D'Angelo, R&B's reluctant icon, has died at 51

D'Angelo, the visionary R&B singer who helped pioneer the neo soul sub genre, has died following a battle with cancer, according to a statement from his family published by multiple outlets. He was 51.

The songwriter and producer, born Michael Eugene Archer on Feb. 11, 1974, in Richmond, Va., spent much of his career wrestling with the scrutiny of his outsized genius. The son of a Pentecostal preacher and a devotee of Prince, a young D'Angelo started a group with two of his cousins called Three of a Kind. At 16, he scored mic time on the coveted rising star showcase Amateur Night at the Apollo; on his second attempt, he won. He took the $500 prize money and bought a four-track, and recorded the majority of the songs that would make up his debut. Two years later, he signed a record deal.

D'Angelo first broke through as the co-writer and producer of the single "U Will Know" by Black Men United, an R&B supergroup that included 1990s stars like Brian McKnight, Usher, R. Kelly, Boyz II Men and Gerald Levert. The song's popularity built the foundation for a solo breakout, and in 1995 D'Angelo released his debut album, Brown Sugar, which blended traditional soul with contemporary R&B and went platinum the following year.

Despite major success, D'Angelo constantly found himself at odds with his increasing profile. He slowed his activity in a moment when most would be ramping up, and struggled with the post-Brown Sugar direction of his music, which was delayed by spells of writer's block.

The landmark album that finally landed in 2000, Voodoo, is among the finest ever made, solidifying D'Angelo as a defining voice of R&B's transitional turn-of-the-millennium sound. One of a handful of records recorded by the Soulquarians collective at Electric Lady Studios, Voodoo melded old school funk ideals with a more freeform, groove-oriented songcraft.

The album had its own psychedelic ethos, one carried by the players on tour, who congealed into the backing band The Soultronics. One of the group's members, bassist Pino Palladino, defined its musical philosophy as playing behind the beat, a rhythmic concept pulling from the rap beat-making savant J Dilla for a particular kind of back-phrasing using the guitar, bass and even bass drum to defy the song's sense of time. "The keyboards will be what some people consider out of time," he said, before shifting away from the theory of it toward something more intuitive: "But it feels great."

The music D'Angelo made came to be known as neo soul, a term coined by music executive Kedar Massenburg to market a new strain of R&B deemed less conventional and pulling broadly from alt styles beyond the genre's soundscape. Eventually, the artist came to see it as a box. "I think the main thing about the whole neo soul thing, not to put it down or it was a bad thing or anything, but you don't ... You want to be in a position where you can grow as an artist. You never want to be told, 'Hey, well, you don't do, you're not doing what you did on Brown Sugar,' you know? Because like right now, we're going someplace else," he said in a Red Bull Music Academy lecture in 2014. "I never claimed I do neo soul ... I make black music."

Voodoo won best R&B album at the Grammys, and the video for its hit, "Untitled (How Does It Feel)," helped that song become his signature and established D'Angelo as a sex symbol, to his dismay. After touring to support the album, ever conscious of and frustrated with his public image, he retreated from the spotlight. Though he would occasionally emerge to appear on songs for collaborators like Dilla, Common and Q-Tip, the dynamic artist would not release another album until 2014. His recorded his third and final LP, Black Messiah, with a group called The Vanguard, which included Palladino, the drummer Questlove, the guitarist Isaiah Sharkey and the horn player Roy Hargrove. It marked a critically acclaimed return and a shift to an analog, progressive soul sound that evoked There's a Riot Goin' On, the 1971 funk opus by Sly & the Family Stone.

The 2019 documentary Devil's Pie: D'Angelo, a behind-the-scenes look at the singer's The Second Coming Tour, provided insight into his meticulous nature. He can be seen piecing together arrangements with players in his band, audibly and percussively dictating what to play and how to play it with his mouth, so the jams are rendered as he heard them in his mind. That unparalleled brilliance was sharply in conflict with the musician's disposition, which found him not simply angling away from attention but yearning for the discretion of private life. "It's a struggle for him to do simple stuff like leave his apartment. I think he just has a fear of going out there. Fears and worries of being the chosen one," Questlove says in the doc. "He knows that it's entertainment business, but 'To thine own self be true' is his mantra."

In the years after Black Messiah, D'Angelo's appearances became fleeting once more. In 2016, after Prince's death, he covered "Sometimes It Snows in April" on The Tonight Show but then stepped away from a tribute for the singer at the BET Awards. In 2018, he had to cancel a run of European shows when a pre-tour check-up revealed an unspecified medical condition that required further evaluation. In 2021, he held a Verzuz show at the Apollo Theatre, the place that kicked off his journey nearly three decades prior, breaking from the conventional format to do a solo show filled with guest stars.

Last year, he released a nine-minute song with Jay-Z and Jeymes Samuel for the latter's film The Book of Clarence, and songwriter, producer and longtime collaborator Raphael Saadiq later told Billboard that D'Angelo was "in a good space," in control of his own destiny and working on a new album. He seemed to be preparing a comeback again, announcing a headlining performance at the 2025 Roots Picnic. But in May, he was forced to cancel the planned appearance, citing unforeseen medical delays from surgery.

When asked by model Veronica Webb, in a conversation for Interview magazine in 2013, whether he saw himself as a life-long performer, D'Angelo explained that, for him, the creative process went beyond the artifice that came with being an entertainer. "I plan to be involved in music — doing music, writing music — for the rest of my life," he said. "But I can't see the future. I don't know what tomorrow's gonna bring. To me, music is far more deep than making videos and doing s*** like that. Music's some deep s***, you know what I mean? So, if I ever come to a point where I decide to stop doing videos and performing or whatever, if it ever comes to that point, that don't mean I've stopped doing music. Music is me. That's what I am, really. So, that's a part of me till the day I die."
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