In that iconic photo of the Soulquarians that basically ended the collective’s collaborative existence, Erykah Badu is seen front and center, flanked by James Poyser and Questlove. Badu was the star of the group, while the two instrumentalists formed the heart of the dozen musicians who cross-pollinated creatively in the late-90’s and early-00’s. There, records like The Roots’ Things Fall Apart, Badu’s Mama’s Gun, and Common’s Like Water for Chocolate were recorded with the collective help and inspiration of the musicians. Common famously traded “Chicken Grease,” meant to appear on Like Water, for “Geto Heaven Part Two,” originally recorded for Voodoo. In the photo, D’Angelo is seen wearing a sleeveless leather vest, positioned just left of center, yet still bold and pronounced.
At the time, the Soulquarians were camped out at Electric Lady Studios, chosen initially by D’Angelo. There was a particular spiritual anointment that drew D’Angelo to the building. Jimi Hendrix built it following Electric Ladyland, though he passed away after just ten weeks of recording at the studio. Electric Lady became a mecca for three decades of funk, punk, and rock that felt some debt to Jimi Hendrix, one way or another. Chic recorded “Le Freak” there, after being rejected from Studio 54 even with an invitation from Grace Jones herself. Hendrix acolyte Patti Smith recorded Horses with John Cale. Stevie Wonder used the space to lay down his two 1972 albums, Music of the Mind and Talking Book. Here, D’Angelo saw himself as part of a lineage of singular auteurs. I’m unsure whether the Fender Rhodes that Stevie Wonder played on “Superstition” actually held any unique creative spirits. But at Electric Lady, just as Africa had talked to Sly Stone, an entire lineage of Black American music – Davis, Ornette, Cooke, Hayes, Clinton, Marvin, Hendrix, Sly, James Brown, Donny, Prince, Quincy, Nina, Diana, Q-Tip – talked to D’Angelo.
Between 1996 and 2014, D’Angelo released three records. Each vastly changed the definition of R&B and the landscape of popular music. Brown Sugar demarcated the end of new jack swing and ushered in neo-soul, the oft-disregarded and definition-less genre the Soulquarians were said to be working in. Voodoo converged entirely new interpretations of soul, jazz, and hip-hop into something unrecognizable, controversial, and sublime. Aside from Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, Black Messiah has come to be the most politically important record of the 2010’s.
Voodoo spent a particularly long time gestating for an R&B record of that era, but by the time it hit shelves in 2000, the mainstream assumed it had a new superstar on its hands. With “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” video, which featured one single long-shot of a shirtless D’Angelo, he relinquished his body as an acceptable fulcrum of discourse. He was victimized by a media complex unwilling to let an artist work or even exist on his own terms and he became the kind of sex symbol that people heckled and harassed during his long-winded tour in 2000.
Very little came from the rest of the 2000’s and the early 2010’s from D’Angelo; Questlove leaked “Really Love” on Australian radio in 2007, while D’Angelo began premiering new music during a 2012 tour. The material was primed for a 2015 release, until the cops who killed Eric Garner, who said “I can’t breathe” eleven times while being choked to death, and Michael Brown, who was shot six times in the front of his body, walked free without being indicted. Black Messiah mirrored the music of Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On, Temptation’s Psychedelic Shack, and War’s The World is a Ghetto. Disheveled, dense, and murky, Black Messiah took time and space to grieve, then to love, celebrate, and riot, all in one breathe.
No one foresaw Black Messiah to be D’Angelo’s last record. When the artist passed away early on Tuesday, he was just 51.
Of his heroes, D’Angelo was the most vocal about Prince as a north star. He made a rare post-Black Messiah television appearance in 2016 to perform “Sometimes It Snows in April” on the Tonight Show. Nearly every other guiding saint for D’Angelo came from Prince, including Jimi Hendrix. “One thing that D discovered during this time was that Prince wouldn’t be Prince without the influence of Jimi Hendrix. Then he started realizing that everyone was influenced by Hendrix – from George Clinton to Stevie Wonder,” said longtime D’Angelo producer Russell Elevado.
Of all the artists that wanted to be Prince, D’Angelo got the closest. He produced almost all of his own music. On Brown Sugar, in sure Prince fashion, he played nearly every instrument on nearly every song. All of the ways Prince innovated and conquered the modern imagination of a superstar – the sex, the color, the name, the mystery – were observed, mimicked, and complicated by D’Angelo. Both the Soultronics, the band featured on the Voodoo World Tour, and the Vanguard, credited on Black Messiah, echo The Revolution, Prince’s band that played on Purple Rain and Around the World in a Day. D’Angelo stood shirtless on the cover of Voodoo as Prince once did on the cover of his self-titled album, the record that got D’Angelo “hooked.” Prince’s rebellion against Warner Bros. for refusing to release his massive catalog of music, and subsequent name change to the unpronounceable symbol, was certainly at the top of D’Angelo’s mind when Virgin executives stopped funding his Voodoo follow-up in 2004.
When Prince passed away in 2016, he left 39 albums released across 40 years. D’Angelo leaves us just three, the same number Hendrix left us when he died just weeks shy of his 28th birthday. Unlike Hendrix, D’Angelo lived to see the long tail of his art, as evidenced by a classic Verzuz performance in 2021. Even so, it’s easy to mourn the early conclusion of an artist that, even if it would have taken another 20 years, seemed like he had more to say.
D’Angelo refuted all turn of the century claims that a retromanic culture was at best stagnating and at worst artistically bankrupt. D’Angelo studied the masters and created works that, while certainly never done before, was also never quite new. Somewhere is someone studying Voodoo as D’Angelo studied “I Want To Be Your Lover,” someone we will one day be as comfortable calling a genius as we are calling D’Angelo such. Hopefully, we will be kinder to them as we were to D’Angelo.