<\/p>\n
On the first day of the century, the sun decided to come up. Everyone\u2019s computers blinked on, and the end-times hadn\u2019t come. But we still couldn\u2019t shake the question mark hanging over America, if not earthly existence: What happens to us now?<\/i> Twenty-four days later, D\u2019Angelo proposed some kind of answer with \u201cVoodoo,\u201d a star map of an R&B album that felt ancient and futuristic, capacious and intimate, immaculate and filthy, fragile and full of desire \u2014 music that, even 25 years later, still fulfills our busted nation\u2019s collective idea of musical greatness. Real greatness, true greatness, total greatness. Not the flattering kind that means best,<\/i> or even the beautiful kind that means loved<\/i>. The indisputable kind that means more to understand, forever.<\/i><\/p>\n
Like masterpieces do, \u201cVoodoo\u201d made him and wrecked him in quick succession, and it wasn\u2019t until the materialization of his third record, \u201cBlack Messiah<\/a>,\u201d in 2014 that we dared to hope D\u2019Angelo 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\u2019Angelo 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 \u2014 in the century after the civil rights movement \u2014 a life of true greatness still involves being made to feel that you\u2019ll never be good enough. \u201cAs Black folk, we gotta always be three, four, five steps ahead of everybody else in order just to break even,\u201d D\u2019Angelo said in \u201cSly Lives!,\u201d a recent documentary about his haunted predecessor Sly Stone<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s just always been that way.\u201d<\/p>\n Born proudly into the hip-hop generation in 1974, D\u2019Angelo grew up in the heat of Richmond, singing Pentecostal hymns on weekends, keeping the sleek funk of Prince\u2019s \u201cDirty Mind\u201d locked in a separate compartment of his consciousness. In time, \u201cDirty Mind\u201d 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 \u2014 through a fundamental understanding that any sound that still shakes the air is totally alive.<\/p>\n When he released his debut album, \u201cBrown Sugar,\u201d in 1995, his falsetto was singular enough to make you wonder whether \u201chigher\u201d might be a different direction from the one we\u2019ve always known. Despite merciless comparisons, his high notes weren\u2019t quite like those of Al Green or Marvin Gaye. Those guys did legendary skywriting \u2014 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\u2019Angelo went up, his falsetto was existential. He didn\u2019t sound higher. He sounded alive and alone. When \u201cVoodoo\u201d arrived five years later, the critic Greg Tate thought<\/a> the singer\u2019s sound had become \u201cso raw, so naked and exposed, you\u2019ll be tempted to throw a blanket over its brittle, shivering bones.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n In the music video for \u201cUntitled (How Does It Feel)<\/a>,\u201d D\u2019Angelo 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 \u201cVoodoo\u201d 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 \u201cBlack Messiah,\u201d an album \u201cabout 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,\u201d as he wrote in the record\u2019s liner notes.<\/p>\n Maybe the only way for D\u2019Angelo to imagine a future for himself was to imagine a future for us. Yet, for all the album\u2019s political heft, its final track is an exquisite wink: \u201cAnother Life<\/a>,\u201d probably the most metaphysical flirtation since the Flamingos sang \u201cI Only Have Eyes for You<\/a>\u201d back in 1959, somewhere near the middle of that 20th century D\u2019Angelo helped us leave behind. \u201cIn another life,\u201d he sings across the room, across the centuries, \u201cI bet you were my girl.\u201d And so his songbook ends with a flicker of something new, something eternal, something to assure us that forever goes in both directions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the first day of the century, the sun decided to come up. Everyone\u2019s computers blinked on, and the end-times hadn\u2019t come. But we still couldn\u2019t shake the question mark hanging over America, if not earthly existence: What happens to us now? Twenty-four days later, D\u2019Angelo proposed some kind of answer with \u201cVoodoo,\u201d a star […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2029532,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[394334,394265,394415,394416],"class_list":["post-2091340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-black-messiah","tag-dangelo","tag-true-greatness","tag-voodoo"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/In-Black-Rabbit-Jason-Bateman-and-Jude-Law-are-brothers.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2091340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2091340"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2091340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2091341,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2091340\/revisions\/2091341"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2029532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2091340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2091340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2091340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}