D'Angelo - "Devil's Pie"

Yet another tract in the literature of soul regarding the struggle between earthly pleasures and heavenly responsibilities, between flesh and faith. Here's an ugly, greedy world, sings D'Angelo, and then, near the outset of what promises to be an anti-sin polemic, the singer, like Saint Augustine, becomes a question for himself. "Who am I to justify/All the evil in our eye/When I myself feel the high/From all that I despise?" Indeed, D'Angelo is not unlike a young Augustine, utterly seduced by "drugs and thugs, women, wine." I don't have a copy of Confessions on me, and therefore I can neither reject nor confirm my intuition that the song's key metaphor for our insatiable and varied transgressive appetites, "Fuck the slice, we want the pie," was taken from that early medieval autobiography. Of course, as with all the best works in the transcendence vs. immanence subgenre, the music does what the lyric cannot: resolve the central tension. That is to say that the song itself proves by example that what is earthbound and profoundly impious can also be sublime; that dirtiness is next to godliness.

Which is not to say that the inverse is necessarily true: Castanets - "Sway"

[Buy Castanets' In the Vines, D'Angelo's Voodoo]