D'Angelo Saw His Future in the Past

"but appreciating D'Angelo, who died at 51 this week after a private battle with pancreatic cancer, often meant many years of hanging onto hope that he'd meet your expectations. The singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist born Michael Archer got to us when he was ready; fans waited because any chance to hear from him, whether it was an interview, a record, or a performance, offered a window into mystic, molting, and encyclopedic brilliance."

"Hip-hop, jazz, and gospel didn't merely rub elbows in his songs. Cycling coolly through sounds, he exemplified the limitlessness of a Black American musical consciousness that yielded pioneers everywhere from folk to hard-core punk. Speaking in Sly Lives about the expectations for greatness and songs of upliftment that Stone faced, D'Angelo could've been describing his own painful period of reclusion and addiction between Voodoo and Messiah:"

Michael Archer, known as D'Angelo, blended hip-hop, jazz, gospel and more across three studio albums—Brown Sugar (1995), Voodoo (2000), and Black Messiah (2014)—to articulate an expansive Black musical consciousness. A Pentecostal church musician by origin, he became an intermittently visible figure whose sparse public appearances turned each interview, record, or performance into a rare event. Periods of reclusion and addiction followed Voodoo, shaping his life between that album and Black Messiah. He confronted expectations of greatness and the burdens of upliftment while struggling with personal hang-ups. He died at 51 after a private battle with pancreatic cancer.

Read at Vulture