R&B singer D'Angelo died this week at the age of fifty-one from cancer. He was best known for expertly combining the heaviness and tenderness of soul music with the ingenuity and edginess of hip-hop, and while he was lauded in all the usual ways—four Grammy Awards, two platinum-selling albums, a music video so sexually charged it still feels dangerous to watch in mixed company—he was also a reclusive, mysterious, unknowable. D'Angelo was a generational talent – an extraordinarily skilled singer and an experimental and idiosyncratic songwriter. But he largely avoided the trappings of fame, releasing just three albums over nineteen years. (His latest record: “Black Messiah“, came out in 2014.) It's dangerous to classify such resistance to celebrity as evidence of genius, but in a sense, of course, it is – we all have an instinct to protect what seems purest and rarest.
D'Angelo, born Michael Eugene Archer, in Richmond, Virginia, is often compared to PrinceAnd rightly so, I think: everyone had a carnal, otherworldly falsetto. But, perhaps more importantly, they shared a sense of rhythm, as if they were tuned to some elegant internal rhythm. Neither one nor the other could be rushed. This feeling – majestic, light, thoughtful – is inherently sensual. Sometimes you will notice this in the slowest but most provocative gestures – a curl of smoke, a touch of hands, the right look from across the room. D'Angelo understood that restraint could be much more exciting and more attractive than aggression.
He signed a songwriting contract when he was seventeen; A record contract followed two years later. He released his first album, Brown Sugar, in 1995, when he was only twenty-one years old. Incredibly, the album isn't overflowing with bravado or youthful lust; There's never a sense that D'Angelo was trying to prove himself to unseen naysayers or in any way resist the immediacy of the moment. “Brown Sugar” is unusually embodied, almost calm – even on a track like “Damn, damn, motherfucker“, in which he vividly imagines killing his wife and his best friend after walking in on them during intercourse. (The opening line – “Why are you sleeping with my woman?” – is sung so beautifully and with such seriousness that it never fails to make me laugh.) D'Angelo played all the instruments himself and used mostly analog recording equipment. “Brown Sugar is a great R&B record – moody, luxurious, softly lit – but it wasn't until Voodoo was released five years later that the depth and richness of D'Angelo's vision became fully apparent.
Voodoo is by all accounts a masterpiece. After learning of D'Angelo's death, I sent a message to my friend and colleague Kelefa Sanna, who quickly replied that she would easily contrast “Voodoo” with “any album ever.” I agreed. His pleasures are so vast and amazing. Songwriting and D'Angelo's virtuoso vocal performance aside, the record's musicianship is sound– it is so stunningly good: heavy, multi-layered, incredibly refined. Erudite but cool. Focused, bohemian. Jazz, soul, funk, gospel, rock and roll. Three minutes into the album's opening track, “Playa Playa,” the air in the room changed. Or maybe the air has changed throughout the area. The gravitational pull of music is so powerful and persistent.
Later that year, D'Angelo released video for the single “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)”, a song about making love. Behind the scenes, the wild excitement of the track is overshadowed by the dissonance and beauty of its arrangement – it's a gorgeous, chaotic ode to pleasure and mutual desire, staccato and wild, containing echoes Jimi Hendrix And Tricky StoneMiles and Betty Davis. However, the video, which featured D'Angelo from the waist up – inscrutably chiselled and completely glowing, naked against a black background, holding a gold crucifix, looking both vulnerable and extremely powerful – was so deliberately seductive that it destroyed any reaction other than (involuntary) drool. The video became a career-defining event, and D'Angelo had complicated feelings about it afterward. In its excellent essay “Time's Out of Order: Notes on the Works of D'Angelo.” Voodoo” accompanying the album's 2012 re-release, critic and scholar Jason King wrote about the cascading effects of the “Untitled” video, especially the dehumanizing moment when D'Angelo became “culturally accepted as a bachelor rather than a serious musician.” King suggests that D'Angelo's “acknowledgment of this misplaced respect may have been detrimental to his confidence and psychological health.” Women in the front row of his performances were now screaming for D'Angelo to take off his clothes. Sometimes they threw wads of money at him. At the end of the tour, Questlovea frequent collaborator and key player on “Voodoo,” recalls D'Angelo saying, “Yo, man, I can't wait for this damn tour to end. I'm going to go into the woods, drink some liquor, grow a beard, and get fat.”
