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This week, the R. & B. vocalist D’Angelo passed away at fifty-one years old, due to cancer. He was renowned for expertly blending the weight and delicacy of soul music with the creativity and daring of hip-hop, and although he was celebrated in expected ways—four Grammy Awards, two albums that achieved platinum status, a sexually suggestive music video that still seems risky to view publicly—he was also private, puzzling, and unknowable. D’Angelo possessed rare talent—a notably skillful singer, as well as an inventive and singular composer. However, he largely rejected the trappings of fame, releasing only three albums across nineteen years. (His last album, “Black Messiah,” debuted in 2014.) It’s risky to consider such a resistance to notoriety as proof of brilliance, yet in a sense, it holds true—we naturally desire to protect that which feels most untainted and uncommon.
D’Angelo, whose birth name was Michael Eugene Archer, born in Richmond, Virginia, is frequently likened to Prince, and justifiably so, in my estimation—both had a sensual, ethereal falsetto. However, more significantly, they shared an exceptional sense of timing, as if they were tuned into some refined inner pulse. Neither could be rushed. That sensation—regal, effortless, intentional—is inherently sensuous. One might discern it, occasionally, in the most subtle yet provocative actions—a wisp of smoke, a fleeting touch, the appropriate sort of gaze from across the room. D’Angelo grasped how constraint could be immeasurably more lingering—and more tempting—than aggression.
He secured a songwriting arrangement at age seventeen; a recording agreement ensued, two years thereafter. He launched his initial album, “Brown Sugar,” in 1995, when he was merely twenty-one. Remarkably, the album is not consumed by the swagger or yearning of youth; one never feels D’Angelo was trying to validate himself to unseen critics, or to struggle against the immediacy of the present moment. “Brown Sugar” feels exceptionally embodied, almost serene—even on a track such as “Shit Damn Motherfucker,” where he paints a vivid picture of murdering his wife and his closest friend after discovering them in the act of lovemaking. (The opening phrase—“Why are you sleepin’ with my woman?”—is rendered so sweetly, and with such sincerity, that it consistently amuses me.) D’Angelo played all the instruments himself, utilizing predominantly analog recording apparatus. “Brown Sugar” is an outstanding R. & B. album—brooding, lavish, softly illuminated—yet it wasn’t until the unveiling of “Voodoo,” five years subsequently, that the magnitude and richness of D’Angelo’s vision became fully realized.
“Voodoo” is, according to practically everyone, a magnum opus. Upon learning of D’Angelo’s passing, I sent a message to my friend and colleague Kelefa Sanneh, who quickly responded that he would easily place “Voodoo” alongside “any album ever.” I concurred. Its delights are immense and astonishing. Briefly setting aside the songwriting, and D’Angelo’s masterful vocal performance, the record’s musicianship—its sound—is extraordinarily impressive: weighty, textured, unbelievably cultured. Knowledgeable but cool. Focused, unconventional. Jazz, soul, funk, gospel, rock and roll. By three minutes into “Playa Playa,” the album’s initial track, the atmosphere in the room has shifted. Or perhaps the atmosphere in the entire vicinity has shifted. The music’s gravitational draw is that potent and consistent.
Later that year, D’Angelo unveiled a video for the single “Untitled (How Does It Feel?),” a tune concerning, well, lovemaking. Beyond the screen, the track’s raw lust is eclipsed by the dissonance and beauty of its arrangement—it’s a splendidly chaotic tribute to pleasure and mutual craving, jagged and untamed, with echoes of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, Miles and Betty Davis. Yet the video, featuring D’Angelo shot from the midriff up—inconceivably sculpted and positively glowing, nude against a dark backdrop, donning a gold crucifix, appearing both exposed and entirely commanding—was so purposely enticing that it obliterated any reaction aside from (involuntary) admiration. The video was a defining moment in his career, and D’Angelo afterward developed complex emotions regarding it. In his remarkable essay “The Time is Out of Joint: Notes on D’Angelo’s Voodoo,” accompanying a 2012 reissue of the album, the critic and scholar Jason King wrote of the cascading consequences of the “Untitled” video, particularly 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 in the front seats of his shows now clamored for D’Angelo to undress. They occasionally hurled wads of money at him. At the end of the tour, Questlove, a frequent partner and an integral presence on “Voodoo,” recalled D’Angelo stating, “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 conceivable that women are more accustomed to the damaging effects of hypersexualization than men are (even when, like D’Angelo, they are to some degree complicit in its creation). However, it’s deeply unnerving for anyone to be observed with such an odd, faceless hunger. D’Angelo struggled for a period. He perceived malevolence in his triumph. In a rare 2012 conversation with GQ, D’Angelo, whose father and grandfather both ministered as Pentecostal preachers, noted, “You know what they say about Lucifer, right, before he was cast out? Every angel has their specialty, and his was praise.” In the ensuing years, there were an uncommon amount of canceled tour dates, prolonged periods of notable silence, and drug-related allegations. There was a D.U.I. in which he overturned his Hummer three times and was flung through the cool Virginia evening, breaking every rib on his left side; in 2010, in New York, he was apprehended for soliciting a prostitute who proved to be an undercover officer. There were two or three attempts at rehabilitation which didn’t quite appear to work. The mug shots circulated around the internet. They were not flattering.
Then, in 2014, after fourteen years of relative quiet, and without significant forewarning, D’Angelo released “Black Messiah,” an album of thorny, psychedelic funk that was partially a response to, as he documented 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 contentious, pulsating with the hectic, expansive energy of political upheaval. (I stubbornly adore it.) Concerning 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 penned. The sentiment felt like a suggestion of commonality: racism was everyone’s concern. Predominantly, D’Angelo sought to convey that the project was not filled with any sense of arrogance. The weight, and the reward, was constantly collective.
Currently, many of D’Angelo’s defining attributes as a musician—modesty, nuance, fallibility, foresight, sensuality, ingenuity—feel as if they are alarmingly limited. D’Angelo understood his function as an artist as crucial, and the responsibility as serious. In the GQ interview, he addressed the spiritual core of his work: “I learned at an early age that what we were doing in the choir was just as important as the preacher,” he asserted. “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 feels like as appropriate a word as any for the mysterious forces that rendered D’Angelo’s work so complex and impactful. “Black Messiah” concludes with a track titled “Another Life.” It’s theoretically romantic: D’Angelo, his voice filled with longing, sings, “In another life / I bet you were my girl.” It’s challenging to discern precisely what he’s communicating in the verses—generally, D’Angelo was more preoccupied with intonation and resonance than clarity, and he favored singing from within a song, suspended in the mix—but on the chorus, at least, it’s evident. He is envisioning a different method of existing, a fresh astral realm, a more pleasant, more gentle, more fulfilling location. It may be all he ever desired. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
