The Wild Reed: Groove and Grace: Remembering D’Angelo

Thursday, October 16, 2025

Groove and Grace: Remembering D’Angelo

I was saddened to hear earlier this week of the passing of soul music legend D’Angelo. The musician died Tuesday, October 14 from pancreatic cancer. He was 51. (For my previous Wild Reed post about D’Angelo, click here.)

Following is how ABC News reported D’Angelo’s passing.

In remembering and celebrating this evening the life and music of D’Angelo, I share (with added images and links) a number of excerpts from various online tributes.

This week, the R&B singer D’Angelo died at age 51, of cancer. He was best known for deftly combining the heft and tenderness of soul music with the ingenuity and nerve of hip-hop, and while he was acclaimed in all the usual ways – four Grammy Awards, two platinum-selling albums, a music video so sexually charged that it still feels dangerous to watch in mixed company – he was also reclusive, enigmatic, unknowable.

“D’Angelo was a generational talent – an unusually artful singer, and an experimental and idiosyncratic songwriter,” Amanda Petrusich writes. But he largely eschewed the accoutrements of stardom, releasing just three albums in 19 years.

D’Angelo signed a songwriting deal when he was 17; a record contract followed, two years later. He released his first album, Brown Sugar, in 1995, when he was only 21. “Brown Sugar is an excellent R&B record – moody, luxurious, softly lit – but it wasn’t until the release of Voodoo, five years later, that the depth and richness of D’Angelo’s vision became fully evident,” Petrusich writes. “Voodoo is, by nearly all accounts, a masterpiece. By three minutes into “Playa Playa,” the album’s opening track, the air has changed in the room. Or maybe the air has changed in the whole neighborhood. The music’s gravitational pull is that potent and that steady.”

Then, in 2014, after 14 years of relative dormancy, and without much warning, D’Angelo released Black Messiah – probably his most divisive album, crackling with the frantic, sprawling energy of political upheaval. The message of the album felt like a suggestion of kinship: racism was everyone’s problem.

“These days, a lot of D’Angelo’s defining qualities as a musician – humility, subtlety, imperfection, prescience, sensuality, inventiveness – feel as though they’re in alarmingly short supply,” Petrusich notes. “D’Angelo understood his role as an artist as significant, and the responsibility as grave.”

– The New Yorker
Describing Amanda Petrusich’s article,
“D’Angelo’s Genius Was Pure, and Rare”
October 15, 2025

D’Angelo was one of the most widely revered artists of the past 30 years. A childhood musical prodigy, he quickly asserted himself as a star with his 1995 debut, Brown Sugar, released when he was 21. A key part of the Soulquarians, a loose collective of musicians, singers, and producers that included Questlove, Erykah Badu, J Dilla, Q-Tip, among others – he was at the forefront of a movement that charted new paths in soul, R&B, and hip-hop while maintaining a deep admiration for the past.

D’Angelo, and this movement, were often pegged as “neo-soul,” but in a 2014 Red Bull Academy lecture, the singer-songwriter chafed at the description: “I think the main thing about the whole neo-soul thing, not to put it down or it was a bad thing or anything, but . . . you want to be in a position where you can grow as an artist.” He added: “I never claimed that. I never claimed I do neo-soul, you know. I used to say, when I first came out, I used to always say, ‘I do black music. I make black music.'”

D’Angelo’s three solo albums – Brown Sugar, 2000’s Voodoo, and 2014’s Black Messiah – all earned critical acclaim and cracked the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 albums chart, with Voodoo reaching Number One. His biggest Hot 100 charter was “Lady,” but it was “Untitled (How Does it Feel),” with its memorable one-shot video of a naked D’Angelo belting the track, that arguably became his signature song.

Nominated for 14 Grammys over the course of his career, D’Angelo won four awards, including Best R&B Album twice for Voodoo and Black Messiah. He also won Best R&B Vocal Performance for “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” [below] and Best R&B Song for Black Messiah’s “Really Love.”

– Jon Blistein
Excerpted from “D’Angelo, Soul’s
Modern Visionary, Dead at 51”
Rolling Stone
October 14, 2023

The world lost a giant.

D’Angelo was more than a musician, he was a vessel of soul, a conjurer of feeling, a truth-teller in melody and rhythm. He bared his soul with every note and we felt it.

And though he may be gone, his spirit remains in every harmony, in every bassline, in every heart he touched. Artists like D’Angelo don’t just make music; they make memories.

We will miss him.

– Nina Turner
via social media
October 14, 2023

D’Angelo, who was born Michael Eugene Archer, in Richmond, Virginia, is often compared to Prince, and rightly so, I think – each wielded a carnal, otherworldly falsetto. But, perhaps more crucially, they shared an exquisite sense of pacing, as if they were attuned to some elegant internal rhythm. Neither could be hurried. That feeling – stately, easy, deliberate – is inherently sensual. You’ll register it, sometimes, in the slowest but most provocative gestures – a curl of smoke, a brush of hands, the right sort of glance from across a room. D’Angelo understood the ways in which restraint can be infinitely more haunting – and more alluring – than aggression.

– Amanda Petrusich
Excerpted from “D’Angelo’s Genius Was Pure, and Rare”
The New Yorker
October 15, 2023

D’Angelo’s 1995 debut Brown Sugar was the blueprint of the Nineties Neo Soul revival, a genre that brought some erotic energy, dirty groove, glorious musicianship and raw, human spirit back into the soul genre after years of over-produced smoothness and the synthetic plasticity of New Jack Swing.

Just 21 when it came out, the artist born Michael Eugene Archer played almost all the instruments (guitar, keyboards, bass and drums), composed and arranged all the songs and sang lead and backing vocals. His hero was Prince, and he aspired to a similar degree of musical control.

You can certainly hear some of Prince’s vocal intonations in D’Angelo’s singing as he shifts from tender murmurings to falsetto screams, but he wrapped in a whole range of other influences too, citing “gospel, blues, a lot of old soul, old James Brown, early, early Sly and the Family Stone and a lot of Jimi Hendrix.” Toss a bit of Fela Kuti, George Clinton and Al Green into that mix. There was hip-hop too, in the modern rhythmic flow, but crucially D’Angelo dialled back past the artificiality that had come to dominate American black urban sounds, forgoing the perfectionism of most contemporary Nineties soul music to bring actual singing and playing back to the fore. . . . The D’Angelo sound was elastic and tight yet slightly shambling funk, the huge bass often slightly behind the drums, with nothing played in strict time (perhaps a result of D’Angelo overdubbing himself).

The result could be shuffling, jerky and weird, slowing down and speeding up through the song, yet all hypnotically strung together by his floating, ethereal, tender vocals. His work is moody and atmospheric rather than tautly constructed songcraft, but it has an almost supernatural energy that feels like D’Angelo is transmitting aural electricity.

– Neil McCormick
Excerpted from “He Only Made Three Albums,
But D’Angelo Changed Soul Music for Ever”
The Telegraph
October 15, 2025

I don’t want to get too sentimental about D’Angelo. But, honestly, how could I not? His music has been the background radiation of my life, the quiet pulse underneath everything since those formative years when we were still figuring out who we were.

So . . . thank you, D.

This one hits different. He was the first artist who really mattered to me. The first whose music felt like it understood me before I understood myself. The first one I saw in full bloom: in his element, in his prime, showing what it means to live inside the song. (and I know that y’all feel me.)

There was a time before Dilla and D’Angelo . . . Then the axis tilted. Music changed. The air changed. Even the way people walked changed. That’s what genius does: it slips into the bloodstream and suddenly everything else feels a little out of tune.

It’s hard to reinvent the wheel in a postmodern world. They did it anyway.

So I’m grateful. For what D’Angelo gave to me, to my friends, to all of us who believe that groove and grace can still save a day. Our hero is gone now. But the rhythm keeps going.

Fly on, D. The world’s still dancing.

– Sinkane
via social media
October 16, 2023

D’Angelo grew up playing in a pentecostalist church in Virginia and went to New York City in search of a record deal as a teenager as part of a trio. The label said, we only want him. His debut album, Brown Sugar, put everyone on notice: there was a new soul giant in town. His single of the same name, a cheeky back-and-forth about his love of marijuana, was among the top songs of that summer in 1995. But some felt it was a project left unfinished, as if the songs were more like sketches. Five years later, D erased all of that with his second album, Voodoo. It was a towering achievement that made it clear that he was not only a disciple of soul legends, he was their peer as well.

But Voodoo led to a problem.

The song “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” was D’Angelo’s masterwork: a swirling groove of erotic funk so hot you could get pregnant just by hearing it. His manager, Dominick Trenier, envisioned a video where D was alone on a stage with the camera giving us closeups of his incredible body — from his cornrows to just below his belly button. It would be simple, and sexual, and powerful. This would be the culmination of years of work on his body. When D dropped Brown Sugar he was overweight. In the five years after, as he worked on Voodoo, he changed his diet and trained obsessively. When it was time to shoot the “Untitled” video, D looked as fit as a human could possibly be. But he didn’t want to do the video. His limo pulled up outside the shoot, and he refused to get out. He was nervous. Trenier came out and sat with him until finally he felt ready.

They went in and created one of the most iconic videos of all time. The video hit the culture like a neutron bomb and titillated everyone. Was this the best-looking man alive? Maybe. The visual alone gave D’Angelo an even bigger profile. But here comes the rub: after “Untitled,” people began to see the singer differently. At his shows, fans screamed for him to take his shirt off. That was acceptable, but he wanted to be seen as a musician.

D had studied music like a graduate student and then spent five years working on Voodoo. He wanted it all to be about songs — to convey that he was a great musician — but they were screaming so loud for his abs that you couldn’t hear the music. He felt like he’d been demoted from genius to sex symbol. He rebelled by disappearing. We spent years missing him. His third and final album, Black Messiah, came out in 2014, more than a decade later.

– Touré
Excerpted from “The Rise, Retreat, and Resurrection of D’Angelo”
Rolling Stone
October 15, 2025

In the long gap between his second and third albums, 2000’s Voodoo, and 2014’s Black Messiah, D'Angelo nearly came undone, with concerning aughts news reports of narcotics arrests and a car accident. But the 2006 loss of legendary beat-maker J Dilla set D’Angelo on a path to recovery.

His return to the stage in the early 2010s was every bit as remarkable as his early classics because it saw him contending openly with a place in a pantheon of all-timers while renegotiating a relationship with his audience. D’Angelo was always grappling with the past. But in his miraculous late-career resurgence, he was not just synthesizing soul history but almost confrontationally using it to speak for him.

– Craig Jenkins
Excerpted from “D’Angelo Saw His Future in the Past”
Vulture
October 15, 2025

[D’Angelo's 2014 album] Black Messiah didn’t disappoint. Despite its lengthy gestation, it appeared to fit perfectly with increasingly troubled times: released not long after the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Black man Michael Brown led to unrest in Missouri, its lyrics dealt with gun violence and systemic racism.

Its raw, dense, avant-soul sound shifted unpredictably from furious to dream-like: you could hear traces of Sly and the Family Stone’s legendary 1971 album There’s a Riot Goin’ On, updated for a new era. It was superb.

It was also the last album D’Angelo was to make, although a single, “Unshaken,” appeared in 2019. As late as last year, when D’Angelo appeared alongside Jay-Z on the soundtrack to the comedy-drama film The Book of Clarence, there was talk of a follow-up: his long-time collaborator Raphael Saadiq told journalists he was working on a new album. Whether that music will now ever appear is open to question.

You could, if you wished, view D’Angelo’s career as frustratingly scattered: it would certainly have been nice if he had released more music than he did. But, then again, he leaves behind a perfect catalogue: only three albums in 30 years, but all of them are of an extraordinarily high quality. It was a conundrum neatly summed by Questlove, who was asked about D’Angelo in the long, grim gap between Voodoo and Black Messiah. “I consider him a genius beyond words,” he offered. “At the same time, I say to myself: how can I scream someone’s genius if they hardly have any work to show for it? Then again, the last work he did was so powerful that it’s lasted 10 years.” The music D’Angelo did release will ultimately last far longer than that.

– Alexis Petridis
Excerpted from “Experimental, Sensual and Political,
D’Angelo Radically Redrew the Boundaries of Soul Music”
The Guardian
October 14, 2025

I always felt like D’Angelo wasn’t a mere mortal, he didn’t walk the same Earth as you or me. He was touched, he had magic – you could call it soul, you could call it grit, but whatever it was, it was otherworldly. To me he was the only singer of his/our generation who could go toe-to-toe with ’60s-’70s legends like Marvin, Al Green, Sly, Sam Cooke. I say “our” generation . . . I clearly remember when the Brown Sugar single came out. I’d only started buying vinyl 12”s a year or so before. When D landed in the record bins, everyone took notice. He completely reinvented R&B. He made it gritty, he brought a hip-hop attitude . . . he was working with Bob Power and Ali Shaheed, so if you were a Tribe fan you were immediately mystified. He made his Rhodes sound like nothing on this planet. And that voice, those harmonies. . . . When that first album dropped, nothing was the same.

Of course then Voodoo came and changed all music – everything. The tour that followed was the stuff of legends. Every player in his band was a deity in their own right.

Over a decade passed without an album. How do you top those two? And then when no one expected it, Black Messiah dropped and was another 10/10. Not only that but D was playing guitar now. With so much gumbo, so much funk. And he had Jesse Johnson on tour with him.

None of this is normal. We’re lucky to have been alive to have witnessed ANY of this. To have heard just ONE stack of harmonies from this man. Thank you D’Angelo. You were my favorite. Your music will stay with me, with us, forever. Send it on.

– A-Trak
via social media
October 14, 2025

Thank you. Thank you a million times over. To create, to shift, to shape and reshape, to push, to inspire, to fuel, to illuminate. An artist can only dream to achieve one or a few of these things. How amazing to witness him who did all of it and so masterfully.

I rediscovered Voodoo in my college days. It opened up the world for me. it became a defining element of art that’s very responsible for where I started. I stack my backgrounds the way I do because of him. I feel unafraid to experiment and evolve because of him.

I think we were all hoping to hear much more from him, but he has given us more than a lifetime of sound. Nothing but gratitude to be around in the same space and time as that sound. God Bless his family. Superbly done. Thank you, thank you, thank you.