The Afghan Whigs’ ‘Black Love’ Is an Underappreciated Masterpiece

I fell hard for the Afghan Whigs’ soulful, confessional rock when I saw the video for “Turn on the Water” on a cable access show, and that turned into a full-blown obsession with the release of Gentlemen. I loved that they were from Ohio, just like my dad, and influenced by the Motown music that my mother turned me on to. I played her their cover of the Supremes‘ “Come See About Me”, and we marvelled at the way the Afghan Whigs uncovered the beating, broken heart of that bubblegum gem.

Seeing them live for the first time in 1994, as part of a truly unbeatable lineup of bands convened to celebrate the birthday of a Detroit radio station, was an otherworldly experience. Scrawl was one of the bands from earlier in the day, so Marcy Mays came out to sing “My Curse” with Greg Dulli, and I was lifted. About a year after that, I saw the Afghan Whigs play at St. Andrews Hall in Detroit. They were testing out some tracks from what would be the next album, Black Love. The show was riveting, and the new songs were powerful, exactly what I wanted from the next chapter. Driven by memories of hearing “Bulletproof” and “My Enemy” at that show, the wait for the Whigs’ follow-up to Gentlemen had been agonizing.

Ahead of the release day, I read an interview with Dulli about the record, and he boasted that the closer, “Faded”, was the best song the band had ever written. For someone who had come under the spell of Gentlemen so fully, reading that statement damn near took my breath away. See them end a show with it, and you will agree. See them live, period, and it will be hard to claim that another group is better. Celebrating their 40th anniversary this year with a tour and (fingers crossed) a new record, I am again counting down to the show in Cincinnati and checking news feeds daily for the album announcement. 

On an ordinary day in early February 1996, I went to my favorite local record store, my home away from home, to kill time between classes. Walking into the small shop, my ears caught what I soon determined to be Greg Dulli singing a song I instantly recognized from seeing the band the previous summer. The song was “Bulletproof”, one of two tracks they played from the yet-unreleased Black Love back in June 1995. That song still gives me goosebumps every time as it crosses the five-minute mark and threatens to spin out of control, an overflow of emotion spilling out of Dulli as he howls, “This ain’t love”.

I excitedly stared at the small stack of promotional compact discs that were in rotation, and there it was–Black Love. I asked one of the owners to run it through again, and I stood in the small shop for another 49 minutes to hear the record in its entirety. To say I was blown away was an understatement. I begged them to let me buy the CD, offering an absurd amount of money on the spot, but we met in the middle: I bought a blank tape from them, and they recorded it for me. I stood in the shop for another 49 minutes, unconcerned about missing class, while it played through. 

As the opening guitar kicked in on “Crime Scene Part One”, tears welled up. From the explosive “Do you think I’m beautiful / Or do you think I’m evil?” that hits about three minutes into “Crime Scene Part One”, I felt like my knees were going to buckle. Getting to hear my most anticipated record a month early left me a mess of emotions.

This was before file-sharing made release day feel like knowing your birthday gifts before you unwrapped them, back when finding an advance copy of a record you couldn’t wait to hear in the used CDs section could make you want to run out to the car to put the CD into your Discman that was connected via cassette adapter to your car stereo, hoping you remembered to put a couple AA batteries in the glovebox. I wore out the tape and had to strike the same deal to get me through to release day. 

While the raw, confessional power of the Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen translated into critical acclaim and, now, the record is widely regarded as one of the best of the decade, it failed to become a huge seller. In the heyday of Pearl Jam, it is unsurprising that a record inspired by Big Star‘s bleak Third and Marvin Gaye‘s Here My Dear didn’t race up the charts, but some things are built to stand the test of time rather than be this year’s model, and the band was packing clubs night after night, anyway. 

When it came time for the follow-up, and rather than sand the edges to make something more radio-friendly, the Afghan Whigs doubled down on their obsessions with funk and soul to create a song cycle that’s closer to a concept album than it isn’t. Dulli has mentioned being inspired by Ann E. Imbrie’s book Spoken in Darkness: Small-town Murder and a Friendship Beyond Death, a true-crime memoir that investigates the murder of Imbrie’s childhood friend. Dulli was a film major in college, and he never did get around to making that movie he was rumored to be directing, but as a fully-formed story, Black Love will do.

Gentlemen is more widely heralded, but takes the listener on a different journey. The pain in the lyrics and the precision of the music drive those songs. Black Love is a different type of song cycle, more thematically-minded than confessional, more dramatic than analytic. Musically, the songs have room to stretch. As much as I love Gentlemen as the record that drew me into the Afghan Whigs and as the soundtrack to my melodramatic responses to heartbreak, Black Love is the one I want to listen to more.  

Greg Dulli’s lyrics in Gentlemen had him playing a character in a song cycle inspired by a real-life breakup. In Black Love, he takes characterization even further, swinging for the fences to tell a fully realized story rather than a collection of snapshots that tell the tale of a relationship gone awry. Gentlemen ends with a powerful instrumental that provides necessary space to process all that’s come before.

Black Love ends with the aforementioned “Faded”, an epic sendoff that rivals “Purple Rain”, and surely Dulli knew what he was after there. I began dissecting it on my second listen and wrote an analysis of the storyline for the zine I published with my best friend soon after it was released. If Gentlemen is the Cassavetes-style, raw story of love gone wrong, Black Love is the gritty crime saga with a debt to Bonnie and Clyde, James Ellroy, and any number of other crime fiction works. 

Soon after Black Love, Dulli had a small role in close friend Ted Demme’s Monument Ave., a Boston-based homage to Mean Streets starring and co-written by Denis Leary. The end credits song, titled “Black Love”, is about as bleak an Afghan Whigs song as there is, playing powerfully over an image of childhood friends. While the song did not make the cut for its namesake album, it did reappear on the debut release from Dulli’s Twilight Singers project, sporting a drum-machine beat it didn’t have originally. Thematically, “I’d kill for you / It’s sick, I know” would be right at home on Black Love, but musically, it would have been an outlier, and it’s hard to imagine where it would fit into the sequence, which is perfect. 

The opener, “Crime Scene Part One”, sets the scene. The main character is at the end of the line. As he dreams, the evidence is piling up. The walls are closing in, and the way out is through an ending. The song builds slowly as Dulli shares bits and pieces of where his character has been and where we are heading, through lines like “Every secret has its price / This one set to kill” and the final line, “You could meet me at the scene of the crime.” The song recalls the introductory nature of Gentlemen opener “If I Were Going” and its tablesetting, but also announces that this is the more ambitious version. It ends with the glorious proposition “You could meet me at the scene of the crime”. 

“My Enemy” crashes into the end of “Crime Scene Part 1” and immediately raises the stakes. There’s talk of murder, love, and some truly memorable provocations, “You want the dog? I’ll let him out. Come and get some, baby”, and the soaring chorus “Sun is gone / And the sky is black / So get your ass / Out from behind my back.” There’s an aggression and energy to this song that makes it stand out on Black Love and also in the catalog.

“Double Day” presents more questions. The character Dulli inhabits here is drunk on love and other things and paranoid, but it’s left unsaid what is driving that feeling. Thematically more than musically, this song reminds me of another classic Afghan Whigs track, three, Congregation’s majestic, driving “Conjure Me”, with its unforgettable line “Gonna turn on you before you turn on me.” Dulli’s characters are often full of swagger but are just as frequently fools for love. “Double Day” feels of a piece with that theme. It’s not typically cited as one of their best tracks, and I cannot remember ever seeing them play it live, but its riff casts an unmistakable spell and serves as a bridge to one of the finest songs on the record. 

Next is “Blame, Etc.” With an intro that begs you to light the incense if, for some reason, you haven’t already. More than any other, this is the Whigs’ soul record, and the multiple ways to read the title tip toward that appreciation for 1970s funk and soul that has always made the Afghan Whigs truly peerless. The song is no tribute or pale imitation; the hallmarks of their sound kick in soon after, as Dulli wrestles with lust and desire and hints at what’s to come. The lines “A lie, the truth / Which one shall I use?” recur throughout the record, and here it feels like a buildup to somebody going down. “Whatcha gonna do? I know” the devil on Dulli’s shoulder implores. 

“Step Into the Light” is a tender ballad where Dulli’s lustfulness is laid bare, with lines that might be come-ons in another context serving as pleas here. It’s a quiet stunner, simple and powerful in its execution. Next, Dulli’s vocal performance and cocky lyrics anchor “Going to Town”, a boastful barn burner with a tinge of melancholic strings that hint at the tragedy to come. 

“Honky’s Ladder” continues that swagger and is matched by the blistering, unsettling guitars. Dulli taunts an unnamed threat, “Got you where I want you, motherfucker / I got five upon your dime / And if you wanna peep on something / Peep what I got stuck between your eyes” and “If you tell me don’t get mixed up with the devil / Exactly what I’m gonna do.”

The song is a strange choice to introduce Black Love to the public, and the video, directed by Samuel Bayer, doesn’t help. The band is the house band at a church with Dulli as the Pentecostal-leaning preacher. Snakes and healing abound. The Afghan Whigs’ videos are always cinematic, but this song and imagery just seem to wrongfoot the entire record to a non-superfan audience. My choice for a single would be the masterful, anthemic “Summer’s Kiss”. More on that later. 

“Night by Candlelight” brings things down a notch sonically, but thematically, this is the calm before the storm, with the character Dulli is playing ending the song by saying “There will be a reckoning.” From here, the rest of the record builds and builds to a triumphant finish. “Bulletproof” hinges on a catchy riff before careening into a finish that just manages to stay on the rails, with Harold Chichester’s piano circling Rick McCollum and Dulli’s guitars as he repeats, “This ain’t love”.

“Summer’s Kiss” is a fan favorite, an anthemic, heart-on-sleeve, unguarded and unabashedly romantic song that doesn’t let up. This is one of the most exhilarating songs to see the band play live, and it sets the stage for the closer, “Faded”, which is their “Purple Rain”, the song where they abandon all restraint to deliver an epic that brings this crime saga to its end. Is there redemption? Is there doom? A little of both?

In my mind, Dulli’s character is cornered. The end is inevitable, but is that just the way out to something more? Dull’s pleas to be lifted out of the night include lines like “Love is not my only crime” and “Get your ass up on the mountain, baby / I’ll take you up tonight.” The final lines are “That secret’s gonna kill you in the end, baby / It’s gonna kill you.” The songs share a similar runtime and a piano-tinged, extended outro.         

Dulli himself has not always been kind to Black Love, calling out its lavish production and some of his loftier ideas in an interview in the 33 ⅓ book on Gentlemen. He told Bob Gedron, “I should have had someone there in the studio to go [Gently but assuredly wagging his index finger] ‘Noooo'”. Despite that, there is a clear joy when playing key Black Love songs live, and in a later interview in The Quietus marking the record’s 20th anniversary, he characterized recording it as “more methodical, like going to work and having a good time. Not as torturous as some of the other ones have been”. 

At the time of its release, Black Love was seen as a step down from Gentlemen by many other than me. Allmusic’s Mark Deming wrote a middling review, saying it “lacks the thematic unity and power” of its predecessor. I have just devoted a significant portion of this piece to unraveling the story of the record, so clearly we disagree. Other writers have spilt significant ink on the arc of the songs, and retrospective pieces in Magnet and another 30th anniversary piece on Tidal’s website noted, “Once seen as the difficult follow-up to Gentlemen, it now feels like the moment the Afghan Whigs fully embraced their dark, cinematic instincts, resulting in their most enduring and timeless album.” 

I often have trouble deciding whether Gentlemen or Black Love is my favorite Afghan Whigs album. On the one hand, I have returned over and over to the tumult of toxic relationships in Gentlemen as I progressed from an impressionable 17-year-old listening to it for the first time to someone who can relate to the drama and ugliness on display in those 11 tracks. On the other hand, the cinematic sweep of Black Love is endlessly replayable, even when I am not licking my wounds. I even went so far as to try to write a script inspired by it. These are some of the most enduring and powerful songs in the Afghan Whigs’ canon, with five or six being among their very best. Fortunately, I will never have to decide. I can wear out my records of each. 

Black Love was the final straw between the band and Elektra. They signed with Sony and recorded 1965, a positively joyous howl of a record that can still get a party started. In a just world, “66” would have been the song that got the Whigs all over the radio at the time. Hell, it’s still only one viral cover away from blowing up now. It’s a grow-up lust song that manages to convey everything that makes the Whigs so magical in just under three and a half minutes.

After a long break where Dulli made several excellent Twilight Singers records, the Afghan Whigs returned with Do to the Beast, and three reunion albums in, they created a spiritual sequel to 1965 in 2022 with How Do You Burn?, another punchy collection of songs that eschews a dark throughline for a more lively collection of party starters, with a tinge of regret. Both records play like singles collections, rather than the themed darkness of Gentlemen and Black Love. Last month, the Afghan Whigs released a new single, “House of I”, a track worthy of their legacy, and I am already revisiting their discography in anticipation of singing every word back to them in Cincinnati this May to celebrate their fortieth anniversary.