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Where did I get the idea that a man had to scream his want, need, ain’t-never-leavin’ in order to quiver some loins? Church, probably. A lot of radio. I mean, my drawers will drop for a screamer.
And yet D’Angelo was an exemplar of the other way: hard elegance, meticulously conceived seduction, maximal texture. He rejected the blunt, febrile, “do me, baby” approach. You’d never find him howling or catching the Holy Ghost up in your bed. He made three differently perfect albums in 30 years, and on each his desperation sounds almost indistinguishable from his delight. And I suppose if I could make music with this much smoldering and insinuation, where most of the instruments seem both off on their own journeys yet utterly respondent to the matter at hand — if I could be this urgent, this urgently slouched, this urgently recumbent, my bewilderment and heartbreak might also sound sublime.
D’Angelo, who died on Tuesday at 51, was a gentleman. Rarely, as a singer, did he raise his voice. Rarely was that necessary. Many great singers aim for the stratosphere. His vocals pooled around you. He multiplied himself and blanketed you with his devastating stank. You never had to doubt whether he was there for you; on these recordings he’s everywhere.
It’s notable that the one time he loses it on a record — like, really hit a vocal roof — is at the summit of “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” an erotic thriller of ascent, slow jam as roller coaster. It takes almost six of the song’s seven-plus minutes for him to arrive at the climax. And what makes his arrival up there so spectacular isn’t just that he loses it. It’s the way he luxuriates in the release, wailing into and over himself. Then suddenly, it’s just … over, like, finale-of-“The Sopranos” over. He’d proven he could get to the top of Prince Mountain and upon reaching the peak, he just jumps off and lands in the album’s next and final track, “Africa,” lest we get the impression that skywriting is what his musicianship was all about.
The man never had to brag about his swag. Your ears work — here’s the prowess. That first album, “Brown Sugar,” explored sexual generosity and the time good loving takes. His keyboard and organ work do so much riffing here. The defining sound of the title song has no traceable melody — it’s all jazz. The organ talks for just about the entire album, like a second set of lyrics. The notes don’t last long. They’re little skin-tingling kisses, fingers on the nape, along the spine, behind the ears. Oh, not your spot? Well, just tell him. These songs won’t end until he finds it.
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I, at least, have often heard Anita Baker’s yearning on that first album, her persuasion, her persuasiveness. But Prince is the obvious framework for the entire D’Angelo experience — the rigorous arrangements, the one-man-band configuration, that eye-watering falsetto, the secularized gospel pique, the eventual expression of and dismay over a world beyond the bedroom. D’Angelo was Prince without the neurosis and musical promiscuity, Prince with a 30-year mortgage on a sound.
You wonder how we’d be discussing D’Angelo as a songwriter had he written more songs, because once you get to “Voodoo” and “Black Messiah,” which appeared 14 years apart, there’s no question that his work had reached some elite tier in which a song can induce pleasure, embrace ambiguity, and mine the ambivalence and hypocrisy of their maker. Both albums are works of disillusionment and frustration and hope that also sound exhilaratingly, sensually strange — molasses and tar. If “Brown Sugar” made midnight love, “Voodoo” is a full moon over a swamp and “Black Messiah” is a postapocalyptic solar eclipse. The curvaceously multiplied D’Angelo of yore now bore new prophetic weight. His “Black Messiah” singing sounded robed.
It feels telling that D’Angelo’s one true banger — a hefty wave of rumbling smoke that would lure you a dance floor if any D.J. dared — is about selling your soul, maybe about selling your people’s soul. He called it “Devil’s Pie.” Anytime I think that’s one of the finest songs anyone’s come up with, I remember that this same person made “The Root,” which sounds like it sneaked over from “Brown Sugar” — a casseroled vocal, some dusky keyboard and driving percussion. But close your eyes and make out what’s happening — or treat yourself to the transcribed lyrics. His lady done put a hex on him! And wouldn’t you know it: “I left my mojo in my fav’rite suit.” There’s a wry unintelligibility born of domestic defeat that Bob Dylan would envy. In addition to the consummate carnality, D’Angelo was a blues comedian, too.
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In the fall of 2015, he did a show at the Apollo that put the comedy in bed with the carnal. It hasn’t even been 36 hours, but I’m surprised by how my crowning memory of this man might just be that show. It wasn’t him at his best, musically, but he got stronger as the night unfurled, as he remembered who he was and what he could do, all that he had done. The “Black Messiah” songs were still new. But I don’t think that explains his initial iffiness. Maybe it was the constant exhalations of joy, relief, disbelief that rained down on him all night. And maybe he finally acquiesced.
Here was a man who’d returned at another scary moment for Black people in this country, a man who had brought powerfully spooky new music with that moment on its mind and was maybe wondering if he still had It. I watched this show up in the balcony, and I don’t believe I’m alone in saying my ecstasy could’ve sent me over the railing and I would’ve been just fine with the consequences. At some point, D’Angelo implied, with a wink, that he might remove the black tank top that hugged a middle thicker than when he was at his pop peak. But we in the crowd were the true comedy that night, all kinds of people, extravagantly losing it. You know who never lost it, though, neither his shirt nor his cool? The screaming — that was our job.
Wesley Morris is a Times critic who writes about art and popular culture.
