On a Planet with D'Angelo.
I started the day yesterday listening to a Wesley Morris podcast about the recent death of Robert Redford.
It was an episode marking the death of a certain type of artist of a certain generation. A real American. A true movie star. A dying breed, now dead.
The podcast developed into a larger discussion about whose deaths would be worthy of being published, to use an old newspaper term, “above the fold”. Barbra Streisand, “yes”. Warren Beatty, “maybe”. Meryl Streep, “the whole damn paper”.
My day ended with a text from a friend telling me that D’Angelo had died.
Turns out, in the digital age, we make our own front pages news.
All deaths are real but only some are symbolic.
If life is a party in full swing, then the atmosphere shifts when certain people exit.
Whether you care about his passing or not, it is an undeniable fact that our material conditions have changed; we are now living on a planet without a D’Angelo.
*involuntary stank face*
The earliest CDs I can remember buying, the ones that stick out in my mind as the first building blocks of my own personal canon, were Stardust’s The Music Sounds Better with You, Britney’s Hit Me Baby One More Time, and D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar. (This chick is eclectic as hell!)
Where I grew up there were no Black people. D’Angelo was the first Black man I ever (felt like) I met. And Brown Sugar was the most exciting album I owned until OK Computer.
Years later, I would end up working on a documentary called Songs to Have Sex to for SKY Arts in which D’Angelo featured heavily. But at 11 years old, D’Angelo’s music was not exciting to me because it was sexy. Sexy as a concept was not all that interesting or even knowable. Sexy was sharp suits and lipstick and expensive aftershave and hair gel. It was Jessica Rabbit and Fabio, intellectual and abstract, two-dimensional renderings spawned from tacky, cynical minds. Every 11 year old knew that.
What D’Angelo introduced me to was something far more interesting: The Sensual. And being sensual is way more embarrassing for a little white horse-girl from Kent to be caught practicing in her bedroom in the mid-90s.
Of course, there had been hundreds of soul artists who’d come before him, many of whom I’d certainly heard of by that point; legends like Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown. But they were not mine. Only one soul artist arrived at a crucial stage in my musical development.
And that artist was D’Angelo.
Tell me what you’re thinking of (tell me what you’re thinking of)
Yeah, must be thinking ‘bout love, yeah (must be thinking ‘bout love)
There are some things I only learned from Black artists. James Baldwin taught me love as a movement. bell hooks, love as a verb. Maya Angelou told me about the kind of love that will saves us all from barbarism.
D’Angelo, son of a pastor, taught me singing as love, music as devotion.
I am not religious and I have never prayed, but even I know singing is holy.
D’Angelo’s songs not only showed me that there were tunes to be carried but ranges to be tested. There are D’Angelo refrains indelibly etched in my mind and in my throat that I return to randomly and often, standing in the kitchen, driving the car, walking in the woods. Melodies and vocal arrangements that demand something of me beyond skill. They demand a spiritual agility.
D’Angelo gave me music as romance, romancing as prayer, the worship of other as an act of divinity. Hanif Abdurraqib talks about it as “surrender as holy practice.” Touré calls it “following the voice inside”.
I have peppered this essay with the refrains that come to me most often but the lyrics are almost embarrassingly simple and go no way in telling you what the song might sound like. A D’Angelo production, with its layers of vocals and multiple instruments almost exclusively played by him, is greater than the sum of its parts. A full body experience that defies description. Music as alchemy.
You’re just not gonna get that same feeling with a timid British vicar warbling “He’s got the whole world in his hands”.
And inch by inch, we get closer and closer (ooh)
Every little part of each other, ooh, baby, baby (oh, yeah)
The release of Voodoo in 2000, the moment widely regarded to be the peak of D’Angelo’s musical genius, also marked the first time a man had been so overtly presented to me as a sex symbol. As a product. As a god.
Though it’s been said many times, it cannot be overstated, the music video for Untitled (How does it feel?) was a cultural moment of seismic proportions, happening at a time when seismic cultural moments were still possible.
Growing up at a time of only two music channels meant that if you wanted to see that one video that spoke to you, that changed you, that rocked your world, you had to sit in front of the TV, in full view of the rest of your family, and just…hope.
And if you missed it you missed it. And when it was all over it was really over.
The Untitled video is so seminal that comedian Jerrod Carmichael recently cited it as one of the key moments when he realised he might be gay. But it is a complicated thing for a man as talented as D’Angelo - a musical prodigy who’d been playing since he was five - to be commodified as a sex symbol.
It would take him another fourteen years to release his third album after becoming disillusioned with the industry and his own objectification. Only a man as beautiful as D’Angelo could outshine a musician as multi-dimensional as D’Angelo.
And I wondered all this time ‘bout how you been
And I hoped by chance I’d see you once again
There is a classically bizarre and beautiful episode of Atlanta entitled Born 2 Die, that builds an entire alternate reality from the D’Angelo effect, rendering him more concept than man.
In the episode, the protagonist Earn goes in search of the genius recluse in the hopes of signing him to his record label. His search ends in a Kafka-esque nightmare where he is left waiting in a room for days with only a disinterested guard and a box of undrinkable Dasani water to keep him company.
He is finally allowed to enter the singer’s hideout when he utters the magic words “What is D’Angelo? We are D’Angelo. Let me experience D’Angelo” only to be greeted by an overweight D’Angelo lookalike who informs him that D’Angelo is not a real person but a group of people facilitating his image.
If none of this makes sense to you, that’s OK. The point I am trying to make is that there are few musicians who could inspire this level of artistic insanity.
I just wanna say I want you in my life til the day I die, baby.
The atmosphere of the party has shifted, every generation goes through it. My favourite people are starting to leave. And at 51, way too soon for D’Angelo. A tragedy layered upon a tragedy.
Part of what made D’Angelo one of the greats, was not just how he showed us how to live - embodied and brimming - but how he also let us witness all the little ways in which he was dying. From lovesickness, addictions, from life. Just a man, a mortal. No gods here. If you don’t believe me, watch this video and ask yourself why all these women are crying at a “sexy song”.
Great music speaks to something beyond, or something sitting just behind, where we live day-to-day, and it pulls it out of us. Grief does that too.
In Tourés Rolling Stone tribute, he mentions how Questlove and D’Angelo used to watch old videos of the RnB greats to inspire their music-making. They called the videos “treats”. After one such session, Questlove asked D’Angelo, “What would your life be like if you hadn’t seen that George Clinton treat?” D’Angelo answered: “Totally different.”
I feel the same way. It is unfathomable to think that anyone else might have found me had D’Angelo not. I am so lucky I landed on the same planet at the same time as him.
I am crying but it can’t be about D’Angelo, I didn’t know him. It must be about all of it, the whole party. The songs that end, the times that pass, the channels and frequencies that one can only ever dip into.
And the brief fleeting moments romancing oneself in the kitchen.
How does it feel? (Take you on a little trip back home, yeah)
Beautiful and poignant! Thanks for sharing and I love you.