Smile Tee

ORDERS OPEN: 2/19/26
ORDERS CLOSE: 2/23/26
TO PRINT: 2/24/26

PRINTED ON LAA GD1801 WHITE TEES.

ALL ITEMS TAKE BETWEEN 3-4 WEEKS TO PRODUCE AFTER THE ORDER PERIOD ENDS. You will always receive your item unless otherwise contacted. All items are final sale. We are not responsible for lost, stolen, or misplaced packages. 

There is a strange rhythm to the way the world moves now. Fast. Constant. Loud. We scroll, we post, we mourn, we move on. Somewhere in that endless motion, we forget how to be still. We forget how to feel. Lauryn Hill said, “people need reflection,” and she was right. We need time to sit with our memories, our music, our losses. To sit with the echo of a voice that changed something inside us. To sit with the sound of a note that once split the sky open. To sit with what our people gave us, because they gave us everything.

Think of the first few notes of 1995's Brown Sugar. They don’t just play, the bass moves like honey, slow and sure. It’s not music that demands your attention; it invites your surrender. Then came Voodoo in 2000, with its smoke and sweat and slow time. It was an album that taught us to be patient, to listen between the beats. It moved like prayer, like something conjured. His music skirted around the rough edges of R&B, the seedy underbelly of 1970s funk. It took the drugged-out, dirt-encrusted sound of Sly Stone and P-funk and pared it down to its barest elements. D’Angelo knew how to both move the listener and restrain them at the same time—keeping them guessing and allowing them to fill in the gaps of his music, both literally and figuratively.

D’Angelo has often been compared to Prince, and although the two share a clear sonic lineage—both steeped in the great American funk-soul continuum—in many respects, they are polar opposites. Prince’s music was huge and theatrical; D’Angelo’s was primarily marked by restraint and subtlety. It’s fitting, then, that D’Angelo’s favorite Prince song was “I Wonder U”, arguably the subtlest moment in Prince’s whole discography.  D’Angelo’s music was not made for hurry. It was made for reflection, for rooms where incense burned low and thoughts stretched long. "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" wasn’t just a song. It was a meditation on intimacy, on presence, on being fully alive in a single moment. His art, like so many who came before him, reminds us that the spirit doesn’t rush. It lingers. It breathes. It teaches us that greatness isn’t measured in trends or streams, but in how deeply it makes us pause.

You could say that D’Angelo’s music bore the best of both worlds—romantic and revolutionary, soft and hard, tender and machismo, masculine and feminine. Nowhere is this world of contrasts more beautifully exemplified than on Voodoo; he appears shirtless, chiseled, and dripping with sex appeal on the cover (just as in the famous music video), but the music itself feels almost supremely feminine and understated—the vocals airy and free-floating, the production minimal and crisp, the lyrics primarily tender and openhearted. Indeed, Voodoo is that rare thing: a 1990s hip-hop record that seems connected to the divine feminine. It doesn’t stand out in the records of the time; it exists in a category entirely separate from them.