“Architect of Black Gen music

Lady (1995)

D’Angelo burst onto the scene in 1995 with his debut album (Brown Sugar) that effectively rearranged our music palette, awakening memories of our parents’ living rooms where the stereo was always plugged in to Stevie, Marvin, Smokey and company. What made Brown Sugar such a seismic jolt in the ’90s R&B scene though was a smoldering sensuality filled with the undercurrents of unflappable hip-hop. Hardworking and loyal tool; And an infectious commitment to the art of endless jam. The Lady is a sister, so to speak, to the title track of D’Angelo’s bold debut album. While the latter presented listeners with a Romeo hood in the making, Lady relishes the pleasure of a lover who has already won the chase and whose dual passion for intimacy and privacy takes the form of a thick, heavy groove recitative. This is the birth of the new soul.

Higher (1995)

Leave it to D’Angelo, that eternally rigorous student of black music history, to conclude his debut album with a track that flaunts his sacred-meets-profane and pulpit-meets-music sensibilities in common. Higher Color fuses the iridescence of modern Sunday morning gospel with light bedroom innuendos (“Because you take me higher/Further than the stars above/Send me in ecstasy, baby/With your love, with your love”). But his emphasis on declaring a cosmic, epic love, a Bowie-like “heroic” love, the kind where “you put your hands in mine…and then we’ll take off to the sky above”—aided by the soaring Hammond B3 organ—is evidence that even on his earliest recordings, D’Angelo was interested in imagining black love not just as a form of escape but as a kind of mobile shelter, massive in scope and intensity. divine. Like many of Brown Sugar’s tracks, it reminded us of the precious and unique power of fake soul. In the midst of an era ruled by hip-hop emcees and show producers, she doubled down on the prowess of the black male voice, treating it like the prodigal son, the pop star we’ve always known. Here, then, was the architect of Black Gen

Devil’s Pie (2000)

From his first masterpiece, Voodoo, Devil’s Pie is arguably the dark and complex sequel to Lauryn Hill’s Lost Ones, hip-hop’s sermon on the mountain addressed to former lovers and fellow MCs fallen by the game’s materialism. In both form and content, Devil’s Pie swings harder than Hill’s Verdict jams with its sparse, pounding rhythm section, its haunting, gradually stacking vocals, and its horror-movie imagery. It plunges us into a Walking Dead world filled with ravenous zombies, all clambering for slice after slice of the entire “pie,” and racist capitalism’s entire laundry list of goods and vices: “Greed and lust, jealousy, and envy / Bread and sourdough, and cheddar / Flash and stash, cash and cream…” D’Angelo himself, likening Satan’s Pie to “a song Blues” with vocals inspired by the sound of “a chain gang… or something like the feel of… field slaves… picking up whatever the master wants us to pick up”. The indictment against him is so audacious that it addresses nightmares of systemic failure as well as our own failure. “There’s no justice, we’re just…” D’Angelo declares.

Untitled (How Do You Feel) (2000)

Yes, it’s one of the greatest tributes ever to D’Angelo’s all-time hero, Prince. Sonically and sexually, Untitled radiates the Purple One’s masterful grammar of tenderness, its irresistible alchemy of masculine eros and feminine intimacy. But it also takes those elements from His Majesty’s repertoire and brings them out, so to speak. Although its hottest accompanying video from July is the first thing you might remember about this song, the last thing you’ll hold onto is definitely the way it leaves you untitled feelhow it tempts you to contemplate the wonder and glory of the slow sexual journey unfolding in real time, and how it makes you believe that you can be moved by a song. and An artist who wants nothing more than for you to surrender to the energy of a woman-centered orgasm. One of the greatest pop music stunts ever recorded.

Africa (2000)

Post-civil rights pop music has its share of sensual lullabies and love songs for artists’ children. It is a subgenre that often feeds on the weaving of a set of historical, biblical or geographical images that define the circumstances of the arrival of a new baby and the legacies that promise to provide this golden child with succor and survival. Think of Stevie’s song Isn’t She Lovely? Or Lauryn Hill’s “To Zion” or Beyoncé’s “Bigger,” the latter of which seems to take direct inspiration from D’Angelo’s Africa. Born Michael Eugene Archer, D’Angelo shared a son, Michael Jr., with powerful neo-soul singer Angie Stone who, in an unfortunate twist of fate, died earlier this year as a result of injuries in a car accident. Africa is a letter from father to son, gentle as an ocean breeze, gently flowing like a river over the steady rhythm of “Questlove” Thompson’s Red. It’s a love song born of a diaspora legacy (“Africa is my home”), an acknowledgment of the magnitude of a people’s past (“From kings and queens to a prince”) and an embrace of reformed patriarchal humility (“I receive the love that radiates from your glow”).

Not That Easy (2014)

The drought between a Game Change record and D’Angelo’s next record ended in the early weeks of winter 2014 when the album Black Messiah dropped. If the dawn of the Black Lives Matter era saw an array of brilliant and insightful works from artists like Kendrick Lamar, Solange and Beyoncé, D’Angelo’s entry was a stunning revelation in itself. Its opening track, “Ain’t That Easy” is a D’Angelo signature with its neo-soul wall of sound and percussive density. We have been drawn into the world of lovers at odds with each other, caught in a relationship on the verge of collapse, but D wants us to lean into conflict with him. “You can’t leave me / Not so easily…” At the end of a long year of black people taking to the streets and fighting for recognition of their full humanity, fighting for their country not to abandon them, “Not So Easy” is full of metaphorical electricity as it recalls James Baldwin’s argument in The Fire Next Time: “If we – and now I mean relatively conscious whites and relatively conscious blacks, who must… They must, like lovers, insist on or create the consciousness of others—do not slack off our duty now, for perhaps we, a few of us, will be able to end the racial nightmare, realize our country, and change the history of the world…” Not an easy task.

Charade (2014)

Black Christ gut punch of the track. Think of George Benson’s cover of Leon Russell’s This Masquerade, sped up and infused with political fire. If this 1976 classic appears as a kind of satirical civil rights song for black Americans living in the wake of the advancing freedom struggle and, likewise, witnessing a gradual backlash (“Are we really happy out here with this lonely game we play?” Benson sings), the charade raises the volume of slogans about racial equality in America. We’re “crawling through a methodical maze” with D and his tightly-knit group, The Vanguard. Steeped in sonic references of Prince, Hendrix and Sly, The Charade rips off the bandages and thrives on second-person questioning, testimony and confrontation (“Decasion so loud you can’t hear the sound of our screams…”). With the murder of Michael Brown and countless others fresh on our minds and in our hearts, 2014’s D’Angelo returned to the scene to call it as he saw it: “All we wanted was a chance to talk / ‘We’ve only been defined by chalk.'” A tornado of the song whose live show on Saturday Night Live shook the foundations of late-night television, offering the musical antidote Fierce anti-blackness.

True Love (2014)

He will always be a lover and fighter. Black Messiah’s big romantic track, “Really Love,” wears its cinematic ambitions on its sleeves with a spoken word opening delivered by Boricua artist Gina Figueroa in Spanish. Use the swirling strings and let Figueroa do what she wants with a short, biting monologue (“Yes, you love me? I love you so much… I didn’t want to fight you. I just wanted to love you. But you’re so jealous”). The greatest falsetto singer of his generation spins the crafted melody here, taking the playful, sensual route of winning this woman back into his arms with Latin guitar licks creating a delicate texture for our fiancé. With dashes of melodrama and the energy of a romantic comedy, “Really Love” invokes the spirit of Prince on any of his oh baby, oh baby, please, you’re so hard to get anthems, reveling in the act of supplication; Like his idol, D’Angelo knows how to turn sweet passivity into bluesy flirtation.

Prayer (2014)

In an age when we’re hungry for anthems (OK, Freedom, Don’t Touch My Hair), D’Angelo turns the concept of anthem on its head with Prayer, a sacred revival of the swamp groove, a dense epic that takes us to the center of our struggle to survive and persevere; P-Funk’s cathartic, slow-paced exorcism of our generation-long struggle to be free. D wants us to step up like an insider preacher in call-and-response mode with the blues guitar lick of “Lord Have Mercy” as his foil. He sees “the devil at your feet” and knows “he’ll… try to keep you / from seeing your days / but you’ve got to pray all the way.” The time is now, and the ominous bells on this path tell us so. This is black preaching from the pulpit preached in the club, chanted on the front lines, and sung from the lip of the stage. It is prayer that comes alive with its full force, with the force of rhythm, the clapping of hands and the determination of the tread. It is a progressive display of movement, church service, and party. It is black hope, faith and resistance manifested in the form of sonic spiritual rebellion.

Lauryn Hill – Nothing Matters (with D’Angelo) (1998)

How can tenderness be measured? Lauryn Hill and D’Angelo showed us the way in one of the great duets of the ’90s — and they’re remarkable in their use of “quiet,” that expressive mode that black studies scholar Kevin Quashie defines as, in part, a sign of a “dynamic and enchanting” interior. Hill and D’Angelo build a fortress of calm as they accept each other and let everything around them fall. “Your love makes me feel 10 feet tall / Without it I’d go through withdrawal / ‘Cause nothing ever matters,” D’Angelo sings as shared warmth with Hill fills the song’s spare, intimate spaces. Surrounded by finger snaps, poignant guitar, and a gentle rhythm section give these two giants room to breathe, and take each other in. Hill adds: “These buildings might wash out to sea / Some natural disaster / There’s still somewhere I’d rather be / ‘Cause nothing even matters to me.” You want these two in a Barry Jenkins romance with the cameras rolling around them. You want to lose yourself in this black love which is salvation itself. D’Angelo signing alongside his neo-soul genius counterpart: How we wish we could preserve this scene forever.

Bonus Tracks: D’Angelo cover versions

D’Angelo – Cruisin (cover by Smokey Robinson)

D’Angelo, Femi Kuti, Macy Gray, Roy Hargrove, Soltronics and Positive Power – Water Don’t Get the Enemy (cover by Fela Kuti)

D’Angelo – I Can’t Hide Love (Live at The Jazz Café, London, 1995) Earth, Wind & Fire cover)

D’Angelo – It’s Always in My Hair (Prince cover)

D’Angelo with the Princess (Maya Rudolph and Gretchen Liebrum) – Sometimes It Snows in April (Prince cover)

D’Angelo and Erykah Badu – Your Precious Love (cover by Marvin Gaye and Tami Terrell)

Romain Gian-Arthur – OK Lady (EP with mix covers of Radiohead and D’Angelo tracks)