The news of D’Angelo’s death following a privately handled pancreatic cancer diagnosis had shocked fans crying Shit, Damn, Motherfucker – a cult favorite from the 1995 Brown Sugar album that heralded the R&B singer as a force in the blossoming neo-soul movement. But the winking references on social media to that crash-out song, about a man who discovers his girl in bed with his best friend and lets rage take over, were soon crowded out by shirtless images of the four-time Grammy winner as tribute. It’s the last thing he’d want to be remembered for.
The images all derive from the same source: the 2000 music video for Untitled (How Does It Feel), from D’Angelo’s sophomore album, Voodoo. And to hear the multiplatinum-selling artist himself tell it over the years, he would have swiftly backpedaled from the New York soundstage where it was filmed if he had the day to do over. While the song itself was composed as an homage to Prince, D’Angelo’s handlers had the bright idea to reposition the music video as a mouthwatering teaser for Voodoo that would also exhibit a dramatic fitness transformation that had the singer striking an even stronger resemblance to the NFL running back Marshawn Lynch.
Made to look as if captured in one shot, the Untitled video revolves around a brawny D’Angelo as he lip-synched the sex plea while appearing as if completely nude. The pajama bottoms he wore were hung low as possible to remain out of view. Taking the perspective of a lover in close quarters, director Paul Hunter sized up D’Angelo like a meal, setting him against a black backdrop for the camera to tarry on his pectorals, adonis belt and lips. The steamy finished product, which elapsed nearly four and a half minutes and was repurposed for a Voodoo album cover that wound up bearing a parental advisory sticker, effectively rebooted D’Angelo – to that point marketed as the hunky but introverted R&B star from around the way – into an S-tier sex symbol to rival Lenny Kravitz.
“I feel guilty because that was never the intention,” D’Angelo’s ex-manager Dominique Trenier told Spin in 2008. “To this day, in the general populace’s memory, he’s the naked dude.” Mark Jenkins, the trainer who whipped D’Angelo into shape for the video, had regrets, too.
While Voodoo debuted at the top of the charts and stayed there, D’Angelo shrank from heightened expectations and came to resent the female fans demanding his clothes as they rained lingerie on stage (his habit of simulating bedroom acts on stage wouldn’t help matters).
After touring the album, he withdrew from the spotlight and spiraled into addiction until a 2010 arrest for soliciting blew his cover. His bloated and bleary-eyed mugshot gave news outlets license to kick him while he was down. CBS, that network we’re all so worried about abandoning its journalistic values, literally asked How Does it Feel? in the headline of its news story – a move ripped from the TMZ playbook. All the while critics seized on the chance to reopen the cultural discourse about the hyper sexualization of the Black male body and the limits of the female gaze.
“One time I got mad when a female threw money at me onstage, and that made me feel fucked-up, and I threw the money back at her,” he told GQ in 2012. “I was like, ‘I’m not a stripper.’ When I got back home [from touring], it wasn’t that easy to just be.”
But to the fans who really loved D’Angelo, and I include myself here, the sex god image was always a footnote to his staggering musical genius. You only had to listen to extract the truth, that D’Angelo was R&B’s oldest cliche: a preacher’s kid from the deep south who broke away from the church band to pursue his dream of playing secular music. (Ryan Coogler just framed a whole horror movie around this archetype.) A lot of D’Angelo music – the Voodoo album, not least – nods at this spiritual dissonance.
My formal introduction to D’Angelo was the music video for Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine, the breakout single from Brown Sugar – a quintessential no-skip album. (Ask anyone who was in high school or college when it dropped.) That video, which presents D’Angelo as a one-man quartet, is a much sharper encapsulation of his astounding artistic range and knack for cinching gospel and hip-hop elements together with his feline melismas to make stank-face inducing soul grooves.
The Brown Sugar video was a welcome (if too brief) reprieve from the east-west rap wars playing out across cable music at the time, and it sent me on a quest to learn more. I’m still chasing the rush I felt upon finding out that D’Angelo could in fact play all those instruments in between harmonizing with himself, like a latter-day Marvin Gaye, and stay in the pocket in each space; Jamie Foxx and Anderson .Paak, to name two shameless impersonators, owe D’Angelo a tremendous debt for paving an express lane in the music industry for R&B polymaths.
D’Angelo was the rare artist who could hear the past and the future. His distinct sound could launch a treasure hunt to track down his influences (starting with mega hip-hop producer J Dilla), and then have you wondering all over again how on earth he put together such a wide array of Black music – from the Native Tongues to Sly Stone to the Pilgrim Jubilees, an old-school gospel foursome. One of my profound regrets in life is missing D’Angelo’s Voodoo tour – which one of my dearest friends, a committed melophile, still describes as “the best show I’ve ever been to”. The making of the Voodoo album – an Electric Lady Studios group project that was happening as the Roots (Things Fall Apart), Common (Like Water for Chocolate) and Erykah Badu (Mama’s Gun) were in session and Jill Scott was popping over – belongs in the pantheon of legendary music folktales.
One of the last albums I bought before renting music became the prevailing model was D’Angelo’s Black Messiah – the long-awaited third album that landed against the backdrop of a burgeoning racial reckoning movement. I kept my whole house up for JK Simmons’s turn hosting SNL in 2015 – not because I loved Whiplash, but so we could watch D’Angelo’s musical guest spot as a family. For the performance of The Charade, a systemic racism protest anthem, D’Angelo ensconced his fuller frame in black while his bandmates wore matching tops that read I Can’t Breathe and Black Lives Matter. That image, as much a political statement as a rejection of the Untitled persona, is the one that still sticks with me. A year ago, longtime ally Raphael Saadiq let slip that D’Angelo was working on a fourth album. One can only imagine the emotion and the commotion it would have stirred in this fraught day and age.
Altogether, D’Angelo leaves behind a slew of collaborators (Method Man, Questlove, Lauryn Hill) and three children; the eldest is an adult son, Michael Archer Jr, who is surely reeling from having to suffer this loss seven months after his mother, Angie Stone, was killed in a car crash near Montgomery, Alabama. A neo-soul pioneer herself, Stone had a heavy hand in shaping D’Angelo’s artistic development, down to braiding the cornrows he wore on the shoot for Untitled – which achieved the 51st spot on Rolling Stone’s list of the best 100 songs of the 2000s. Its music video may have doomed him to recognition as a star-crossed sex god, but his body of work remains his lasting redemption. In the end D’Angelo made three studio albums that defined the decades in which they were released and stand together as one of the all-time great modern music catalogs. There aren’t many artists left who can honestly say how that feels.
