In January of 2000, a snowstorm blanketed the Washington, D.C., area—up to 17 inches, unexpectedly. But I didn’t care about any of that: D’Angelo’s Voodoo was set to come out that week, and I needed the roads to be clear enough to drive my mom’s silver Dodge Dynasty up the street to buy the CD. Come hell, high water, or black ice, and with enough cash for the album and nothing else, I needed to hear “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” on blast. The radio rip on cassette had run its course.
This was the era when album releases were kinetic, when you had to physically show up at the record store, put the money down, and tear the plastic off the case. And it didn’t get more dynamic than D’Angelo, the singer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer born Michael Eugene Archer, who died earlier this week at 51.
Reluctantly, D’Angelo had become a star. He had already helped pioneer the neo-soul genre as a blend of classic R&B and hip-hop. The anticipation for his next work only heightened when “Untitled”—with its sultry and audacious video, featuring only a warm light on a naked D’Angelo—made him a sex symbol. But he wasn’t just that: Co-produced with Raphael Saadiq, “Untitled” was an extraordinary song, a seven-minute implosion of desire and transcendence, on which the divine and the erotic co-mingled until they were indistinguishable. Voodoo was rife with moments like these: A planet unto itself, with its own gravity and humidity—staggering, murky, and gorgeous.
Five years prior, D’Angelo had already altered the music landscape with his debut album Brown Sugar, which sounded like a nod to the past and a declaration of the future. Because Voodoo dominates much of the conversation around D’Angelo, it’s easy to forget how radical Brown Sugar was upon its release in 1995. Radio R&B sounded slick with drum machines tuned to perfection. The singers themselves were adorned in silk suits or white linen, singing on beaches or in mansions somewhere. Then here comes D’Angelo with his straight-back cornrows and baggy jeans, singing about the pleasures of weed through a honeyed voice, his timbre somewhat rough as if this 21-year-old kid had lived a lifetime.
All smoke and sweat, full of gospel phrasing and hip-hop undertones, Brown Sugar introduced D’Angelo as an emotive, smooth-talking vocalist, a thinking, feeling performer in the likeness of Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, and Curtis Mayfield without borrowing too heavily from any of them. It was clear that he had lived and breathed those luminaries and exhaled something new. D’Angelo had cracked the door to a different kind of masculinity: laid-back yet attentive, stoic yet loving, a confessional tone conveying lust, romance, heartbreak, and devotion.
