It's been a few weeks since singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer D'Angelo transitioned, after losing an extended battle with pancreatic cancer at 51. In the first few days after his passing, I went back through his discography, let out scattered bits of tears, and tried to gather my thoughts. As tributes from every corner of the music industry and the major legacy publications that cover it began to circulate, I wondered if there was a "right" moment, a best moment, to try and add to that global conversation. At times, I grew nervous that by the time I found the "right" words, the moment might have passed—these days, shared tragedies seem to pass far too quickly, as collective grief constantly butts up against information overload, the attention economy, and the ever-pressing matter of our own survival.
But D'Angelo's masterful catalog—three critically-acclaimed records over three decades, a live album, various features, and behind-the-scenes writing and producing credits—has always had a messy relationship to time. When he showed up, it felt fortuitous, almost like chance; when he worked quietly in the background, we noticed the subtle shades of him in all the artists he influenced, most prominently in a contemporary Black avant-garde that has built itself in his image.
Like countless other listeners, his music has been with me my entire life. And I'm especially drawn to it in those moments when I feel most unmoored from time, unsure about where I am in the long march of history, or contemplating whether "history" might die with us.
Maybe that's because D'Angelo's catalog feels like a living archive. He constantly saw his work as part of a historical continuity: soul, R&B, jazz, funk, hip-hop, Latin music, all bleeding into each other. "Black music is the root of every genre of music," he told Ebony in 2000. "I'm just trying to make the connection between all of this music that traces itself back to blues and the gospel and everything else." And the history of Black music is, of course, a history of Blackness, and The Black South. As I previously wrote for Scalawag, Black music is "a culture of surviving however you can by holding onto whatever you can." It sonically represents the endless contradiction of struggling against an antiBlack world while having to live inside it.
D'Angelo's sonic world was strikingly borderless—and his commitment to building that world reminds me now about the violence of the border, its maintenance as a form of policing, and the very real possibility of a world without it.
We can't help but try to build walls, though. When law student-turned-manager Kedar Massenburg met D'Angelo in 1993, he was struck by how his aesthetic seemed to straddle two distinct generations: "You closed your eyes and heard Marvin Gaye," Massenburg told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2002. "And if you opened your eyes, you saw this guy in cornrows and a leather jacket." After executive producing D'Angelo's debut LP, Brown Sugar, Massenburg reappropriated the term "neo-soul" (previously a vague neologism without any one settled meaning) to describe an emerging canon that paired the organic instrumentation and progressive song structures of '70s soul with a hip-hop sensibility.
Media coverage back then often framed D'Angelo (and neo-soul in general) as a rebuttal to the synthetic sheen of '90s R&B, and the blunt-edged street talk associated with mainstream hip-hop. But as much as he critiqued the "business-savvy" impulses within contemporary music and the loss of its "deeper consciousness," he also resisted easy categorizations. "I never claimed I do neo-soul," he reflected in a 2014 interview. "When I first came out, I used to always say, 'I do Black music. I make Black music.'"
The need to brand him as "neo-soul" and silo D'Angelo from the rest of the popular music landscape was both a marketing tool and a border-making exercise that was useful in some ways and deeply inadequate in others.
When I was in the fifth grade, my mom gifted me a stereo system for my childhood bedroom. I started getting familiar with the "neo-soul" canon by sneaking CDs from her collection—genre-defining classics like The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite, Baduizm, and D'Angelo's first two albums, Brown Sugar and Voodoo. It was Voodoo that stuck with me the most: its patience, its countless intricate parts, the way layers of vocals met me like a thick fog, the lopsided lilt of the drums. For many of my favorite records, I can distinctly recall the first time I heard them: where in the room I was, the brightness of the lamp next to me, the weight of the headphones on my scalp. But I don't have that with Voodoo. In my earliest memories of hearing it, I've already played it a thousand times.
Throughout the album, low murmurs and extraneous playing fill up every scrap of what might normally be empty space. On the intro "Playa Playa" (and, for that matter, on Brown Sugar), these are some of the first sounds we hear. Critical theorist Fred Moten suggests that this choice, which recalls classic soul records like Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On?," reminds us that music always bleeds into the noise of living that surrounds and precedes it. "It didn't come from nowhere," he writes. "If it came from nowhere, if it came from nothing, it is basically trying to let you know that you need a new theory of nothing and a new theory of nowhere."
I realize now that in my listening experience, I was picking up on what Fred Moten would call "Black study," or knowledge-building as social life: "It's talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice."
When D'Angelo blends prayer, protest, and confession on a song like "Devil's Pie," recalling, as he put it, "a chain gang" or "a feel of slaves in the field", it's a form of study. When he asks "How does it feel?"—when he sings until the tape he's recording on literally runs out—this is Black study, at its atemporal best. He had this uncanny ability to cut through emotional knots while preserving their deep complexity, something I could only recognize in my youth as pure feeling.
D'Angelo's sonic world was strikingly borderless—and his commitment to building that world reminds me now about the violence of the border, its maintenance as a form of policing, and the very real possibility of a world without it.
D'Angelo's path after Voodoo was infamously paved with personal traumas. He struggled with deep feelings of objectification after becoming a sex symbol, a substance use disorder, deaths of close family and friends, and critical injuries from a car accident. I looked for him, still, and only got scattered moments—a lush feature on a Q-Tip record here, limited tour dates there, rumors of a new album called James River. And then, in 2014, Black Messiah finally appeared—with almost no promotion beforehand and a new backing band, fittingly called the Vanguard.
I was a college student by then; in the weeks prior to its release, grand juries had declined to indict the police officers who murdered Michael Brown and Eric Garner in broad daylight. D'Angelo famously pushed up the release date to meet the Black Lives Matter movement's early political crescendo with the urgency it demanded. Some tracks had existed in one form or another for nearly a decade, but as I pressed play, the vast gap between those two parts of my life seemed to melt away.
"It's about people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen," read Black Messiah's liner notes. "It's not about praising one charismatic leader but celebrating thousands of them." The cover captures that collectivist spirit: shot during a headline performance at Afropunk festival, the crowd's ambiguous framing blending "praise in church" and "hands up in protest." In a time when "the personal is political" has become a common activist refrain, I see almost the opposite at work on what's now, tragically, his last full project.
In the pure comfort of a song like "Really Love," or the tender croons and fierce guitar riffs of "The Charade," you can feel the world closing in around you. "1000 Deaths" features a quote from Fred Hampton, the deputy chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, assassinated by an FBI fearing the ascension of a revolutionary "Black messiah": "The people that we're asking for peace—they're a bunch of megalomaniac war-mongers… We've got to struggle with them to make them understand what peace means."
As D'Angelo sings, "I can't believe I can't get over my fear / they're gonna send me over the hill," it's chilling to recall that Hampton was murdered in his sleep by the state at just 21 years old. I'm reminded that The Political is always, necessarily personal—that politics is the messy work of living in a world that runs on Black death.
How can a hundred million people share a secret? How can a solar system fit inside a dingy bar or a bedroom tucked away in the back of a home, the lights low and aching, the air clogged with smoke and incense? In Voodoo's liner notes, poet and musician Saul Williams sets a vivid scene for incoming listeners, as intimate, subversive, and esoteric as the album's title suggests: "We have come in the tradition of burning bushes, burning ghettos, burning spliffs, and the ever-burning candles of our bedrooms and silent chambers… We speak of darkness, not as ignorance, but as the unknown and the mysterious of the unseen."
If anything, D'Angelo's music remains timeless, not because it transcended time, but because of the ways he refused it, the ways he spoke to it through that refusal. It's taking hold of the moment in front of you by wringing every other moment out of it. It's a place where the silence always hides a low hum, the hiss of the tape, and the people filling out the room.
One of D'Angelo's many gifts to this world was his singular theory of nowhere, his call to study, a call that echoes through every corner of the Black experience. I realize now that it's never too late to start. I know he'll be there when you do.