Thoughts on the death of D’Angelo
Christ it’s a grief, how a body goes his whole way on earth, all his days, and his life is never known. – R. G. Vliet
The great blues singer Howling Wolf was once asked what he felt about death and he said, death ain’t nothing to do with me. Death’s death and living’s living and that’s the way I want it to stay.
All things are either devolving towards, or evolving from, nothingness.
I listened to D’Angelo’s record Voodoo obsessively. Every day for six months. I listened to it either in its entirety or I listened repeatedly to certain tracks. It was, for six months, a companion when I desperately needed one. I thought my life, at the time, was falling apart. D’Angelo heaved me back from the edge. Black Messiah, fourteen years later, came at another moment of feeling lost. For these two acts of kindness I thank him.
Demons screaming in my ear, all my anger, all my fear, if I holler let them hear, in this spinning sphere. – D’Angelo
Is there any contemporary singer with whom I’ve spent more time than D’Angelo? How often, coming in from a long, cold, mid-winter walk, have I put on D’Angelo, sat by the fire and eased into that realm only accessible by music? And in the summer, doors and windows open, how often have I bothered the sheep with ‘Higher’ or ‘Send It On’?
What separates funk from soul? What separates D’Angelo from other R&B artists? 1. Impermanence. Everything he recorded is constantly in a state of collapse. The layers of vocals, the bass, the drums, the timing, the melodic structures, are all are bent toward oblivion. 2. Imperfection. Everything strives not for perfection but for life. That which is most truly alive is always imperfect. 3. Incompleteness. Nothing true is ever ‘finished’ or ‘complete’. Everything is in a state of becoming. All is a cycle. Is a song, at the end of its three and a half minutes, ‘finished’? Or is it just one part of something bigger? The notion of completion has no place in either funk or D’Angelo’s music.
Beauty out of ugliness, out of chaos.
I would argue that D’Angelo didn’t make records, he constructed churches. He built spaces that allowed physical forces to suggest the subtlest dynamics of existence. Mark Rothko once said of his paintings: They’re not paintings they’re a place. The same could be said of D’Angelo. His three records are three very different places. Places built by hand, out of materials that move in a high wind, with windows that diffuse what light enters, with floors that were both dancefloors and entryways. They are welcoming places, places of sanctuary.
In a world where we all circle the fiery sun, with a need for love, what have we become? – D’Angelo
D’Angelo’s rate of production, three albums in nearly thirty years, seems to tell us something about finding your own speed, your own way of being. It seems to point toward a preoccupation with music, with art, with the spirit, with needs that exist outside the marketplace; not money or success or power or glamour.
And it was all so damn beautiful. So sensual. So of the flesh. The body. So rooted in the business of living; bending, standing, walking, loving, dancing; it was constantly and unalterably alive.
Who am I to justify, all the evil in our eye, when I myself feel the high, from all that I despise. – D’Angelo
His music, for the most part, was concerned with intimacy. It beckoned; come closer, touch, be here now. There was little posturing. His music was a state of grace. Modest, intelligent, stripped back to its bare essentials.
So often the music was murky; built from mud and earth. It was black and deep brown and dark blue. It swirled. It entered the room like smoke.
The beauty of funk is a perpetual event. It shifts, it recoils, it divides, it hides; it demands to be misunderstood. It is at once bombastic and infinitely delicate. It is imperfect, it is irregular.
My soul is empty, my blood is cold, I can’t feel my legs. I need someone to hold me, bring me back to life before I’m dead. – D’Angelo
I was reading Leonard Koren’s book Wabi-Sabi when I heard about D’Angelo’s death. Special thanks to him and his brilliant book.
D’Angelo [Michael Eugene Archer], 11th February 1974 – 14th October 2025
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