings with a teasing and flirty confidence, yet there’s always a sense of calm and self-control. Where others treat sex as conquest, he plays the part of the dutiful full-service lover. Indeed, he somehow managed to make a song called “The Pussy Is Mine,” from “Kaleidoscope Dream” (2012), sound gentle and soulful, and not at all grabby.

There’s been a steady push and pull to Miguel’s career. When his début album, “All I Want Is You,” was released, in 2010, after a legal dispute between his record label and production company had kept it shelved for two years, it seemed reasonable to believe that he might never find the audience that his talents merited. The record was stylistically promiscuous, full of R. & B. songs that borrowed from alternative rock and electronic music, all of it lunging for some kind of distant, post-genre future. “Kaleidoscope Dream” was a more grounded affair, as Miguel grew more literal about the earthiness of his desires. The album was driven by the single “Adorn,” which sounds like a slightly hurried take on Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” shorn of Gaye’s neediness. His last album, “Wildheart,” from 2015, experimented with structure, trading in catchy hooks for lavish, psychedelic sounds.

“War & Leisure,” which came out earlier this month, initially feels like a return to economy. It is still exquisite and dreamy, full of swirling textures and crunchy guitars. But the songs are more direct than those on “Wildheart,” as if Miguel were translating slow jams from the nineteen-eighties into early-nineties grunge. “Criminal,” produced by Dave Sitek, of TV on the Radio, sounds like an indie-rock song that’s been taken apart and reassembled into something booming and majestic. “Sky Walker,” one of the best songs on the new album, is an enjoy-the-moment, poolside anthem featuring a slithery guest verse from the rapper Travis Scott. The song is built on a bass line that’s felt as much as heard—it conjures a tingly, full-body high. “Splish,” Miguel ad-libs every now and then. It’s breezy and fun, and he doesn’t have to try very hard to hit the occasional high note.

Maybe it’s possible to be too cool. In the past, Miguel has sung about his biracial upbringing, when he was “too proper for the black kids, too black for the Mexicans.” But he has always seemed like a peculiarly untroubled artist, too sensible to descend into existential dread. His music lacks that often romanticized sense of inner struggle that made artists like Gaye and Prince so conflicted about sin and salvation. These days, the bad man charts his own story line, in which love becomes yet another incitement for self-loathing, and sex is a pathology—a way to cope with insecurity, or to puncture a deep-down numbness. Some of my favorite songs this year, from young rappers like Lil Uzi Vert and Trippie Redd, have explored the moody extremes of heartbreak. They make love sound like little more than a prelude to pain, every interaction merely a breach of trust waiting to happen.

Miguel seems to pursue the higher peaks of pleasure for their own sake, because sex is about generosity, about being present. “Let my love adorn you,” he once sang. His songs are intimate without evincing vulnerability, perhaps because he so rarely loses his cool, or feels the need to wail or throw tantrums. But throughout “War & Leisure” Miguel wonders whether we can make an actual life out of moments of bliss. Like the Miguel fan, listening at home, who wonders if there’s more to life than songs about great weed and even better sex, Miguel, too, begins wondering if it’s healthy to stay in bed so long—if it’s really possible to “celebrate every day like a birthday.”

“There’s a war on love, just look around you,” he sings on “Banana Clip,” an ecstatic throb of a song that initially feels like a pro-forma attempt to dramatize love as a battlefield. (For his part, Miguel confesses to being “trigger-happy.”) But he admits, almost in passing, that there’s “a lot of terror on my mind,” as if it were something that can’t be shaken. In the video for “Told You So,” which borrows its funk pomp from mid-eighties Prince, Miguel dances by himself in an open field, shirt blowing in the breeze, while a rocket rises from the horizon. The video cuts between Miguel and images from protests and the nightly news. A song about love and liberation takes on another meaning: “Every pleasure you taste has its price, babe,” he sings, and you wonder what kind of commitment he’s talking about.

The album isn’t some grand political statement; it certainly holds more leisure than war. But in those glimmers and asides, such as when Miguel points at the “contrails in the sky,” it captures something about life nowadays, when the pursuit of distraction feels particularly fraught. Lurking in these tender and erotic songs is the worry that love, even a transcendent love, is a retreat. On a strange song called “City of Angels,” Miguel sounds as if he were singing through a bullhorn, while his vocals follow a heroic, ascendant guitar line. He imagines two lovers seeking out each other as their city falls, fighter jets in the sky. By the end of it, everyone has fled to Nevada: “I stayed behind to search for your smile / Hoping to find you in the rubble / Hoping that I could just hold you for a while.”

These conflicting impulses run through “War & Leisure.” Maybe simple things are all we have; maybe they no longer suffice. Last year, Miguel uploaded a song called “Come Through and Chill” to SoundCloud. Built on a frisky, traipsing guitar line, it was a nice tune about getting laid. A new version appears on “War & Leisure,” featuring a guest verse by the pensive rapper J. Cole, who apologizes for not calling a woman back: “In case my lack of reply had you catchin’ them feelins / Know that you been on my mind like Kaepernick kneelin’ / Or police killins / Or Trump sayin’ slick shit, manipulatin’ poor white folks because they ignant.”

The new album ends with “Now.” Over flickers of electric guitar, Miguel addresses the “C.E.O. of the free world,” pleading on behalf of the poor and the forgotten: brown farmworkers and black kids gunned down in the streets, from Standing Rock to New Orleans. Whether Miguel’s burgeoning consciousness is just a momentary flourish or a new spark, it speaks to something inescapable about pop culture’s present: when so many artists have grown outspoken, the ones who seem carefree and untroubled stand out. For Miguel, seeing the war outside is almost enough to cast doubt on leisure, the purpose of transcendent sex, and good drugs—even pop music itself. Maybe love is just a way of seeking meaning beyond yourself, to guide you toward a purpose slightly larger than yourself. In August, Miguel posted a video on Twitter, in which he sang a few lines from a song he’d recently liked: “Make America Great Again,” an anti-fascist electro tune by the Russian punk group Pussy Riot. Soon afterward, he participated in a conversation, for Flood, with Nadya Tolokonnikova, a member of the group, in which they discussed making art in troubled times. His contribution, he concluded, was to make music that might “bring people together.” In fact, that’s what his music’s always been about. But two is easy; maybe, for Miguel, three is as well. It’s what comes next that will be the measure. ♦