In January of 2000, a snowstorm blanketed the Washington, D.C., area—up to 17 inches, unexpectedly. But I didn’t care about any of that: D’Angelo’s Voodoo was set to come out that week, and I needed the roads to be clear enough to drive my mom’s silver Dodge Dynasty up the street to buy the CD. Come hell, high water, or black ice, and with enough cash for the album and nothing else, I needed to hear “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” on blast. The radio rip on cassette had run its course.
This was the era when album releases were kinetic, when you had to physically show up at the record store, put the money down, and tear the plastic off the case. And it didn’t get more dynamic than D’Angelo, the singer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer born Michael Eugene Archer, who died earlier this week at 51.
Reluctantly, D’Angelo had become a star. He had already helped pioneer the neo-soul genre as a blend of classic R&B and hip-hop. The anticipation for his next work only heightened when “Untitled”—with its sultry and audacious video, featuring only a warm light on a naked D’Angelo—made him a sex symbol. But he wasn’t just that: Co-produced with Raphael Saadiq, “Untitled” was an extraordinary song, a seven-minute implosion of desire and transcendence, on which the divine and the erotic co-mingled until they were indistinguishable. Voodoo was rife with moments like these: A planet unto itself, with its own gravity and humidity—staggering, murky, and gorgeous.
Five years prior, D’Angelo had already altered the music landscape with his debut album Brown Sugar, which sounded like a nod to the past and a declaration of the future. Because Voodoo dominates much of the conversation around D’Angelo, it’s easy to forget how radical Brown Sugar was upon its release in 1995. Radio R&B sounded slick with drum machines tuned to perfection. The singers themselves were adorned in silk suits or white linen, singing on beaches or in mansions somewhere. Then here comes D’Angelo with his straight-back cornrows and baggy jeans, singing about the pleasures of weed through a honeyed voice, his timbre somewhat rough as if this 21-year-old kid had lived a lifetime.
All smoke and sweat, full of gospel phrasing and hip-hop undertones, Brown Sugar introduced D’Angelo as an emotive, smooth-talking vocalist, a thinking, feeling performer in the likeness of Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, and Curtis Mayfield without borrowing too heavily from any of them. It was clear that he had lived and breathed those luminaries and exhaled something new. D’Angelo had cracked the door to a different kind of masculinity: laid-back yet attentive, stoic yet loving, a confessional tone conveying lust, romance, heartbreak, and devotion.
By the time Voodoo arrived, D’Angelo had gone inward, reeling from the attention he received after Brown Sugar, burrowing into the very DNA of Black soul and rock music. “I sort of went through this tunnel, through gospel, blues, and a lot of old soul, old James Brown, early, early Sly and the Family Stone, and a lot of Jimi Hendrix,” he told Interview Magazine in 1999. “It’s been a journey doing this album. I learned a lot about music, myself, and where I want to go musically.”
Recorded at Electric Lady Studios—a space built by Jimi Hendrix—Voodoo was the product of the Soulquarians movement: Questlove on drums, Pino Palladino on bass, Saadiq dropping in, Roy Hargrove tracing trumpet lines through the ether. They weren’t chasing a sound so much as conjuring it. Voodoo wasn’t just a great album; it was seismic and revolutionary, a study in sonic texture as world-building. It was the way the music seemed to lag just a touch, the bass wobbling, the intent behind it.
Analog by design, the album’s imperfections became the groove; listening to it felt like eavesdropping on a jam session between the musical ancestors D’Angelo coveted so much. In 2001, Voodoo won Best R&B Album at the 43rd annual Grammy Awards, then a decade of silence followed. Weary from the public fixation on his body, which threatened to overshadow the music itself, D’Angelo disappeared into years of grief and addiction, popping up for the occasional feature, though remaining very much in the bunker. In that silence, the aura of D’Angelo only grew wider. Indirectly, he taught his peers that groove could be elastic, that blemishes are fine.
I still remember that random night in December 2014 when D’Angelo’s third album, Black Messiah, dropped without warning during another period of national unrest. Michael Brown and Eric Garner had been killed by law enforcement that summer, and the streets were thick with protest. Once again, America was showing how it’s always felt about Black people, and here came D’Angelo with a work that sounded like a dispatch from both the front lines and the spirit realm. “1000 Deaths,” with all its distortion and chaos, leapt quickly into motion, supplanting D’Angelo’s voice beneath the weight of its dense mix. “The Charade” was all reflection, opening with the flicker of a guitar, a Prince-inspired rhythm, and lyrics that cut straight to it. “All we wanted was a chance to talk,” D’Angelo sang, his falsetto hovering above the funk, “instead we only got outlined in chalk.”
This was a new guitar-wielding D’Angelo, in a bandana or a top hat, more Sly and George Clinton than seductive soul crooner. That he titled the album Black Messiah was no small thing: eschewing the slow-burn sensuality of Voodoo and the gospel-soul of Brown Sugar, D’Angelo aimed for something sentimental and prayerful, a resurrection of sorts. He came back weathered and scarred. I could hear the years in his voice, the gravel and the tenderness. But I could also hear resilience. I could see the armor of a man who’d wrestled with demons and the industry and lived to testify.
“I don’t know if I’m comfortable being quote-unquote a leader,” he told the Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale in 2015. “But I do realize and understand that my role as a musician, and in the medium that I am, that people are listening to me. Kids are listening to me. We have power to influence minds and influence lives. So I respect that power. I really do. I’m not putting myself on a pedestal or anything like that. I think that’s dangerous. When you start playing with that, and you’re not careful, you can get yourself into trouble.”
Still, D’Angelo’s declaration mattered. His survival mattered. Because so much about being Black in America is about endurance, the daily negotiation between visibility and erasure, between power and stillness. D’Angelo traced that journey on his own terms, from youthful bravado to hard-earned grace, temptation to ultimate salvation.
Occasionally over the years, I would think about that drive in my mom’s old car—the transmission slipping in and out, the heat on high—and I would consider the communion I had with D’Angelo’s music. Then and always, it’s a conversation about art and endurance, how we love and lose and rebuild ourselves. D’Angelo’s impact on soul music can’t be measured by charts or sales. It’s in the way his songs linger, how he inverted the genre and expanded its vocabulary. That, to me, is the heart of his genius: his ability to draw upon decades of genealogy, giving us the permission to feel everything—on its own time.