He started a record label, Wallshaker, named after his final single for Banks; he licensed “My House” to Josh Wink and King Britt’s Ovum label, who made it an international smash. By the early 2000s, he had chops, a little bit of cash, and a reputation that allowed him to tour. He also had a new partner, Mel Winders, and two young adoptive sons. With this foundation, he could have doubled down on Detroit, making an instrumental fascinator like Aztec Mystic’s “Knights of the Jaguar.” Or he could have gone rootsy, placing himself in a legacy like Masters at Work did by remixing Nina Simone’s “See-Line Woman.” But maybe he wondered, what would Prince do? His answer was, well, everything.
His debut album, unmistakably titled Uncloseted, is the sound of a Black gay man taking up all the space he wants. It starts with a radio dial flipping through his previous hits, but it doesn’t linger on them. Instead, it creates new classics. “I’m Not Free” is a protest song you could imagine either Crystal Waters or Le Tigre performing, a bandwagon of crispy breaks, tooting horns, and woozy little sound effects. On “Switch,” he invokes the spirit of fellow travelers in Black weirdo visionary culture like Green Velvet and Kevin Aviance, for a tribal-house kiki to rival anything Danny or Junior spun in the ’90s. He goes home again for “Tribute 2 My City,” but on his own terms. Contrast its placemaking with the Underground Resistance remix of Kraftwerk’s “Expo 2000,” released just a couple years previous: UR fuses together cultural powers with its chant of “Detroit, we so electric/Germany, they so electric.” Aaron-Carl, though, queers his geography into a feeling. “Detroit, the attitude,” he murmurs. There’s no place like home.
It’s also where the heart breaks. “Sky” pays tribute to Aaron-Carl’s father, who was killed in 1987, with a sky-blue house-blues lullaby. Plush drums blanket the ears as his voice does runs, raining below the synth pads, praying for the certainty of an afterlife. In a bravura risk of schmaltz, one of Aaron-Carol’s own sons cries out, “Daddy, I love you.” Imagine hearing that in the club. The first time I heard it—in a bathhouse, of all places—my heart stopped and I gay-gasped. Out of sorrow, of camp incredulity, I don’t know. But I felt it.
And then there’s “Homoerotic.” If Prince made drums sound like fucking, Aaron-Carl made drum machines sound like gay fucking. “Gentlemen, the orgasm starts now,” he announces at the start, and damned if it doesn’t. “Homoerotic” recasts “Down,” the track that made him famous but which he didn’t own, into a mid-tempo phantasmagoria of sweaty tambourines and Astroglide-slick synths. Its lyrics boast of the prowess of his ass, of how a moment with him is “so much better than masturbation.” You believe it. The song is Aaron-Carl’s “Sexy M.F.,” his “Justify My Love,” and in a just world, it would have made him as big as Prince or Madonna. But we know this isn’t one. The song made some waves across the pond as part of a new queer techno movement in Berlin, but never made much of a dent in America’s neon-white electroclash scene.