D’Angelo’s Genius Was Pure, and Rare

This week, the R. & B. singer D’Angelo died at age fifty-one, of cancer. He was best known for deftly combining the heft and tenderness of soul music with the ingenuity and nerve of hip-hop, and while he was acclaimed in all the usual ways—four Grammy Awards, two platinum-selling albums, a music video so sexually charged that it still feels dangerous to watch in mixed company—he was also reclusive, enigmatic, unknowable. D’Angelo was a generational talent—an unusually artful singer, and an experimental and idiosyncratic songwriter. But he largely eschewed the accoutrements of stardom, releasing just three albums in nineteen years. (His final record, “Black Messiah,” came out in 2014.) It’s dangerous to codify that sort of resistance to celebrity as evidence of genius, but in a way, of course, it is—we all have an instinct to shield whatever feels most pure, and most rare.

D’Angelo, who was born Michael Eugene Archer, in Richmond, Virginia, is often compared to Prince, and rightly so, I think—each wielded a carnal, otherworldly falsetto. But, perhaps more crucially, they shared an exquisite sense of pacing, as if they were attuned to some elegant internal rhythm. Neither could be hurried. That feeling—stately, easy, deliberate—is inherently sensual. You’ll register it, sometimes, in the slowest but most provocative gestures—a curl of smoke, a brush of hands, the right sort of glance from across a room. D’Angelo understood the ways in which restraint can be infinitely more haunting—and more alluring—than aggression.

He signed a songwriting deal 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. Incredibly, the album is not overwhelmed by the bravado or thirst of youth; one never gets the sense that D’Angelo was trying to prove himself to invisible naysayers, or to thrash in any way against the immediacy of the present moment. “Brown Sugar” is unusually embodied, almost calm—even on a track such as “Shit Damn Motherfucker,” in which he vividly imagines murdering his wife and his best friend after happening upon them mid-coitus. (The opening line—“Why are you sleepin’ with my woman?”—is sung so prettily, and with so much earnestness, it invariably makes me laugh.) D’Angelo played all of the instruments himself, and used mostly analog recording equipment. “Brown Sugar” is an excellent R. & B. record—moody, luxurious, softly lit—but it wasn’t until the release of “Voodoo,” five years later, that the depth and richness of D’Angelo’s vision became fully evident.

“Voodoo” is, by nearly all accounts, a masterpiece. After hearing of D’Angelo’s death, I sent a text to my friend and colleague Kelefa Sanneh, who quickly replied that he would easily put “Voodoo” up against “any album ever.” I agreed. Its pleasures are so vast and surprising. Briefly putting aside the songwriting, and D’Angelo’s virtuosic vocal performance, the record’s musicianship—its sound—is so staggeringly good: heavy, layered, unbelievably sophisticated. Erudite but cool. Focussed, bohemian. Jazz, soul, funk, gospel, rock and roll. By three minutes into “Playa Playa,” the album’s opening track, the air has changed in the room. Or maybe the air has changed in the whole neighborhood. The music’s gravitational pull is that potent and that steady.

Later that year, D’Angelo released a video for the single “Untitled (How Does It Feel?),” a song about, well, making love. Offscreen, the track’s feral horniness is overshadowed by the dissonance and beauty of its arrangement—it’s a gorgeously chaotic ode to pleasure and mutual desire, splintery and wild, containing echoes of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, Miles and Betty Davis. Yet the video, which featured D’Angelo shot from the waist up—inconceivably chiselled and fully aglow, nude against a black background, wearing a gold crucifix, looking both vulnerable and utterly commanding—was so deliberately seductive that it obliterated any reaction other than (involuntary) drool. The video was a career-defining event, and in its aftermath D’Angelo developed complicated feelings about it. In his excellent essay “The Time is Out of Joint: Notes on D’Angelo’s Voodoo,” which accompanied a 2012 reissue of the album, the critic and scholar Jason King wrote of the cascading effects of the “Untitled” video, particularly the dehumanizing moment 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 row of his shows now howled for D’Angelo to disrobe. Sometimes they tossed wads of cash at him. At the end of the tour, Questlove, a frequent collaborator and a crucial player on “Voodoo,” recalled D’Angelo saying, “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.”