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This week, the R.&B. artist D’Angelo passed away at fifty-one, due to cancer. He garnered recognition for expertly fusing the weight and gentleness of soul music with the creativity and daring of hip-hop, and while his achievements were celebrated in typical fashion—four Grammy Awards, two albums achieving platinum status, a music video so sexually charged that it still feels risky to view publicly—he remained secluded, puzzling, inscrutable. D’Angelo possessed a unique talent—a remarkably skillful vocalist, and an inventive and distinctive composer. However, he generally avoided the trappings of fame, putting out merely three albums over nineteen years. (His last release, “Black Messiah,” debuted in 2014.) It’s precarious to label such a reluctance to embrace celebrity as proof of brilliance, yet in some sense, it rings true—we all possess an urge to protect that which we deem most genuine, and most uncommon.
D’Angelo, whose given name was Michael Eugene Archer, born in Richmond, Virginia, is frequently likened to Prince, and justifiably so, in my view—both brandished a sensual, unearthly falsetto. Nonetheless, perhaps even more significantly, they shared a refined sense of timing, as though in harmony with some sophisticated inner cadence. Neither could be rushed. This sensation—composed, effortless, calculated—is inherently alluring. It manifests, at times, in the subtlest yet most impactful actions—a wisp of smoke, a fleeting touch, the perfect gaze across a room. D’Angelo grasped how constraint can be considerably more haunting—and more captivating—than force.
He secured a songwriting agreement at seventeen; a recording deal followed, two years later. He issued his debut album, “Brown Sugar,” in 1995, when he was just twenty-one. Surprisingly, the album avoids being overshadowed by the eagerness or boastfulness of youth; one never senses that D’Angelo was attempting to validate himself to unseen doubters, or to struggle against the immediacy of the here and now in any way. “Brown Sugar” feels unusually grounded, almost serene—even on a piece such as “Shit Damn Motherfucker,” wherein he graphically envisions killing his wife and closest friend after discovering them having sex. (The opening line—“Why are you sleepin’ with my woman?”—is delivered with such sweetness, and with such sincerity, that it always elicits a laugh.) D’Angelo performed all the instrumental parts himself, and utilized mostly analog recording technology. “Brown Sugar” is an exceptional R.&B. recording—brooding, opulent, dimly lit—but it was not until the arrival of “Voodoo,” five years later, that the breadth and intensity of D’Angelo’s artistic perspective became fully apparent.
“Voodoo” is, by nearly all estimations, a work of genius. Upon learning of D’Angelo’s passing, I sent a message to my friend and colleague Kelefa Sanneh, who promptly responded that he would readily pit “Voodoo” against “any album ever.” I concurred. Its delights are so immense and unexpected. Setting aside, for a moment, the songwriting, and D’Angelo’s masterly vocal delivery, the record’s musicianship—its sonic quality—is extraordinarily outstanding: robust, richly textured, exceptionally polished. Knowledgeable yet trendy. Intentional, unconventional. Jazz, soul, funk, gospel, rock and roll. Within three minutes of “Playa Playa,” the album’s initial track, the mood in the space shifts. Or perhaps the mood has transformed throughout the entire neighborhood. The music’s magnetic force is that commanding and that persistent.
Later that year, D’Angelo unveiled a video for the single “Untitled (How Does It Feel?),” a song centered on, essentially, lovemaking. Apart from the screen, the track’s intense lustfulness is eclipsed by the contrast and artistry of its arrangement—it’s a splendidly chaotic tribute to pleasure and shared desire, fragmented and untamed, containing hints of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, Miles and Betty Davis. Still, the video, which presented D’Angelo filmed from the waist up—incredibly sculpted and completely radiant, naked against a dark setting, wearing a gold cross, appearing simultaneously fragile and utterly dominant—was so overtly seductive that it overwhelmed any reaction other than (unintended) admiration. The video served as a landmark event in his career, and in the aftermath, D’Angelo fostered complex sentiments about it. In his insightful essay “The Time is Out of Joint: Notes on D’Angelo’s Voodoo,” which accompanied a 2012 re-release of the album, the critic and academic Jason King described the ripple effects of the “Untitled” video, specifically the dehumanizing instant when D’Angelo became “recognized in the culture as more of a bachelor stud than a serious musician.” King suggests that D’Angelo’s “recognition of that misplaced respect may have been deleterious to his confidence and psychological health.” Women situated in the front rows of his concerts now screamed for D’Angelo to undress. They sometimes threw bundles of money at him. At the tour’s conclusion, Questlove, a frequent collaborator and a pivotal figure on “Voodoo,” remembered D’Angelo remarking, “Yo, man, I cannot wait until this fucking tour is over. I’m going to go in the woods, drink some hooch, grow a beard, and get fat.”
It’s plausible that women are more accustomed to the damaging consequences of hypersexualization than men are (even when, like D’Angelo, they in some way contribute to its development). Nonetheless, it’s profoundly disconcerting for anybody to be observed with such an odd, anonymous craving. D’Angelo struggled for some time. He perceived wickedness in his own triumphs. In a rare 2012 discussion with GQ, D’Angelo, whose father and grandfather both served as Pentecostal ministers, remarked, “You know what they say about Lucifer, right, before he was cast out? Every angel has their specialty, and his was praise.” In the following years, there was an uncommon amount of cancelled performance dates, lengthy spans of noticeable quiet, and drug-related charges. There was an instance of driving under the influence in which he overturned his Hummer three times and was ejected through the cool Virginia night air, fracturing all of his left-side ribs; in 2010, in New York, he was apprehended for propositioning a prostitute who turned out to be an undercover officer. There were two or three stays in rehab that didn’t seem particularly effective. The mugshots circulated widely online. They were unflattering.
Then, in 2014, following fourteen years of relative inactivity, and rather unexpectedly, D’Angelo issued “Black Messiah,” a collection of edgy, psychedelic funk that served in part as a reaction to, as he penned in the liner notes, “people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen.” The album is likely his most polarizing, bursting with the frenzied, expansive intensity of political unrest. (I hold it in high regard, persistently.) Regarding the title, D’Angelo was generous, yielding: “We should all aspire to be a Black Messiah. . . . It’s not about praising one charismatic leader but celebrating thousands of them,” he stated. The sentiment conveyed a sense of camaraderie: racism concerned everyone. Primarily, D’Angelo aimed to emphasize that the project lacked any hint of conceit. The responsibility, and the reward, was invariably shared.
Currently, many of D’Angelo’s defining traits as a musician—humility, subtlety, imperfection, foresight, sensuality, originality—appear to be dwindling rapidly. D’Angelo viewed his function as an artist as meaningful, and the obligation as weighty. In the GQ conversation, he referenced the spiritual core of his craft: “I learned at an early age that what we were doing in the choir was just as important as the preacher,” he said. “It was a ministry in itself.” Concerning the “Untitled” video, he stated, “We talked about the Holy Ghost and the church before that take. The veil is the nudity and the sexuality. But what they’re really getting is the spirit.”
Spirit seems as appropriate a term as any for the mysterious forces that rendered D’Angelo’s body of work so intricate and affecting. “Black Messiah” concludes with a track titled “Another Life.” It’s ostensibly romantic: D’Angelo, his voice saturated with longing, croons, “In another life / I bet you were my girl.” It’s difficult to discern precisely what he’s expressing in the verses—typically, D’Angelo prioritized intonation and reverberation over clarity, and he preferred to sing from within the core of a piece, floating within the mix—but within the chorus, at least, it’s unequivocal. He is envisioning an alternate existence, a fresh astral sphere, a more pleasant, gentler, more gratifying realm. It may have represented all he ever yearned for. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
