When I showed up to Golden Gate Park on August 7, 2015 for a D’Angelo concert as a part of the Outside Lands music festival, it was unclear if he would even show. Two years prior, the mercurial singer had been booked at the same festival but cancelled due to a medical emergency. Over the prior decade, D’Angelo had garnered a reputation for flakiness and erratic behavior, with several purported comebacks withering away.
But not only did D’Angelo show up that night, he delivered perhaps the greatest musical performance I’ve ever witnessed. He showed off the full range of his virtuosic singing and songwriting, playing sultry R&B ballads, punk-infused protest anthems, and jazz-inflected interludes. He crooned in falsetto like Prince, stomped and shrieked like James Brown, sashayed across the stage like MJ, melding generations of Black artistic traditions into a style fully his own.
D’Angelo closed the show with the torrentially funky “Sugah Daddy,” punching home the outro with an emphatic series of horn stabs which he directed with his outstretched fist. When the band raced to a halt, the crowd went absolutely crazy, its cheers reverberating across the park. For a full minute, the singer basked in the waves of roaring adulation, looking back at his band, bug-eyed and laughing, as if even he couldn’t believe the flow state he had just achieved. He then punched the air again and re-launched his band into the same blistering groove, giving the crowd one final passage of brilliance to hold onto for the trip home.
That moment was a special one in my life, but just one of countless moments of white hot genius that D’Angelo forged over his three-decade career. The singer created three near-perfect albums: Brown Sugar (1995), Voodoo (2000), and Black Messiah (2014), and became renowned for being one of the best live performers of his generation. He distilled musings about sex, suffering, love, and oppression into musical masterpieces. But he also struggled in his personal life, wrestling with alcoholism, drug abuse, and anxiety. On Tuesday, he died of cancer at the age of 51.
“We are saddened that he can only leave dear memories with his family, but we are eternally grateful for the legacy of extraordinarily moving music he leaves behind,” his family wrote in a statement sent to TIME. His music label, RCA, added: “He was a peerless visionary who effortlessly blended the classic sounds of soul, funk, gospel, R&B, and jazz with a hip hop sensibility.”
Born Michael Eugene Archer in 1974, D’Angelo grew up in Richmond, Va. at a time when the state was rapidly becoming a hotbed for Black musical excellence: D’Angelo, Pharrell, Missy Elliott, and Timbaland were all born there in a four-year period. D’Angelo was raised in a deeply religious Pentecostal family and got his musical start in the church, becoming a virtuoso at several instruments. Over his career, D’Angelo would approach both religious and secular subjects with the same ecstatic fervor.
D’Angelo moved to New York at the age of 18 and helped shape the burgeoning heyday of neo-soul, when artists were combining revivalist impulses with new innovative sounds and approaches. On his debut album Brown Sugar, he imbued the timelessness of the soul music tradition with the grit and swagger of hip hop. “I’m not trying to sugarcoat myself. I’m trying to be as raw as I can be,” he told Vibe in 1995. “I just want to make some real Black music.”
Working closely with a school of neo-soul icons like Erykah Badu and Questlove in the collective the Soulquarians, D’Angelo reached his peak of fame in 2000 with Voodoo, on which he played drums, electric guitar, percussion, and keyboards, including the Fender Rhodes that Stevie Wonder played on Talking Book. The album won two Grammys, and Time named it the best album of the year. “D’Angelo summoned old ghosts — Jimi and Marvin — and woke up a new artistic spirit in R&B,” wrote Christopher John Farley. “Even as D’Angelo pays homage to music’s past, he proves the future is in good hands.”
But Voodoo’s all-around brilliance was perhaps eclipsed by the music video for one song on the album: “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” which is now widely considered his most famous song. The erotic video featured close-ups of his sculpted, glistening body, and became a mainstay on music video channels.
The adoration of the video turned sinister, and into objectification: while on tour, fans would rush the stage and try to disrobe him. Over the next decade, D’Angelo would retreat into reclusion and heavy drinking and drug use. He worked and overworked songs due to both his perfectionism and writer’s block, and his output ground to a halt. He was also injured in a car crash, had run-ins with the law, and drifted in and out of rehab.
D’Angelo’s very public struggles can be viewed as part of a larger tradition of Black artists being crushed by the exploitative systems of fame and the music industry. Questlove, D’Angelo’s bandmate, explored these themes in the 2025 documentary Sly Lives!, which focused upon Sly Stone, but more broadly explores the impossible weight of Black genius in American society, and the guilt and self-sabotage that often accompany it.
In the documentary, Questlove interviewed D’Angelo, who talked about the heavy burdens he faced. “They’re depending on you and they’re counting on you,” he said. “It’s enough just navigating and coping through the change in your life that happens when you become a celebrity. Just that within itself is a huge paradigm shift.”
He added, in a moment of grim foresight: “I hate to say it but these White rock-and-rollers… go out in style, they go out paid. … They die in their tomato garden with their grandson, laughing … That’s what we’re supposed to be doing.”
After his public struggles in the 2000s, D’Angelo could have faded away. But he returned in 2014 with Black Messiah, a stunning album that captured both Black joy and oppression. Black Messiah was released in the thick of the Black Lives Matter movement and following the killings of unarmed Black men like Michael Brown and Eric Garner. “Aretha Franklin was as important to the civil-rights movement as Malcolm X and Medgar Evers,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015. “Artists can choose to take on the tremendous amount of responsibility we have, or choose to ignore it.”
One of the best songs on Black Messiah was “Charade,” a bitter, desolate protest song about Black bodies being “outlined in chalk.” But during the song’s bridge, D’Angelo sparked hope with one line of warm optimism: “And we’ll march on / And it really won’t take too long / It really won’t take us very long.”
D’Angelo’s legacy is being carried forward by a new generation of stars including Janelle Monae, Tyler the Creator, and Donald Glover, who paid tribute to D’Angelo in an episode of Atlanta. He also shares a son with Angie Stone, who was killed in March in a car crash. Upon his death, tributes poured in on social media.
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