How D'Angelo's neo-soul masterpieces influenced a generation
The genius behind 'Untitled,' D'Angelo fused the raw desire of Prince and the yearning soul of Marvin Gaye into a deeply influential blueprint for contemporary music
In the long history of horny sex jams, nothing quite matches up to the brilliance of D’Angelo’s Untitled (How Does it Feel?). It’s a seven-minute slow-burn that thrums with a tension both erotic and divine, its entreaties to his lover to “take the walls down" with him delivered by a choir from the heavens. It’s a song that channelled decades of Black musical excellence—controversy-era Prince’s fusion of raw desire and tender vulnerability, the yearning of Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing, Jimi Hendrix’s volcanic guitar playing—into a meisterwerk of pop eroticism.
If Untitled (How Does it Feel?) was the only song that D’Angelo ever wrote, it would already guarantee him a spot in the pantheon of pop music greats. But the American musician—who died last month aged 51, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer—leaves behind a body of work that is full of such moments of sonic wizardry. With just three albums, released over two decades, he helped birth the neo-soul movement, influenced artists as varied as Tyler The Creator, Alicia Keys and KeiyaA, and laid the blueprint for the contemporary Black avant-garde.
D’Angelo was born Michael Eugene Archer, the son of a Pentecostal minister in Richmond, Virginia. He was three years old when his elder brother discovered him playing the house piano, and he was soon performing gospel songs to his father’s congregation. By the time he was a teenager, he was dominating school talent competitions and playing local gigs as part of Three Of A Kind, a band that consisted of him and two cousins.
His first significant success came a year before his debut album Brown Sugar dropped in 1995, with U Will Know, a song he co-wrote and co-produced for supergroup Black Men United, alongside R&B stars Brian McKnight, Usher, R. Kelly, Boyz II Men, Lenny Kravitz and Gerard Levart. Even then, he was being spoken of as one of the music industry’s biggest talents.
At a time when popular R&B was all shiny and synthetic, Brown Sugar harked back to the organic warmth and grainy textures of 1970s soul, which he blended masterfully with the sounds and sensibilities of contemporary hip-hop. Shit, Damn, Motherfucker, a song about coming home to find your girl in bed with your best friend, is a murder ballad set to the most seductive of bass-and-drum grooves. The title song is a smoky, jazzy ode to marijuana in the vein of James Brown’s Mary Jane, while album closer Higher hinted at the synthesis of spirituality and sex that found full bloom on Untitled.
A modest success on its release, Brown Sugar would eventually spend 65 weeks on the Billboard 200 charts, and launch the neo-soul movement, its name coming from a term popularised by D’Angelo’s then-manager Kedar Massenburg (though D’Angelo would later disavow the term, saying he was making “Black music"). After touring behind the album for two years, he retreated to the Electric Lady Studios in New York—established by Jimi Hendrix—to work on the follow-up. He was plagued by writer’s block for years, though he also found a collaborative community in experimental collective Soulquarians, of which he was founding member alongside Questlove and J. Dilla (Erykah Badu, Q-Tip, Common and Mos Def would be among the group’s later alumni).
The collective’s jam-and-recording sessions at Electric Lady Studios would result in truly iconic albums, including The Roots’s Things Fall Apart and Phrenology, Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun, and Common’s Like Water for Chocolate. But D’Angelo’s Voodoo, released in 2000, was an outlier even among this set of instant classics. The album eschewed traditional song structure in favour of extended jams that drew from funk, soul, blues and rock. Questlove’s usually precise drumming often lagged just behind the beat in a way that gave the album’s grooves a languid elasticity, as if time itself was just another instrument in the hands of these masters.
Voodoo was also a darker, more philosophical record than its predecessor, touching upon subjects like spirituality, sexuality, personal growth and fatherhood. But thanks to the scorching hot video for Untitled—which featured a ripped, shirtless D’Angelo singing to the camera—it was the sensuality that lodged itself into the public consciousness. D’Angelo became an unwilling sex symbol, with women often lining up at his shows and shouting at him to take his clothes off. He struggled with that attention, receding from public view after the Voodoo tour was done. There were battles with addiction, a near-death car accident, and drug arrests.
Fourteen years after his last album, D’Angelo returned in the waning days of 2014 with Black Messiah, once again reclaiming his title as one of contemporary music’s most visionary geniuses. The album dropped in the wake of the acquittal of the police officers who had murdered Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and seemed to be a prescient response to the growing urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement—its dense jazz-funk grooves and psychedelic guitar pyrotechnics soundtracking D’Angelo’s verses about systemic racism and Black resilience.
“We should all aspire to be a Black Messiah," he wrote on the album’s liner notes. “It’s about 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. It’s not about praising one charismatic leader but celebrating thousands of them."
In the wake of D’Angelo’s passing, and at a time when America—and the world at large—seem to be heading for another period of darkness, those words ring even more loudly as a challenge and an exhortation for other artists to pick up the baton.
Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based writer.
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