Let It Splash Down On Me: Miguel's 'Wildheart' Turns 10

Let It Splash Down On Me: Miguel’s Wildheart at 10

There’s a pop sound that’s developed in the last ten years, by no coincidence in concurrence with the legalization of weed in the United States—a sort of indica-disco, half-classic rock, half-French touch and all R&B; you can hear it in Kali Uchis, Steve Lacy, Harry Styles, and even Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” whose pulse is so much thicker and more psychedelic than the sort of comparable Mickey Mouse beach song Katy Perry might’ve sung a decade prior. When Tame Impala’s Currents gets its hosannas in a few weeks as its own anniversary pieces roll around, it’ll rightly be feted as a precursor to this sound. But there’s a wilder, weirder album that came out a few weeks before, one that doesn’t get nearly enough credit for predicting what the next decade of pop would sound like: Wildheart, the third album from the R&B eccentric Miguel.

Listen to “Waves” and you’ll hear Styles’ “Watermelon Sugar” and Steve Lacy’s “Bad Habits” in utero. Listen to him occupy the suit of a bloodsucking capitalist on “Deal” and recall Kali Uchis’ own uptempo vampire exorcism, “Your Teeth in My Neck.” Listen to the flangers and phasers on the guitars, which represented a bold turn towards rock from an established R&B star at a time when Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker was forswearing Beatleisms for Timbalandisms and UMO guitar god Ruban Nielson was writing disco songs about polycules. Wildheart was a bold and risky move at the time, not least because Miguel was using these shades to paint himself as an archetype that pop culture was seriously considering allowing to die: the oiled-up, crotch-stuffing sex god, wielding a phallic guitar like a scepter of authority. (It didn’t help that featured guest Lenny Kravitz’s own phallic incident took place just months after he played guitar on Wildheart.)

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I wonder if future generations will really understand the climate of the first few years of the 2010s pop moral reckoning. In those few years between “Blurred Lines” and the Trump victory, the arc of the universe still looked like it was bending towards good, albeit with a bit of shoehorning. The pop-culture sphere was gripped by a collective imperative to take out the trash—to excise all the creeps and bigots from the mainstream, to reject sucky heroes like John Lennon and Eric Clapton and exalt underloved women and PoC auteurs like Alice Coltrane and Rosetta Tharpe, to grow the great-music canon beyond the usual white classic rock chestnuts.

Rock music itself got a lot of flak during this era, with the decrepit Hollywood Vampires performance at the 2016 Grammys as the entire genre’s arguable nadir, and it wasn’t until the emo revival and the more inclusive wave of indie rock, led by the likes of Mitski and Phoebe Bridgers, that the rock bugaboo subsided and it became celebrated as vital music again. A sort of lobotomized sexlessness reigned on the pop charts, either deliberate (Future and Drake’s narcotized, pill-popping zombie rap) or otherwise (Charlie Puth and Meghan Trainor’s limp-fish trad-pop). For Miguel to go down the rock road was riskier than I think a lot of people remember.

Wildheart didn’t do much—or try to do much—to dispel the perception of rock as the terrain of sexual aggression and chauvinist vulgarity. A lot of Wildheart is about what he wants and how he wants it, some of the sex sounds rough and of dubious consent, and he talks a lot about how romantic it is to die young, as if he’s suddenly going to grab the wheel from you. He sounds like a good lay but not an especially stable person, and it’s a lot harder to buy the egalitarian hunk angle some critics tried to sell in their reviews following an ugly sexual assault allegation against Miguel in 2017, whom the accuser claims touched her breast inappropriately during a meeting at a club.

The music on Wildheart transcends the Motley Crüe clichés the poptimist movement was trying to kill, even if Miguel’s behavior didn’t. I think the reason the album sounds so sexy, in spite of not being that much less troglodytic than your run-of-the-mill pop album by a straight man, is because it’s so well-written and well-sung. Listening to “Coffee,” you can imagine yourself as the lover who’ll fuck you, make conversation with you and bring you coffee in the morning, or the lucky girl/guy (the bent-over figure on the cover is pointedly ambiguous) who’s being pampered. If you can make “fuck” sound transgressive in 2015, congratulations: You’re sexy. It was striking to return to “The Valley” after all these years and reflect that “fuck,” now a word in the public vocabulary of the president, hasn’t sounded transgressive since then. Is this the last place that word ever felt like anything?

My Pitchfork colleagues Walden Green and Harry Tafoya recently invented the delightful game of real-freak-fake-freak—i.e. say “real freak: Gary Numan; fake freak: Trent Reznor” at a dinner party and watch people get defensive. I think a key element of real-freakness is understanding how being a freak lets you take control of your own narrative, and Miguel underlines this point—maybe too explicitly—on “What’s Normal Anyway,” where the Afro-Chicano artist and former Jehovah’s Witness describes all the ways he feels stuck between two worlds. In a mostly positive review, the heelish but perceptive rock critic Robert Christgau said Wildheart reflected “rock’s endless succession of coming-of-age struggles” more than R&B’s “sin-versus-salvation struggles,” though that may just be a consequence of R&B’s emerging post-Drake emo moment.

Prior to Wildheart, Miguel was a critically-acclaimed, lower-chart denizen in a similar stratum to Ryan Leslie or Jazmine Sullivan: someone that anyone who followed R&B knew was working at a scary and exciting level of talent, but whom namedropping in casual conversation (even with white indie rockers just jumping on the R&B bandwagon) might be greeted with blank stares. The album that will likely go down as his masterpiece is 2012’s Kaleidoscope Dream, which had a similar tenor of utopian drugginess to Wildheart but nowhere near as many rock trappings; before that was the great “Adore,” the Art Dealer Chic EP, and a debut called All I Want Is You whose sleeve depicts him as some sort of cyber-dance-maven and belies the tenderness within.

Wildheart turned Miguel into something else, but it’s hard to tell exactly what that was, or if it really existed outside the 46-minute confines of this album. He made one more album, War & Leisure, which kind of sucked; the love-in-wartime concept was cool, but his sociopolitical conscience rubbed up against the sex talk in weird ways, and it didn’t really work as either of the things it was trying to be. That was the year of the allegation, and he has kept a low profile since: He got married and divorced. Recently he’s been affecting a goth look and teasing something called Viscera, which hasn’t come yet. We get an EP every couple years, and he’s flirted with finding stardom in the Latin world, pulling the same kind of soft-disappearance from the Anglophone market as the Black Eyed Peas did shortly thereafter.

Nothing since Wildheart has garnered nearly the same level of acclaim, even if some of the reviews felt like overcorrections for underrating Kaleidoscope Dream the first time around. Anupa Mistry’s Pitchfork review compared him to pleasant MOR pop-soul craftsman Leon Bridges and a then-pre-Blonde Frank Ocean, neither of which is a crazy stretch but neither of which is really right; that those were the closest reference points just shows how ahead of its time the music was. His closest contemporary might’ve been Janelle Monaé, whose 2010 album The ArchAndroid is arguably the most successful fusion of pop with psych-rock in its decade. But Miguel’s real contemporaries are the artists who would pick up on his freak flag-waving and rock mystic self-styling in the decade to come. 10 years later, Wildheart stands with the best of them.

Daniel Bromfield is a writer, editor, and musician from San Francisco, CA. He currently works as Calendar Editor at the Marin Independent Journal and is a prolific freelancer, with bylines at Pitchfork, Atlas Obscura, Resident Advisor, and local media in the Bay Area. He runs the popular @RegionalUSFood Twitter account, highlighting obscure dishes from across the US. Find him on Twitter at @bromf3.

Let It Splash Down On Me: Miguel’s Wildheart at 10

Miguel’s real contemporaries are the artists who would pick up on his freak flag-waving and rock mystic self-styling in the decade to come. 10 years later, Wildheart stands with the best of them.