Philadelphia pays tribute to D’Angelo

Few artists cause a shift in the collective musical solar system quite like D’Angelo, the R&B icon who reshaped soul music with a trio of classic records. Last week brought news that the Richmond, Virginia native had passed from pancreatic cancer at age 51. A collective outpouring of grief, tributes, and reflections came quickly from a musical community still struggling to process the loss. 

Born Michael Eugene Archer, he named himself D’Angelo in a prescient move that dared to put him in the leagues of predecessors like Marvin, Stevie, and Prince, artists recognizable by just a single name. D’Angelo was a devoted student of these icons and a prodigy in his own right; his older brother was wowed watching him play piano at just three years old. And at 18, D’Angelo won the prestigious Apollo Theater’s Amateur Night contest, like many of his heroes before him.

The records he made, and the records that made him

With his 1995 debut record, Brown Sugar, D’Angelo both brought R&B back to its gospel roots, and pushed it further into a modern hip-hop landscape. It’s an album that features both a silky Smokey Robinson cover (“Cruisin”), and a vengeful anthem entitled “Sh*t, Damn, Motherf*cker,” a far cry from the optimistic era of Motown Records. Propelled in part by “Lady,” his wildly funky breakout single, D’Angelo was quickly dubbed the king of a new sub-genre: “neo-soul.” 

Yet sudden success and media labelling felt stifling for this singular artist. Reflecting back in an interview for the 2013 doc Finding the Funk, he commented: “So when I came out everyone would ask me ‘what do you call what you do?,’ and I would say soul music. Not neo soul but soul. Soul – it’s like you either got it or you don’t…And [neo-soul] also puts us in a box, it puts us right back in the box we were tryna get out of in the first place.”

Amidst feverish anticipation and battles with writers-block, D’Angelo teamed up with a legendary crew of musicians, including Philly’s own Questlove. Together, they crafted Voodoo, a tour-de-force saga of soul released right at the turn of the century. In a world increasingly-focused on smash singles, D’Angelo made an intentional throwback to the auteur-driven albums, like Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life and Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, the records he grew up on. 

Throughout this nearly 90-minute masterpiece, D’angelo blended gospel, blues, rock, Afro-Cuban jazz, and funk into an odyssey through the past, present, and future of Black music. It’s hardly hyperbolic to claim the album rewired the collective musical consciousness. Advancing technology of the late 20th century inspired many musicians, including Questlove himself, to strive for metronomic perfection. But Voodoo ignored that quantized, grid-like approach to musicmaking almost entirely, instead drawing inspiration from the rawness of the 70s studio era and J Dilla’s beatmaking. Additionally, D’Angelo’s piano playing reflected new shades of love and lust, while Questlove shifted his approach to create intentionally sloppy grooves. The intoxicating new sound influenced everyone from jazz musicians like Robert Glasper to electronic producers such as Flying Lotus. 

Shying away from the spotlight

Arguably the high point of Voodoo is “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” a seven minute slow-burning ballad that became a titanic hit. A brilliant track on its own, the song was nearly eclipsed by its music video, a seductive showcase of D’Angelo’s chiseled physique. For a shy church kid still adjusting to the spotlight, the ensuing reaction was overwhelming, immediate, and nearly crippling. The music industry then demanded more hits and more money, and screaming fans wanted fewer clothes. In response, D’Angelo disappeared, slipping deep into depression and addiction. 

Anticipation for a third record built for years until D’Angelo returned in 2014 with Black Messiah, an electrifying funk-rock opus. Following in the lineage of classic records such as Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Going On and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Black Messiah is both a reflection on the fight for justice, and a rejection of the commodification of black music. It remains timely and timeless, and in the wake of his death, songs such as “Back to the Future” and “Another Life” have already taken on a haunting poignancy. “I just wanna go back, baby/Back to the way it was,” he sings on the former. “I used to get real high, now I/But now I’m just gettin’ a buzz.”

D’Angelo in Philly

Throughout his life, D’Angelo was never shy about his love for Philadelphia. In the opening lines of his debut album he sings, “Let me tell you ’bout this girl, maybe I shouldn’t/I met her in Philly and her name was Brown Sugar.” D’Angelo’s close kinship with the Roots, specifically Questlove and keys player James Poyser, brought him back to the city, where the trio collaborated at the now defunct Sigma Sound Studios in Center City. In 2012, he performed at the city’s Made in America Festival, and you can watch the entire performance online.

On Instagram, Poyser reflected on the loss, calling D’Angelo “every musician’s favorite musician, every singer’s favorite singer.” To Poyser and so many others, he was “the blueprint we followed, the soundtrack we turned to whenever we needed inspiration.” Kayla Childs, a fellow Philly-based keys player who carries on the funk and soul tradition and performs as Black Buttafly, posted her own tribute on social media. “Being introduced to you was the greatest thing that could have ever happened to me musically,” she wrote. “Hearing the church undertones, the funk, jazz, and soul music all fused into one sound captured me forever. Having a big sound and band on stage…channeling Sly, New Birth, James Brown etc…I chase the perfection of warm and real human tones/connection in my music because of you.” The local funk collective Snacktime also paid tribute, releasing a cover of the Beach Boys classic “God Only Knows” “inspired by our hero D’Angelo.”

For more D’Angelo history, readers can dive into the XPN archives and read Bruce Warren’s recap of a legendary 2013 duo show at TLA. Entitled “Brothers in Arms,” it featured just Questlove and D’Angelo; you can listen to the audio of the entire show here. For a deeper dive into Voodoo, listen back to John Morrison and Raina Douris discussing the album on World Cafe, earlier this year when the album celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary.