Photo: Andrew Lipovsky/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
I was riveted earlier this year when D’Angelo popped up in Questlove’s Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius)a star-studded exploration of the rise and fall of the late Sly Stone. A longtime friend’s doc about a funk icon’s life and work was a likely place for D to show, but appreciating D’Angelo, who died at 51 this week after a private battle with pancreatic cancer, often meant many years of hanging onto hope that he’d meet your expectations. The singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist born Michael Archer got to us when he was ready; fans waited because any chance to hear from him, whether it was an interview, a record, or a performance, offered a window into mystic, molting, and encyclopedic brilliance. His studio album — 1995’s Brown Sugar2000’s Voodooand 2014’s Black Messiah — each relayed a vision of Black music as an intergenerational cultural project. Hip-hop, jazz, and gospel didn’t merely rub elbows in his songs. Cycling coolly through sounds, he exemplified the limitlessness of a Black American musical consciousness that yielded pioneers everywhere from folk to hard-core punk. Speaking in Sly Lives about the expectations for greatness and songs of upliftment that Stone faced, D’Angelo could’ve been describing his own painful period of reclusion and addiction between Voodoo and Messiah: “The hang-ups, baggage, guilt, pain, shame that comes with it … If you don’t have your soul centered and people around you that you really trust … it can be unbearable. It’ll turn you into an unwilling participant, and that’s equivalent to hell.”
Just as Stone withdrew from the spotlight and into studio experimentation both aided and abetted by drugs in the ’70s, D’Angelo struggled to cope healthily with life in the spotlight. He was a Pentecostal church musician who happened to be the image of chiseled turn-of-the-century handsomeness. And so he wore neither the title of R&B sex symbol nor neo-soul progenitor with much comfort. (“I never claimed to do neo-soul,” he said in a 2014 Red Bull Music Academy talk. “When I first came out, I said, ‘I do Black music.’”) He studied the greats that came before him carefully, aware of not just the peaks of his soul, funk, and jazz predecessors’ careers — check his version of Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’” from 1998’s Live at the Jazz Cafe — but their dogged climb out of valleys of despair and self-medication. To truly understand Sly Stone, or Marvin Gaye or Prince or Miles Davis or John Coltrane, is to know that to whom much is given, much is required. D’Angelo’s affection for these pillars of Black music ran deeper than taste; he met a similar conundrum learning how much was riding on his achievements. In Sly Liveswhich could be one of his final interviews, D replied to Questlove’s titular query — is there a burden on Black genius? — in weary affirmation: “Heavy is the head that wears the crown, right?”
D’Angelo’s death offers a moment to revisit the exquisite music he left behind and the journey to a relative sense of peace with our pining for timeliness and excellence. In the long gap between his second and third albums, he almost came undone, with concerning aughts news reports of narcotics arrests and a car accident. But the 2006 loss of legendary beat-maker J. Dilla, a bright star in the Soulquarians collective (see: the Roots, Erykah Badu, Common, D, Black Star, Bilal) who died of lupus, set D’Angelo on a path to recovery. His return to the stage in the early 2010s was every bit as remarkable as his early classics because it saw him contending openly with a place in a pantheon of all-timers while renegotiating a relationship with his audience. D’Angelo was always grappling with the past — at Switzerland’s Montreux Jazz Festival in 2000, his performance of Brown Sugarit’s smooth “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker” arrived at a beefy proto-metal space somewhere between Jimi Hendrix and Rage Against the Machine. But in his miraculous late-career resurgence, he was not just synthesizing soul history but almost confrontationally using it to speak for him. Footage from the years of appearances that lead up to the release of Black Messiah reveal some of D’Angelo’s most breathtaking performances. He didn’t always play much of his own music. Sitting in communion with his inspirations, after a taste of their triumph and tragedy, he taught us to appreciate his gifts and perseverance, not just his hits and abs.
If you waited almost a decade and a half for D’Angelo to revisit his shirtless serenade in the music video for Voodoo‘s “Untitled (How Does It Feel?),” the 2010s gigs trained you to stop salivating. At Brooklyn’s Afropunk Festival in 2014, he remained parked behind a keyboard stack, dipping into his own catalog only for the Voodoo deep cut “Greatdayndamornin’/Booty.” Fronting the Roots, D’Angelo instead splashed around metal, reggae, and funk tunes in a set that was more interested in mapping out influences for his songwriting than revisiting any of it. It was a Sly song that nearly lured him out from behind the Yamaha: For “Thankful n’ Thoughtful” from 1973’s FreshD’Angelo went from sensual whisper to funk scream, juiced by the notable choice of cover. “Thankful” is about clawing your life back from the jaws of what had seemed like certain doom: “They said I was dying, I didn’t want to go / And I kept on feeling I had to live some more.” It’s too sexy and wounded of a vocal to immediately scan as gospel, but each note D’Angelo sang surged from somewhere primal. For a man who once hurtled through the windshield of his car following a bender, this was a testimony.
As much as D’Angelo related to Sly Stone’s battle to be a less “unwilling participant” in his own success, he respected Prince’s restlessness and occasional obtuseness. What’s said by serious followers of the Purple One — that you must jump outside the handful of albums everyone knows to begin to grasp his vastness — is also true of his student. D’Angelo rebuffed our yearning for a traditional career long enough to eke out a delightfully unpredictable final decade. Newly recommitted to releases and appearances, he sang on television and graced film and video-game soundtracks. The shock of encountering new D’Angelo music deep in the cowboy video-game opus Red Dead Redemption 2where the country-tinged “Unshaken” awaited an intrepid player, mirrored the confused excitement of learning that Prince made music for the 1989 Batman film. D’s transformation into a guitar player and bandleader for Black Messiah radiated Loven for Prince’s Revolution, from naming his own band “the Vanguard” to the paisley-tinged political pop-rock of “The Charade.”
The most stunning cover from D’Angelo’s comeback era is his The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon appearance in April 2016, after Prince died. It was a rough month; D had just delivered a rousing rendition of Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” at the New York City funeral for A Tribe Called Quest’s Phife Dawg. Hon Fallonhe communicated via song choice again, tearfully turning 1986’s “Sometimes It Snows in April” around on its author. “April” recounted the murder of the protagonist of Prince’s Under the Cherry Moon film, but it grew a different meaning in D’Angelo’s hands: an auteur’s wish for more time with his idol. Coming back from the brink of ruin fixated on Prince and Sly songs about the nearness of death, D’Angelo advised us to love the “good things they say never last” and, like “Thankful,” to take our worst days graciously in stride. His sudden loss is a terrible surprise, but his life was a monument to a drive stronger than the demons that beset genius.
