#TBT: D'Angelo

Dubbed "R&B Jesus" by music critic Richard Christgau, D'Angelo is widely considered one of the most gifted musicians of his generation. A virtuosic multi-instrumentalist with a sensuous voice and keen songwriting instincts, he single-handedly initiated the neo-soul movement when he released Brown Sugar in 1995, at age 21. Around the time he released Voodoo in 2000, he called contemporary R&B a "joke." "It's sad—they've turned black music into a club thing," he said.

This article revisits five songs from each of D'Angelo's first two albums. It is a primer for those unfamiliar with his music and an excuse to listen again for the umpteenth time for those who are. Because once you go D'Angelo, you never go back.

Like most of D'Angelo's music, the Brown Sugar title track is groove-based and could seemingly loop for hours if it needed to. But the song, co-produced by ATCQ's Ali Shaheed Muhammad, contains one of D'Angelo's most urgent hooks and thus demands brevity; it is 4 minutes and 23 seconds, one of the shortest songs in his catalogue.

"Brown Sugar" isn't about "the brown sugar you buy in the supermarket... it's about the REAL brown sugar."

D'Angelo's cover of Smokey Robinson's popular 1979 single "Cruisin'" featured a lighter-handed arrangement than the original. PLaying virtually all the instruments by himself, D'Angelo laid down spare drums and bass, added a few aqueous electric piano stabs, and let the vocals carry the song. The result is pure uplift.

"When We Get By" is a good example of the low-budget aesthetic of Brown Sugar, compared to Voodoo, which took a village to put together. The song contains none of the spectral mist of D'Angelos' second album, but rather is a straight-forward combination of core instruments: drums, a walking upright bass line, glistening piano chords, and cheap keyboard horns.

The penultimate track on Brown Sugar, "Lady" feels like the inevitable conclusion to "Brown Sugar" and "Shit, Damn, Motherfucker," the album's raunchy infidelity anthem. Its refrain feels eternal -- D'Angelo has finally find his woman. Or at least, he hopes he has.

Co-produced by Raphael Saadiq.

My personal favorite D'Angelo song, "Higher" gives away D'Angelo's origins as the Virginia son of a Pentecostal minister. Using gospel harmonies and leaning heavily on his Hammond organ, D'Angelo transports the listener to his house of worship, where he preaches salvation via orgasm.

We have reached the Voodoo section of this list. After Brown Sugar, D'Angelo came down with a severe bout of writer's block. The event that vaporized the writer's block was the birth of his son in 1998. "Send It On," written with his brother and his then-girlfriend Angie Stone at Electric Lady Studios, was the first song he wrote for his new album.

D'Angelo largely created Voodoo by sitting with Questlove and listening to classic soul and funk records -- James Brown, Prince, Sly & The Family Stone -- and letting their music percolate into tangential grooves that would eventually coalesce into original, fully-formed songs. "Chicken Grease" was the product of jamming on Curtis Mayfield's "Mother's Son" and letting it marinade. 

"The Line" is remarkably unhurried song but it is not unbothered. D'Angelo sings about and tries to give shape the formless anxieties and pressures he grapples with. "I'm gonna put my finger on the trigger, I'm gonna pull it and we gon see what the deal."

The great trumpet player Roy Hargrove appears on multiple Voodoo tracks and plays his his prominent role on "Spanish Joint." A good accompaniment album for Voodoo is Hardgroove, Hargrove's side project with RH Factor that exists in a musical realm not far from that of D'Angelo.

The "Untitled" video, which offers an intimate look at D'Angelo's muscular frame, became an instant sensation and vaulted D'Angelo to sex symbol status -- a label he quickly rejected. Women started yelling for him to remove his shirt at concerts, which contributed to him taking up the guitar -- it gave him something to hide his body behind.