When a great artist passes, we often say that they were “larger than life”. While this was true of D’Angelo in many ways, it doesn’t exactly do his legacy justice. D’Angelo‘s presence certainly loomed large over the neo-soul scene throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but his music stood out not for its largeness, but its lightness—its subtlety, sparseness, and deftness of touch. It was as smooth as “chicken grease”, to borrow an oft-cited phrase from his musical icon, Prince, at once as sensual and soulful as Motown in its heyday and as effortlessly cool as the best of old-school hip-hop.
Since his passing on 14th October, many tributes have been paid to D’Angelo, born Michael Eugene Archer, calling him a hitmaker. Yet calling him a hitmaker seems to miss the mark. Yes, he did score a top 10 hit in “Lady”, and a top 25 hit in “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)”, but D’Angelo’s true gift was not as a hitmaker.
Instead, his music skirted around the rough edges of R&B, the seedy underbelly of 1970s funk. It took the drugged-out, dirt-encrusted sound of Sly Stone and P-funk and pared it down to its barest elements. D’Angelo knew how to both move the listener and restrain them at the same time—keeping them guessing and allowing them to fill in the gaps of his music, both literally and figuratively.
That is evident even in his most ‘billboard’ moments, like “Untitled”, where the oddly syncopated 6/8 beat almost seems to create a delay in the music, an extra space for the listener to fill. The additional space heightens the sexual tension within the track, dramatizing D’Angelo’s impassioned pleas for his lover to come closer, stop playing silly games, and “take the walls down” with him.
Indeed, if there was one word that truly defined D’Angelo, it may have been just that: space. That was true of the way he made music, but it was also true of the way he treated the musicians who worked with him. As his tour manager, Alan Leeds said:
“D’Angelo always surrounds himself with great musicians, but most importantly, he gives them space. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a frontman artist as unselfish musically and on stage as D’Angelo is. He’s like a jazz guy doing funk. I think he intrinsically gets the idea that’s foreign to so many musicians today that the beauty of the musical art form is the interplay.”
Perhaps more than any other artist of his generation, D’Angelo knew how to let the music breathe. He knew that there is wisdom in letting your collaborators find their own rhythm, and that inspiration is something you have to sit with and wait on, not force. As a result, there isn’t a wasted note in his discography, nor is there a bad album. All three of his studio LPs—released in three separate decades—reflect a painstaking work ethic and a patience that verges on legendary. They are all certified stone classics, as virtually any R&B head worth their salt knows.
D’Angelo has often been compared to Prince, and although the two share a clear sonic lineage—both steeped in the great American funk-soul continuum—in many respects, they are polar opposites. Prince’s music was huge and theatrical; D’Angelo’s was primarily marked by restraint and subtlety. It’s fitting, then, that D’Angelo’s favorite Prince song was “I Wonder U”, arguably the subtlest moment in Prince’s whole discography.
The beat in “I Wonder U” is even sampled in “Africa”, the closing track on Voodoo. “Africa” was written as a tribute to D’Angelo’s newborn son, Michael, and it’s breathtakingly beautiful—a lullaby with a twinkle in its eye, sleepy, backward guitars merging with D’Angelo’s half-whispered vocals about spirituality and the blessings of “African descent”.
To sum up their differences: Prince made music for the party; D’Angelo made music for the after-party—steamy, slow-burning funk for bleary-eyed dancers taking one more hit of the joint, drinking “one mo’ gin”. It was the kind of music you put on in the wee AM hours when you were tired, high, and could no longer tell the difference between dreaming and waking.
Yet this isn’t to say that all of D’Angelo’s music was marked by restraint and subtlety (just as not all Prince’s was power-ballad bombast). When the time was right, D’Angelo knew how to let fly and flat-out rock, like on his epoch-defining, 15-years-in-the-making comeback album Black Messiah.
The album’s central highlight is probably “1000 deaths”, which opens with the sermonizing screed of black revolutionaries Khalid Abdul Muhammad and Fred Hampton and then comes totally unglued, the low-slung, bass-driven groove giving way to an epic wail of gun-slinging, turbine-roaring guitars. D’Angelo, deep in the mix, cries out in a plaintive and desperate battle cry: “You know a coward dies a thousand times, but a soldier only dies just once.”
You could say that D’Angelo’s music bore the best of both worlds—romantic and revolutionary, soft and hard, tender and machismo, masculine and feminine. Nowhere is this world of contrasts more beautifully exemplified than on Voodoo; he appears shirtless, chiseled, and dripping with sex appeal on the cover (just as in the famous music video), but the music itself feels almost supremely feminine and understated—the vocals airy and free-floating, the production minimal and crisp, the lyrics primarily tender and openhearted. Indeed, Voodoo is that rare thing: a 1990s hip-hop record that seems connected to the divine feminine. It doesn’t stand out in the records of the time; it exists in a category entirely separate from them.
It’s ultimately impossible, in the space given here, to do adequate justice to D’Angelo’s legacy. Suffice it to quote the closing lyrics on “Africa”: “From which you came was love / And that’s how it all should be / You and my soul are one / Through all the time and history / And I thank you, thank you.”
Thank you, Michael Eugene Archer, for gracing this planet with your delicate and beautiful sound.