R&B Soul Great D'Angelo Passes Away

D’Angelo in 2000. He found fame with an innovative, sensuous take on 1970s R&B.


D’Angelo, Acclaimed and Reclusive R&B Innovator, Dies at 51

After hitting No. 1 with “Voodoo,” the genre-melding 2000 album that he promoted with a risqué music video, he vanished for more than a decade.


By Ben Sisario

D’Angelo, the acclaimed neo-soul singer who found fame in the 1990s and early 2000s with an innovative and sensuous take on 1970s R&B, as well as with a risqué music video that briefly made him a pop culture phenomenon but helped drive him into nearly a decade of seclusion, died on Tuesday. He was 51.

His death was confirmed in a statement by his family, which did not say where he died but gave the cause as cancer.

During the first phase of his career, leading up to his triumph with the 2000 album “Voodoo,” D’Angelo was a leading light of a revolution in soul music, melding the seductive melodies of classic singers like Al Green and Marvin Gaye with the beats and urgency of hip-hop.


His biggest songs, like “Lady,” “Brown Sugar” and “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” were hailed as supreme examples of the trend, which sought not a revival of Black pop traditions but a transformation of them. Each of those tracks became a Top 10 hit on Billboard’s R&B chart, D’Angelo went into heavy rotation on Black radio stations and “Lady” went to No. 10 on Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100 chart.


D’Angelo performing at the Made in America music festival in Philadelphia in 2012.
D’Angelo’s signature vocal style was a delicately expressive falsetto that, like Prince’s, could build to an ecstatic wail. Also like Prince, he arranged his music meticulously, served as his own producer and played guitar. Critics exalted him as a worthy successor to the greatest traditions of Black pop.

“He is R&B Jesus, and I’m a believer,” Robert Christgau wrote in The Village Voice in 2000.

“Untitled,” which unfolds slowly, at an erotic tempo — it runs to more than seven minutes in its full album version — also crossed over to the wider pop market, thanks in no small part to its music video.

In the video, D’Angelo stood against a dark backdrop as a Black Adonis in cornrows, apparently naked except for a gold chain with a crucifix. (The video framed its lower edge just below his waist.) The camera slowly scanned his muscled, sweat-drenched physique as he brought the song to an orgasmic climax.

The video established D’Angelo as an unabashed sex symbol — The New York Times called it “pure beefcake” — and bolstered his commercial power, sending “Voodoo,” the album that the song appeared on, to No. 1 for two weeks.



D’Angelo in 2000. “He is R&B Jesus, and I’m a believer,” the critic Robert Christgau wrote in The Village Voice that year.
In 2001, “Voodoo” won best R&B album at the Grammys, and “Untitled” took best male R&B vocal performance.

But D’Angelo, the son of a Pentecostal minister who sometimes described his art in spiritual terms, grew uncomfortable with being pigeonholed as a heartthrob. After a breakdown on tour, he fell into a depression and struggled with alcohol and drug abuse before going to rehab.

“‘Untitled’ wasn’t supposed to be his mission statement for ‘Voodoo,’” his former manager, Dominique Trenier, told Spin magazine in 2008.

“I’m glad the video did what it did,” Mr. Trenier added, “but he and I were both disappointed because, to this day, in the general populace’s memory, he’s the naked dude.”



D’Angelo’s album “Voodoo,” from 2000, won a Grammy Award for best R&B album.


D’Angelo also chafed at the description of his music as simply neo-soul. “I never claimed I do neo-soul,” he said in a Red Bull Music Academy interview in 2014. “When I first came out, I used to always say: ‘I do Black music. I make Black music.’”

For much of the rest of his career, D’Angelo would vanish from the public eye for years at a time. After “Voodoo,” he did not release another album until “Black Messiah,” which he produced himself, in 2014. That album brought two more Grammys.

His absences further cultivated his mystique among his fans, as well as drew concern. In May he withdrew from a festival performance in Philadelphia, citing a recent surgery.

 

Continued


D’Angelo was born Michael Eugene Archer in South Richmond, Va., on Feb. 11, 1974. His father was a Pentecostal preacher and his mother was a legal secretary. As a child, he played organ and was part of the choir at his father’s church. He also spent time poring through the broad-ranging record collection of an uncle, and studied classical music briefly.

After moving to Chesterfield, Va., for high school, he started a hip-hop group, IDU — which stood for Intelligent, Deadly but Unique — with friends, and appeared in talent shows. At 16, after winning a local contest, he came to New York to compete in Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater — where, he said, he won with a cover of Johnny Gill’s New Jack Swing track “Rub You the Right Way.”





He soon returned to New York looking for a record deal. Auditioning for a music publisher, he performed a Jodeci song, a gospel song and a Miles Davis song: three distinct strands of his musical obsessions that he would soon intertwine. By his late teens, he was calling himself D’Angelo, a nickname that was said to be derived from Michelangelo.

He was signed to EMI, and his first album, “Brown Sugar” (1995), laid out much of the approach that he would follow throughout his career: dense, soulful songs with multilayered vocals — all sung by D’Angelo himself — that drew from Prince, classic soul and traces of the gospel music he grew up with.




“Brown Sugar” was D’Angelo’s debut studio album in 1995.

Driven by its title track and “Lady,” the album’s popularity grew steadily, reaching No. 4 on Billboard’s R&B chart and No. 22 on its all-genre Billboard 200 chart; within a year it went platinum.

To follow up “Brown Sugar,” D’Angelo gathered a group of collaborators, including the drummer and producer Questlove, the keyboardist James Poyser and the hip-hop producer J Dilla. Calling themselves the Soulquarians — and sometimes joined by Erykah Badu, Common and Mos Def — they hunkered down at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, and some days spent as much time listening to music as recording it.

“The best way to describe the process is very much like a sculpture,” he once told Rolling Stone. “You’re just constantly chipping and chipping away at it. I’ll work on something for a minute, and, once I feel like I’m starting to fixate on it, I put it away and go to another one.”




At the same time, D’Angelo was becoming a bona fide celebrity. According to a profile in GQ magazine published in 2014, Madonna invited him to sing “Happy Birthday” to her at her 39th birthday party, in 1997.

While recording “Brown Sugar,” D’Angelo became romantically involved with the soul singer Angie Stone. In 1998, they had a son together, Michael D’Angelo Archer II, also known as Swayvo Twain.





D’Angelo in Las Vegas in 2015, three years after he returned to performing.


D’Angelo had two other children, but complete information about his survivors was not immediately available. Stone, who was also an early rap pioneer, died in a car crash in March, at 63.

The making of “Voodoo” stretched on for nearly two years in the studio. When released, it was received as a triumph. According to GQ, George Clinton, the funk icon behind the groups Parliament and Funkadelic, compared the album to Gaye’s 1971 landmark album “What’s Going On.”

In the troubled wake of “Voodoo,” D’Angelo decamped to Richmond. In 2005, he was given a three-year suspended sentence for cocaine possession, and that same year he crashed his Hummer on a road near Richmond, breaking his ribs. He returned to performing in 2012, though he was no longer the svelte, muscular figure of his “Voodoo” days.





“Black Messiah,” credited to D’Angelo and the Vanguard, was made with a team of collaborators that included Questlove, the jazz trumpeter Roy Hargrove and the stalwart R&B drummer James Gadson. In a review in The New York Times, Jon Pareles and Jon Caramanica called it “a knotty, inward-looking, musicianly album made to reveal itself slowly.”

The album and its release were partly political statements. D’Angelo and his label, RCA, rushed to release it as a response to the killing of Black men that year, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.




Fourteen years elapsed before he released a follow-up: the Grammy-winning “Black Messiah” (2014).


“The one way I do speak out is through music,” D’Angelo told his tour manager, Alan Leeds, as reported in The Times. “I want to speak out.”

After the release of “Black Messiah,” D’Angelo said that he was working on a companion album, going through the surplus of songs he had written for that album, some of them more explicitly political. That album was never released, although he didn’t vanish from public view as completely as he had in the decade before.

He contributed a song, “Unshaken,” to the soundtrack for the 2018 video game “Red Dead Redemption 2” and collaborated with Jay-Z and Jeymes Samuel on “I Want You Forever,” a slow jam from the soundtrack of Samuel’s 2024 movie “The Book of Clarence.”



Throughout his career, D’Angelo sometimes described his creative process in terms that mirrored his religious upbringing.

“I learned at an early age that what we were doing in the choir was just as important as the preacher,” he told GQ in 2014. “It was a ministry in itself. We could stir the pot, you know? The stage is our pulpit, and you can use all of that energy and that music and the lights and the colors and the sound.

“But you know,” he added, “you’ve got to be careful.”