Revisiting “Angel In Disguise,” The Song Jack Harlow Didn’t Know Was Brandy’s

Cynicism is a growing phenomenon in music. True love songs are hard to come by these days. Deriving its name from Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” Yellow Diamonds is a series of lyric breakdowns in which VIBE Senior Music Editor Austin Williams celebrates songs that sound like love found in a hopeless mainstream.

Last Wednesday (May 11), Jack Harlow made headlines for something other than his recently released sophomore album. While on the road promoting Come Home The Kids Miss You, the Kentucky native stopped by New York’s Hot 97 morning show for what the radio hosts called “WhiteIshWednesday.” Unquestionably, the whitest thing that happened was Harlow not recognizing Brandy’s voice in “Angel in Disguise” during a music trivia game.

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As this column celebrates love songs in a landscape that’s long-abandoned romantic music, I can’t begrudge a 24-year-old rapper for not knowing a ballad that was released the year he was born. Even Brandy seemed to take the situation lightly, as the Queens star joked on Twitter early Tuesday morning (May 17), “I will murk this dude in rap at 43 on his own beats and still sing [h]is a** to sleep.” But what was truly shocking to others—so much so that some even considered it offensive—was Harlow didn’t seem to know who Brandy was at all. Seeing the internet’s reaction to this sparked a long, winding train of thought that prompted me to revisit the lyrics of “Angel in Disguise,” a beautifully written song about still loving your ex and hating on the person they left you for.

As a music journalist, a Millennial, and a Black man, I experienced four distinct emotions while watching Harlow struggle to name the song or singer he was hearing during his morning show appearance. With my expectations not being very high in the first place, I was initially impressed when the beat to “Angel in Disguise” dropped and he guessed the song was by Aaliyah. When the Never Say Never single was released, even critics at the time compared its production to that of Aaliyah’s most popular hit, “One in a Million.”

The very next thing I felt was a sense of secondhand embarrassment. Because it should have been obvious who the vocalist was once Brandy began the record’s opening monologue. It’s hard to overstate just how famous the former Moesha star was at the turn of the century. Beyond her virtuosic singing that earned her the nickname “the Vocal Bible,” Brandy’s face and voice have been on television sets for the entirety of Harlow’s life. In 1998, her hit sitcom was at its peak and would be aired in syndication throughout the next two decades on both white and Black networks—the latter of which Harlow presumably watched as someone interested in Black culture. As I write this, I can’t think of a singer-actor with a more recognizable speaking voice than hers.

What I felt next while watching the viral clip was head-to-toe ickiness. After Harlow was still unable to guess who was singing despite Laura Stylez, one of the morning show’s three hosts, hinting, “She starred in a TV show,” co-host Ebro Darden offered a much weirder tip: “Her brother had an amazing sex tape.”

A child of the TMZ era, Harlow immediately got warmer but still had no clue who Brandy was despite being familiar with the exploits of her brother. “Who’s Ray J’s sister?” was the Jeopardy–style quote that angered R&B fans the most last week. Understanding the unintended grossness of reducing Brandy’s legacy to her siblinghood with a man best known for a tabloid story, the final emotion I felt was schadenfreude.

For an uncomfortably long time (honestly just a few months), Black women online have expressed their attraction to Jack Harlow. Most Black men have suffered this phenomenon in silence, as the “First Class” rapper is wholly unproblematic, genuinely funny and talented, and surprisingly tall—meaning we simply had no ammunition for hate. But the moment I realized my sisters in Christ would turn on this young man, I thought to myself, “We got him,” in my best Druski impression.

I’m obviously joking. Neither I nor any other dude I know actually have anything against Jack Harlow. But what’s ironic about this playful hate (and even Brandy’s own tongue-in-cheek response) is that “Angel in Disguise” is a deceptively hating a** love song.

Someday, I’ll do a deep dive on R&B’s long tradition of dirty macking love songs, which includes classics like Destiny’s Child’s “She Can’t Love You,” Mary J. Blige’s “I Can Love You,” and Joe’s “All The Things (Your Man Won’t Do).” But today, inspired by Jack Harlow, Twitter pettiness, and there not being any new R&B music I’m interested in covering, I’m starting with “Angel in Disguise,” a love song for the ages ironically written with a subtle hint of hate.

The monologue heard during Jack Harlow’s viral Hot 97 clip is the above spoken-word prelude from “Angel in Disguise.” These are the lyrics that distinguish the record as a love song that simultaneously makes space for hate. If Harlow got back to his hotel room after leaving the radio station, searched for the track on Spotify, and pressed play expecting to hear a song about a lover so heaven-sent they must be an angel on earth, he was wrong for the second time that day.

Throughout this piece of poetry, Brandy clarifies that the actual angel in disguise is the woman her partner abandoned her to be with. This other woman, who was once thought to be one of “God’s most precious works,” apparently “fooled” the singer’s man into thinking she was something that she wasn’t. In this sense, Brandy’s competition isn’t an angel in disguise, but rather a devil disguised as an angel.

Yet, despite her ex finding out his new flame was a fraud, Brandy maintains, “Still, I love you.” What makes this dirty macking so entertaining is it’s incredibly dramatic and even a little insensitive. Imagine getting your heart broken and having your ex call you up to say, “Hurt and pain could never come from her/ So you left me only to find that/ Hurt and pain involves her/ But now you see your mistakes.” These are Shakespearean expressions of hate.

While the prelude is the most balanced part of “Angel in Disguise,” dishing out just as much love as it does jealousy, the above stanzas from verses one and two contextualize why there’s cause for confrontation in the first place. Throughout the song’s first verse, Brandy details suspicions that eventually become confirmed feelings of hurt and betrayal. Twice in these lyrics, there’s a reference to the singer’s partner becoming so sloppy with his cheating that he slips up and says the name of his side chick. Despite these obvious fumbles, he insists she’s “just a friend.”

In verse two, Brandy recalls meeting this “friend” and realizing she’s anything but. “Who was she foolin’?/ I had a clue of what she was doin’,” the Vocal Bible croons in her signature timbre. At the end of this second verse, she begs someone or something—perhaps God, the universe, or her ex himself—to “stop the rain” that began in the first.

Both verses are shockingly loveless despite being warmly delivered. They’re more about the past than whatever future Brandy hopes to create by professing her love however many weeks, months, or years after the fact. But this sort of romantic negging is essential to dirty macking. For someone to effectively position themselves as the better option, they have to make their crush—or in Brandy’s case, her ex—feel like a bit of a fool for entertaining anyone else to begin with. This subtle antagonism is what makes the declarations of love and comeuppance so profound in the song’s chorus.

What’s far more interesting than a white rapper not having an encyclopedic knowledge of Black music, or a sex tape that’s now 13 years old, is the idea that loving someone can include taking pleasure in the pain that another person has caused them. Yet, despite whatever thought experiments I might derive from it, I’m not sure I agree with this notion.

I’m a slightly petty person myself. This means I’m able to find joy in other people’s failures quite often, whether that joy comes from outperforming certain peers professionally or seeing Black Twitter’s boyfriend of the month get dragged on the timeline. But when it comes to people I love, I don’t think I could ever relate to the feelings expressed in the above chorus from “Angel in Disguise.”

I sense a slight celebration as Brandy sings, “She broke your heart that day/ And left you in the rain/ But still, I love you.” These lyrics don’t read as comforting as they were possibly intended to be. Instead, they seem to emote something more rooted in scorn—an emotion that often makes for great music and can add a measure of romantic realism to love songs.

But as I unpack my own feelings about “Angel in Disguise,” negotiating how sublime it sounds with my interpretation of its writing, I’m brought back to the same question: “How the f**k has no one ever played Jack Harlow this song before?”

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