"Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me." This is from Psalms 23:4, a classic prayer about God's blessed navigating a world full of sin and evil at every turn. Growing up in the church, that's certainly what you're told starting from a very young age. The secular world is evil, there's temptation at every corner, and as a child of God you must do your best to stay away from it all.
But who can stand up to that much temptation? This is a question that seemed to have weighed heavily on the mind of Michael Archer, better known as D'Angelo, who died on Tuesday of pancreatic cancer at the age of 51. D'Angelo was a textbook child of the Pentecostal church, a religion based on fire and brimstone. His grandparents' church was way up in the woods of Richmond, Va., a white tower encasing a hotbox of holy fervor, where people shouted and spoke in tongues and caught the Holy Ghost. And right there leading the choir was a teenaged D'Angelo, then just Michael, with his brother and cousins, as their grandmother preached. When he decided to start his music career, everyone in the church warned him against making secular music—the devil's music—except for that grandmother, who wanted him to follow what he felt was right. It made sense that he had Psalms 23:4 tattooed onto his arms, a constant reminder as he entered the heart of that valley.
My Nigerian father had an extensive collection of CDs when I was a kid. A member of one of those CD clubs, he mostly used it to restock his collection with music from back home, unfortunately for me and my sisters. Fela Kuti, King Sunny Ade, Lagbaja, and the like. The few American albums he would buy were usually jazz or gospel records. Out of his entire collection of nearly a thousand CDs, I found a literal handful of modern pop records, one of which was ABBA (I would love to find out what hold this band has on every person in the entire world born after 1950). But it was another one that always caught my attention, because of the cool, street-looking guy with braids on the cover, and also because there was a song on it called "Shit Damn Motherfucker," which had an obvious appeal to a seven-year-old.
1995's Brown Sugar, which I first listened to a year after its release using my father's CD player, was my improper introduction to D'Angelo. Improper because, although I liked it fine, seven years old is not exactly an age where you can appreciate what D is going for. I did, though, notice that it was much different than what I usually heard on R&B and pop radio at the time. It felt like a version of the jazz records my dad liked, so it made sense that he owned it. My proper introduction to D'Angelo came with the first album I was allowed to get at that age, the Space Jam soundtrack.
One of the lamentable things about culture now is the death of the movie soundtrack, not just because they were fun collections of the biggest stars in music at the time, but because if you were a kid who loved a movie and listened to its soundtrack all the time, you felt bonded to every artist that appeared on there for the rest of your life. It's similar to the reason why great actors love to do kids movies. Regardless of how much I understood his musicality, D'Angelo became one of my guys, because he was on the Space Jam soundtrack. Only later on did I appreciate his genius.
"You don't understand how country this really is ... this is like my uncle Buster's shit." That is a line from Chris Rock, in the studio listening to an early version of Voodoo, D'Angelo's sophomore record, which took five years to make. Voodoo would go on to be recognized as one of the greatest albums of all time, a true masterwork that lives up to its stature. At the time, Voodoo established some other things, namely that D'Angelo's musical process was arduous, collaborative, and slow, much to the chagrin of fans and the music industry's bottom lines. The album established D'Angelo as a "genius," uninterested in redoing what he already did before. For as gorgeous as Brown Sugar is, you can hear in it a young artist trying to warp the box the industry was trying to place him in. His voice is every bit as provocative and ethereal and lustful as it ever would be, but he is trying to meld his old soul sensibilities with a modern radio sound that is unfussy and clean. By the time of Voodoo, D'Angelo had more control and a better understanding of what he was trying to capture, which as Rock said, was some country shit. Sloppy, drunken drums from Questlove, a thumping Pino Palladino bass providing the album's heartbeat, and D using his voice like another horn on the record. His voice quivers at moments, goes into warbles and deep rumbles, and then it might erupt into holy fire. In one line he'll give the most elegiac, gorgeous performance of a line and then for another he'll be filled with desperation and exasperation.
The other thing about Voodoo is that it the most metatextual soul record. It self-consciously seeks entry into the pantheon of the great masterpieces that came before it. The stories behind the making of the album are legend. The many hours of old Soul Train performances D and Questlove watched, the soul singers—Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Stevie Wonder—they listened to over and over, the fact of their recording at Electric Lady, Jimi Hendrix's dormant studio. The process led to the birth of the Soulquarians, a loose collective of artists collaborating with one another, which included D, Questlove, J Dilla, Erykah Badu, Common, and James Poser, and led to albums like Voodoo, the Roots' Things Fall Apart, Common's Like Water For Chocolate, and Badu's Mama's Gun. It is all very serious and committed, but also kind of precious. There are very few artists who have so explicitly sought immortality in album form and then pulled it off. D'Angelo's ability to do just that speaks to his power as an artist, but with that power usually comes a flip side, which D would become acquainted with all too well.
I do wonder if the country shit was what I was responding to with Voodoo. Outside of the lead single "Untitled," it might take some adjusting of the ears to get used to the album. I'm not a jazz musician, so it's not that I was picking up on the intricacies. I was just a kid who, for some reason, felt called to revisit this album every few years. It was like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey—inscrutable, unknowable, but full of so much feeling and urgency, and that I could understand. Half the time I didn't even know what he was saying but I know he meant it and that's what mattered. D'Angelo was a musician first. Many will tell you that his true power came out during his concerts, part funk show, part revival—he took you to church, as we like to say. That's part of the rough hew of Voodoo, that desire to translate a live experience to an album format. He was still that church kid leading his choir.
We should talk about the video. It's always been a big part of his legacy. The video for "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" was a real "the world just stopped" kinda deal. It was on MTV and BET seemingly all the time, and when it wasn't it felt like it was what people were always talking about. D'Angelo, seemingly completely naked in a black void, with a physique that look like it'd been freshly chiseled by Michelangelo, the camera zooming in and out of his face and torso. I think the power of the video is twofold: both the rhythmic, pulsating ways his voice and body heave in orgasmic delight, and in how often the camera gets so tantalizingly close to giving you the money shot without ever actually crossing that point. I have seen this video more times than I'd like to admit through the years, and every single time I think they're gonna show it.
"When I used to sing in the choir, after the rehearsal, you go in to eat. I remembered seeing the preacher looking at a lady's skirt one week and then, the next Sunday, talking about how fornication is wrong." This is the video's director Paul Hunter talking about the genesis of his concept for the shoot, touching on the theme of the pleasure of the flesh in conflict with the spirit. The sacred and the profane. Hunter continues, "So I was like, 'Think of your grandmother's greens, how it smelled in the kitchen. What did the yams and fried chicken taste like? That's what I want you to express.'" On some level, this seems like some typical director nonsense, giving depth to something so straightforward. But as a fellow child of the church, I actually understand perfectly what he means. There is something both shameful and thrilling about being horny in church. The angst and lust of noticing someone's thighs in a dress or your knees grazing against someone else's in a tightly packed pew. I remember listening in on the older ladies at my church gossip about which deacon or husband of the church made a pass at them or did something suggestive. In lieu of such direct behavior, intimacy could only be expressed in the ways people cooked and prepared food for each other after service. It's fitting that the only thing you can see D'Angelo wearing in the video is a necklace with Jesus on the cross.
The video may have been a sensation, but it proved a double-edged sword for D. On top of the pressure on him as the savior of soul music, he had to be a sex symbol now, too. The minute the Voodoo tour ended, we wouldn't hear from him for another 14 year years, except in drips and drabs of gossip—drugs, weight gain, label issues, stints at rehab. In 2003, he totaled his Hummer in an accident that nearly killed him. After that, you couldn't help but wonder if this story was going to end the way these types of stories tend to end. Another black artist destroyed under the weight of "genius."
If you can't tell by the scare quotes, I've always been suspicious of the word "genius." It's a label often thrown around to avoid the hard work of specificity and contextualization. I'm especially suspicious of this idea of black genius, with its implications that there's something unique about genius when a black person has it and that the black genius has responsibilities that their counterparts don't. Much like auteur theory in film, the concept of the musical genius tidily attributes to a single person what is typically collaborative work. What does it mean for D'Angelo to be a genius? Does that leave room for all the magic Palladino and Questlove brought to his music? What about his former partner Angie Stone, who recently died in March of this year? Her contributions to both Brown Sugar and Voodoo as his writing partner and muse has to count for something. According to Questlove, D's process involved making like a hundred songs and whittling them down to 10 or 13. Would anything be different under any other combination of 13 tracks? Or did it have to be these 13?
D'Angelo, for his part, helped cultivate his own genius mythos, both in the metatextual aspects of Voodoo and in his elusiveness. He worshipped at the altar of the geniuses before him, from Jimi Hendrix to Sly Stone to Prince. Part of his mythos even involves prophetic dreams involving visits from the spirit of Marvin Gaye. I think a lot about an Ethan Hawke interview where he talks about Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman after both men had already passed. He keeps uttering the refrain "it didn't come for free." This great talent to tear your heart out and show it to the world, it costs a great deal to be able to summon that power. It was the power of the music that maintained D'Angelo's cultural presence even when the man himself disappeared. Of course, we all waited for him to return; we always want more. But certain things become so undeniable that they stand on their own, never getting old or tired.
Some people are better at being artists than at being stars. Prince could've stopped after Purple Rain and he'd still have gone down as a musical genius, but he wouldn't be regarded the same way we view him now. The way Prince kept himself relevant even when the music began to lose its potency is a critical part of his legacy. He was every bit the tortured artist, but was also a star who kept on delivering. That was the part D'Angelo couldn't stand up to. He was maybe too shy and antisocial to be that. But we waited anyways, because whatever he did on those songs hooked into people and didn't let go.
When 2014's Black Messiah finally came, it did feel like Moses had come down with the tablets. Not just because the artist who had become more myth than man had reemerged, but because he did so in the aftermath of Eric Garner and Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin. Black Messiah is another perfect funk record about black resistance, yes, but more than that a black spirit that withstands anything and survives through every test of time. A spirit that loves and fights and dances and perseveres—a testament to D'Angelo's own journey through the fire of expectations and insecurity and fear and industry bullshit, and coming out the other side with another amazing album. Neo-soul is a marketing term invented by record companies. When asked how he would categorize himself, D'Angelo called what he made simply "Black Music." Music that encompasses our entire history: the blues, rock and roll, jazz, gospel, funk, soul, hip hop.
If you wanna know the true power and artistry of D'Angelo it's this: in the just about 20 years from his debut in 1995 to what would be his final album in 2014, as pop/R&B/hip-hop music changed with the advancing technologies and speed-running of sounds to much a cyber future that never really materialized, there is a straight line between all three D'Angelo projects. All music that felt true and authentic to the music he loved most and wanted to emulate while simultaneously pushing those sounds further until they ended up somewhere advanced from what came before it. His were techniques and songwriting that influenced many, though none come close to achieving what he did.
It's a trope now that rockstars who burn brightest tend not to burn for long, and the prospect of dying young was a major concern for D'Angelo during his lost years. In an interview with GQ, he explained how the death of his collaborator and close friend J Dilla was especially terrifying for him:
What finally made him see, he says, was the passing of J Dilla, the revered hip-hop producer, on February 10, 2006. They'd just talked on the phone, D'Angelo says, when suddenly, J Dilla was gone at 32 after a long battle with lupus. It was like a blinding light had been switched on. Why did so many black artists die so young? He'd been haunted by this thought for years. Marvin. Jimi. Biggie. "I felt like I was going to be next. I ain't bullshitting. I was scared then," he says, recalling how shame engulfed him, preventing him from attending the funeral. "I was so fucked-up, I couldn't go."
Like Dilla, D'Angelo ultimately would not succumb to the more lurid evils of the world, but rather to something painfully mundane. There was comfort in D'Angelo making it through to the other side of addiction and an ugly entertainment business, but there's just as much despondence that his story ends with cancer in his early 50s.
In terms of his artistry, what I find myself ruing aren't the albums we won't get, but instead the opportunities to see him live that I missed. To see the fire in his bones as he put on a show. There's one from the 2000 Montreux Jazz festival that's especially great to watch. Anytime he performed live he wanted to create an experience. That's what the music was always about: the experience, the feeling. Giving you something you can't say no to, something undeniably magical. That was his true gift. And now, another light goes out too soon and we're left to make sense of it in the aftermath. But that's why they call it the blues.
