Micheal Eugene Archer, the singer and musician better known as D’Angelo, had no use for “neo soul,” the label critics used to describe the type of music he helped personify in the 1990s and 2000s. “I never claimed I do neo soul,” he said in 2014. “I make Black music.”
D’Angelo, who died of pancreatic cancer on Tuesday at the age of 51, certainly did. His music helped define what it meant to be Black at a time when that meaning was in flux, an age where some African American intellectuals feared that their community’s most popular cultural export, rap, was overly coarse and primitive. Over three incomparable albums—Brown Sugar (1995), Voodoo (2000), and Black Messiah (2014)— D’Angelo made art that was unquestionably Black in its embrace of gospel’s history, as well as its experimentation and radicalism.
From the Bill Clinton impeachment scandal to Woodstock ’99, the late 1990s left many Americans worried that culture was going down the drain—but the neo-soul moment now stands out as a vibrant and meaningful counterexample. Made by bohemians with a social conscience and remarkable skill, their music wasn’t just enjoyable, it was ambitious. D’Angelo worked with, inspired, and paved the way for a mind-boggling list of musicians, from Questlove and The Roots DJ Premiere, Raphael Siddiq, Erykah Badu, Maxwell, Lauryn Hill, and Angie Stone—his former partner and the mother of his son, who died earlier this year in a tragic car crash. In hindsight, it’s pleasantly surprising that they all enjoyed so much critical and commercial success during their creative peaks.
If soul music is made for falling in love, D’Angelo made music for people who were trying to live together, however uneasily. Voodoo was one of the only things that could soothe a restive Black family gathering in the early 2000s, getting the hateration and holleration to stop for at least 79 minutes as older generations gave Millennials a lesson about good music. Despite the “explicit” sticker prominently displayed on the CD jewel case—and profane guest appearances from Redman and Method Man—even respectable members of the Greatest Generation could find something to love in that album, thanks to D’Angelo’s knowledgeable interpretations of the blues.
For someone whose best-known contribution to the cultural conversation is a video in which he appears to be (but actually isn’t) entirely naked, D’Angelo’s music was also surprisingly churchy. He was raised in a devoutly Pentecostal family in Richmond, Virginia, and during his teen years, he played the organ at the church where his father preached. His music is full of the vamping and intensifying one expects to hear during a particularly pleasurable hour at a Black church, and the call-and-response motif common in the spirituals that grew out of work songs. His transcendent hit “Untitled (How Does It Feel)”—the song illustrated by that classic music video—feels more like a hymn than a pop song, even if it is clearly sung in praise of the body.
That conflict makes it painfully ironic that D’Angelo is still so associated with the single’s intensely sexy video, even though “sex symbol” wasn’t a mantle he felt comfortable seizing. (Mark Jenkins, the trainer who helped D’Angelo transform his physique for the video, told SPIN Magazine in 2008 that the reaction came as a shock to the musician: “To be someone who was so introverted, and then, in a matter of three or four months, to be so ripped—everything was happening so quickly.”)
Look at the work, and you’ll see why D’Angelo wasn’t comfortable with the label of “neo soul;” marketing language can often fail to capture what art really is. Now that his music is no longer new, maybe we can just call it “soul”—and add D’Angelo to a long list of artists who have transformed difficult lives into emotive examples of Black expression: Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye. All of them are gone. Now D’Angelo and Stone are, too. Who could look at that list and not be struck by the sheer number of artists on it who were taken too soon?
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
-
What Bari Weiss Means for 60 Minutes
-
All About Melania
-
Meet the British ’90s It Girl Who Wants to Make England Great Again
-
Anjelica Huston’s Cultured Coolness
-
Gore Vidal’s Final Feud
-
The 6 Grisly Films Inspired by Serial Killer Ed Gein
-
Charlie Kirk, Redeemed by the Media
-
The 25 Best Movies to Watch on Netflix This October
-
From the Archive: The Hollywood Secret Katharine Hepburn Helped Bury
The post D’Angelo Made “Neo Soul” a Document of Black Life in America appeared first on Vanity Fair.
