Experimental, sensual and political, D’Angelo radically redraws the boundaries of soul music | D’Angelo

IIn the mid-1990s, Roots drummer Questlove was approached to work on the new soul singer’s debut album. He rejected the offer out of hand: “I was like a 90s soul singer – whatever,” he later recalled. “I don’t do that. Nothing about soul singing, compared to any ’90s show, moved me in the same way that it did Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder, and Lou Rawls.”

A year later, with D’Angelo’s debut album Brown Sugar on shelves, Questlove radically reconsidered his opinion: when he saw the singer in the audience at a show the Roots were playing, he “frustrated and canceled the entire show” by suddenly playing “Prince’s mysterious drumbeat” in a (successful) attempt to get his attention. “The only person in the room that mattered to me that night was D’Angelo,” he admitted.

It worked: The duo became collaborators, forming the music collective The Soulquarians with producer and DJ J Dilla in time for D’Angelo’s second album, Voodoo. But it’s also a story that tells you a lot about the devastating impact of brown sugar.

It’s not just that D’Angelo’s debut album was critically acclaimed and commercially successful (it went platinum in the US). It was that she single-handedly heralded a new era and musical subgenre: the term “neo-soul” was literally invented for her as a marketing tool. Over time, “neo-soul” came to refer to music slavishly devoted to recreating the past, but that was never the point of Brown Sugar. Sure, there was vintage equipment involved, a Smokey Robinson cover lurking between her tracks, and a clear hint of Donny Hathaway and Al Green about D’Angelo’s faux vocals: there were hints of jazz, gospel and blues about her voice. But “Brown Sugar” wasn’t just a tribute, it was a product of its time, the work of an artist who cared as much about hip-hop as he did the history of black music, and who idolized Prince and — as a songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist — modeled himself on his idol’s author’s approach.

The results weren’t filled with great songs and smooth-but-emotional vocals, like everything else in 1995. But as it turned out, Brown Sugar was just D’Angelo’s beginning sound. His progress was never smooth – over the course of his subsequent career, he suffered from bouts of writer’s block, crippling doubts about the way his music was marketed, and problems with drug and alcohol addiction that meant his releases were rare and punctuated by long, troubled silences – but it was progress nonetheless: both of his subsequent albums provided stark evidence of musical evolution.

Four years in the making, 2000’s Voodoo is more experimental and more challenging than their game-changing debut, eschewing standard song structures for a looser approach that requires the listener to give themselves over to its ebb and flow. It was also darker in tone, a paean to physical ecstasy — the most obvious being the Prince-influenced single Untitled (How Does It Feel) — and its taut, sparse funk flows balanced with troubled musings on black masculinity and moments that seemed downright desperate: “I feel like my soul is empty, my blood is cold and I can’t feel my legs,” he sang. D’Angelo on The Root. “I need someone to hold me and bring me back to life before I die.” It covered a lot of ground emotionally and musically, but somehow it held together perfectly. You didn’t have to agree with the jazz critic who enthusiastically compared it to both Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” and John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” to think it sounded like a masterpiece.

The silence that followed (initially driven in part by D’Angleo’s discomfort with the sex symbol status given him by the Untitled video, in which he appeared naked) was eventually broken by 2014’s Black Messiah: a delay in its arrival prompted Questlove to suggest it was the “black version” of the infamous “lost” Beach Boys album Smile. Understandably, anticipation around its release has been high. Incredibly, Black Messiah did not disappoint. Despite its long gestation, it seemed to fit right in with the increasingly turbulent times: Released shortly after the police shooting of 18-year-old black man Michael Brown led to unrest in Missouri, its lyrics addressed gun violence and systemic racism. Her raw, dense and unexpectedly avant-garde sound shifted from fury to dreaminess: you can hear traces of Sly and the Family Stone’s legendary 1971 album There’s a Riot Going On, updated for a new era. It was great.

It was also the last album D’Angelo produced, though a single, “Unshaken,” appeared in 2019. Late last year, when D’Angelo appeared alongside Jay-Z on the soundtrack to the comedy-drama The Book of Clarence, there was talk of a follow-up: His longtime collaborator Raphael Saadiq told reporters he was working on an album new. Whether or not this music will appear now is open to question.

You can, if you wish, view D’Angelo’s career as frustratingly scattered: it certainly would have been nice if he had released more music than he did. But, once again, he leaves behind an exemplary catalogue: only three albums in 30 years, but all of them are of unusually high quality. It was a mystery neatly summed up by Questlove, who asked D’Angelo in the long, dark gap between Voodoo and Black Messiah. “I consider him a genius beyond words,” he said. “At the same time, I’m saying to myself: How can I shout out someone’s genius if they barely have any work to show for it? But then again, the last work he did was so powerful that it lasted 10 years.” The music D’Angelo released would ultimately last much longer than that.