In the mid-90s, the Roots’ drummer Questlove was approached to work on the first album by a new soul singer. He turned the offer down out of hand: “I was like, ehhh, soul singers in the 90s – whatever,” he later remembered. “I’m not doing this. Nothing about soul singing had moved me, from any 90s offering, the same way it did with Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder, Lou Rawls.”
A year later, with D’Angelo’s debut album Brown Sugar on the shelves, Questlove had radically reconsidered his opinion: when he spotted the singer in the audience at a show the Roots were playing, he “thwarted and threw off the entire show” by suddenly playing “an obscure Prince drum roll” in a (successful) attempt to attract his attention. “The only person that mattered to me that night in the room was D’Angelo,” he admitted.
It worked: the pair became collaborators, forming the musical 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 great deal about the disruptive impact Brown Sugar had.
It wasn’t merely that D’Angelo’s debut album was critically acclaimed and commercially successful (it went platinum in the US). It was that it singlehandedly ushered in a new era and musical sub-genre: the term “neo-soul” was literally invented for it, as a marketing tool. In time, “neo-soul” came to signify music slavishly devoted to recreating the past, but that wasn’t the point of Brown Sugar at all. There was certainly vintage equipment involved in its making, a Smokey Robinson cover lurking among its tracks, and a distinct hint of Donny Hathaway and Al Green about D’Angelo’s falsetto vocals: there were hints of jazz, gospel and blues about its sound. But Brown Sugar was resolutely not a mere homage but a product of its era, the work of an artist who cared as much about hip-hop as he did about Black music’s history, who worshipped Prince and – as a songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist – modelled himself on his idol’s auteur approach.
Packed with fantastic songs and smooth but emotive vocals, the results didn’t sound like anything else in 1995. But as it turned out, Brown Sugar was merely the sound of D’Angelo getting started. His progress was never smooth – over the course of his subsequent career, he suffered bouts of writer’s block, crippling doubts about the way his music was marketed and issues with drug and alcohol addiction that meant his releases were infrequent and punctuated by long, troubled silences – but it was progress nonetheless: both his subsequent albums offered striking evidence of musical development.
Four years in the making, 2000’s Voodoo was more experimental and more challenging than his game-changing debut, eschewing standard song structures for a looser approach that demanded the listener given themselves over to its ebb and flow. It was also noticeably darker in tone, its paeans to carnal ecstasy – most obviously the Prince-influenced single Untitled (How Does It Feel) – and its bursts of taut, sparse, funk balanced by troubled ruminations on Black masculinity and moments that sounded utterly despondent: “I feel my soul is empty, my blood is cold and I can’t feel my legs,” D’Angelo sang on The Root, “I need somebody to hold me, bring me back to life before I’m dead.” It covered a vast amount of ground both emotionally and musically, but it somehow held together perfectly. You didn’t have to agree with the jazz critic who excitedly compared it with both Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and John Coltrane’s Giant Steps to think it sounded like a masterpiece.
The silence that followed (initially spurred in part by D’Angleo’s disquiet at the sex symbol status afforded him by the video for Untitled, in which appeared naked) was eventually broken by 2014’s Black Messiah: the delay in its arrival prompted Questlove to suggest it was the “Black version” of the Beach Boys’ notorious “lost” album Smile. Understandably, anticipation around its release was high; incredibly, Black Messiah didn’t disappoint. Despite its lengthy gestation, it appeared to fit perfectly with increasingly troubled times: released not long after the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Black man Michael Brown led to unrest in Missouri, its lyrics dealt with gun violence and systemic racism. Its raw, dense, avant-soul sound shifted unpredictably from furious to dream-like: you could hear traces of Sly and the Family Stone’s legendary 1971 album There’s a Riot Goin’ On, updated for a new era. It was superb.
It was also the last album D’Angelo was to make, although a single, Unshaken, appeared in 2019. As late as last year, when D’Angelo appeared alongside Jay-Z on the soundtrack to the comedy-drama film The Book of Clarence, there was talk of a follow-up: his long-time collaborator Raphael Saadiq told journalists he was working on a new album. Whether that music will now ever appear is open to question.
You could, if you wished, view D’Angelo’s career as frustratingly scattered: it would certainly have been nice if he had released more music than he did. But, then again, he leaves behind a perfect catalogue: only three albums in 30 years, but all of them are of an extraordinarily high quality. It was a conundrum neatly summed by Questlove, who was asked about D’Angelo in the long, grim gap between Voodoo and Black Messiah. “I consider him a genius beyond words,” he offered. “At the same time, I say to myself: how can I scream someone’s genius if they hardly have any work to show for it? Then again, the last work he did was so powerful that it’s lasted 10 years.” The music D’Angelo did release will ultimately last far longer than that.
