On the first day of the century, the sun decided to come up. Everyone’s computers blinked on, and the end-times hadn’t come. But we still couldn’t shake the question mark hanging over America, if not earthly existence: What happens to us now? Twenty-four days later, D’Angelo proposed some kind of answer with “Voodoo,” a star map of an R&B album that felt ancient and futuristic, capacious and intimate, immaculate and filthy, fragile and full of desire — music that, even 25 years later, still fulfills our busted nation’s collective idea of musical greatness. Real greatness, true greatness, total greatness. Not the flattering kind that means best, or even the beautiful kind that means loved. The indisputable kind that means more to understand, forever.
Like masterpieces do, “Voodoo” made him and wrecked him in quick succession, and it wasn’t until the materialization of his third record, “Black Messiah,” in 2014 that we dared to hope D’Angelo was ever coming back. But damn, he did, and he was glorious, and if you ever needed to believe in the ability of wounded human beings to pull themselves all the way up from the bottom of the world, here was proof you could dance to. Now, a decade later, D’Angelo is dead at 51, from cancer, his torqued arc of come-ups, flameouts, down-bads and comebacks finally cinching itself in a grim knot: For Black artists in America — in the century after the civil rights movement — a life of true greatness still involves being made to feel that you’ll never be good enough. “As Black folk, we gotta always be three, four, five steps ahead of everybody else in order just to break even,” D’Angelo said in “Sly Lives!,” a recent documentary about his haunted predecessor Sly Stone. “It’s just always been that way.”
Born proudly into the hip-hop generation in 1974, D’Angelo grew up in the heat of Richmond, singing Pentecostal hymns on weekends, keeping the sleek funk of Prince’s “Dirty Mind” locked in a separate compartment of his consciousness. In time, “Dirty Mind” became his gateway to James Brown and George Clinton, and by listening to all of those succulent vintage funk songs alongside the crispy contemporary boom-bap of Marley Marl and DJ Premier, he learned that old things could sound new, just as new things could sound old. This is how timeless music gets made — through a fundamental understanding that any sound that still shakes the air is totally alive.
When he released his debut album, “Brown Sugar,” in 1995, his falsetto was singular enough to make you wonder whether “higher” might be a different direction from the one we’ve always known. Despite merciless comparisons, his high notes weren’t quite like those of Al Green or Marvin Gaye. Those guys did legendary skywriting — the kind of singing that levitated out of the grit and grunt of church-forged soul, off in the direction of the great hereafter. When D’Angelo went up, his falsetto was existential. He didn’t sound higher. He sounded alive and alone. When “Voodoo” arrived five years later, the critic Greg Tate thought the singer’s sound had become “so raw, so naked and exposed, you’ll be tempted to throw a blanket over its brittle, shivering bones.” It was a new kind of singing, delivered with a vulnerability that felt almost impolite to try to relate to. For the music to fully bare itself to you, you have to fully bare yourself to it. Give him your blanket.
In the music video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” D’Angelo is literally naked, and from there he became one of the most reluctant sex symbols in pop history. Feeling objectified and frightened, he retreated from the acclaim of “Voodoo” and into a shadow life that involved disappearances, addictions, arrests, a car crash and worse. Then, after a 14-year absence, he reappeared during the crescendo of the Black Lives Matter movement with “Black Messiah,” an album “about people rising up in Ferguson, [Missouri,] and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen,” as he wrote in the record’s liner notes.
Maybe the only way for D’Angelo to imagine a future for himself was to imagine a future for us. Yet, for all the album’s political heft, its final track is an exquisite wink: “Another Life,” probably the most metaphysical flirtation since the Flamingos sang “I Only Have Eyes for You” back in 1959, somewhere near the middle of that 20th century D’Angelo helped us leave behind. “In another life,” he sings across the room, across the centuries, “I bet you were my girl.” And so his songbook ends with a flicker of something new, something eternal, something to assure us that forever goes in both directions.
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