Send It Right Back to You: The Ascension of D'Angelo

First of all, fuck cancer.

On Monday night, I felt something. It was an eerie, yet familiar feeling. I have learned to recognize this feeling over the years so I know what it means—something was about to happen…and it wouldn’t be good. I shook it off, spoke a quick prayer, and distracted myself with whatever I was doing at that exact moment.

Then, Wednesday morning, a friend of mine who lives in Chicago sent me a DM from BallerAlert’s IG account. I went into full denial. I refused to believe it because I know how these social media apps are — they love to unalive people for shits and giggles. Many are so uninformed but so brazen that they’ll repost news of a beloved celebrity passing from years prior; thus stirring up people’s emotions all over again.

To do some follow up, I went to Facebook and there were others who were in denial just like me but as the news outlets caught word, it was dreadfully true. Michael Eugene Archer, known lovingly to us as D’Angelo, had ascended.

Sidebar: I am intentional about not using the words ‘die’, ‘dying’, and ‘death’. I wrote about this in another piece titled Sacred Terminology. Check it out if you haven’t already.

A numbness washed over my body. My emotions were frozen as the news continued to spread across all social media channels. Once I saw 9th Wonder’s post on Facebook and soon after, photos with sad captions from other musical artists and celebrities, I checked out of all apps for awhile and spent the day just sitting with it. Weeks earlier, we reeled in shock and sorrow at the passing of another Black GenX icon, Malcolm-Jamal Warner. It seemed we had just came to an acceptance of that and here we are, getting the wind knocked out of us again.

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But, admittedly, D’Angelo’s ascension feels differently as it settles into my soul. Considering that he was battling pancreatic cancer away from the public eye, D’Angelo’s passing feels…peaceful, like a deliverance. Sometimes, deliverance from such suffering can only come that way — to release the spirit into the ether as the pain-wracked body is left here to return to ashes.

So while I want to mourn, the only thing I have is gratitude. I am blessed that this gift of a man obeyed the calling of his soul and protected the purity of his anointing by ensuring that he used his gift wisely.

Since his debut, Brown Sugar, dropped in 1995, D’Angelo spent a considerable amount of time away from the spotlight over the span of his career. After the album’s meteoric success, D’Angelo wouldn’t return until 2000 when the sophomoric, certified classic, Voodoo, was released. The fact that it took him four years to release his second album was an indication that he was meticulous in the curation of his music.

Rather than acquiescing to the music industry’s formulaic approach of cranking out one project after another, he set a precedent for how we, as his fans, were supposed to accept him. If you are a music fan of a certain caliber, you respect that. Frequency and constant presence to remain relevant doesn’t exactly mean anything if the music rides a mediocre wave and is easily forgettable after the TikTok dances fade.

While clearly embodying the influences of the greats such as Sly Stone, George Clinton, Prince, and Marvin Gaye, the album Voodoo is in a class all on its own. It’s been about twenty-five years and we have yet to hear anything that resembles its’ well-blended duality of spirituality and sensuality. If an album has the capacity to possess us in the most righteous way, it indeed would be Voodoo.

During this time, D’Angelo’s imaging shifted. When he blessed us with Brown Sugar, we were all smitten with the leather-jacket wearing, cigarette smoking, braided up, ‘thug balladeer’ as Cedric the Entertainer hilariously quipped during one of his comedy specials. He appeared more comfortable with displaying his overflowing sex appeal. The most popular but, in my opinion, not the best song on that album, Untitled (How Does It Feel?), was released as a single along with that infamous video that has not been duplicated to date. Once that happened, D’Angelo became an instant sex symbol. We started seeing more images of him, shirtless and seductively glaring into the camera.

After soaring from the chart-topping adrenaline of the second album and touring internationally with his collection of stellar musicians known as the Soulquarians, D’Angelo eventually became disenchanted with the overt sexualizing of his persona. In true Aquarian Sun fashion, he was most concerned with making sure his audience saw him as a premier, consummate artist and not just eye candy.

The music industry is a capitalistic monster, ready to chew up every artist and spit them out as an inanimate object; incapable of inspiration but programmed to manufacture static reproductions of a work that allows execs to cash fat checks. Once D’Angelo’s label saw the profitability from promoting him as an erotic snack for salivating women fans, they wanted more of that. But, in interviews, D’Angelo explained how being perceived as a sex symbol actually made him feel uncomfortable.

An unpopular opinion of mine is that the objectification of Black men’s bodies is just as problematic as the objectification of Black women’s bodies. It’s one thing to have sex appeal which is something offered under the autonomy of the individual and being sexualized which is at the whim of anyone who aims to view someone in that way, without any expressed permission. One is self-empowered and the other is consumption. Being sexualized takes the meat off the bones. Don’t get it twisted. D’Angelo was/is one beautiful man. Yet, unlike many other women, I love the man for what his music does to my soul, not my body. Aldis Hodge does that — but that’s a piece for another day.

While it seemed that D’Angelo understood the lure of a musician and the power that music has to activate every aspect of humanness, including eroticism, he didn’t want to be minimized to being half-naked and watered-down throughout the duration of his career.

So, what did he do?

He stepped out of the spotlight. And, we missed him…and we waited for him…and we asked about him…but other than the occasional whiff of news and a breaking news story about a car accident he was involved in, we knew nothing.

When he returned some fourteen years later with the release of Black Messiah, we saw a much more cloaked D’Angelo. He was deliberately hidden under layers of clothing so the focus would be solely on his music and not his exuding sex appeal. In his autonomy, he chose not to entice but to enthrall us all with the purity of his anointing. The rippled muscles and six pack had dissolved into a cute Dad body and I, personally, was just as much in love as before. Black Messiah also showed us his evolution as an artist and a man as he held that same commitment to being a vessel carrying our musical culture.

“Send it up, send it through, send it right back to you…”

D’Angelo is one of one. He was a constellation of a human being; gifted and anointed. With a gospel upbringing and under the sonic tutelage of musical elders and ancestors, he crafted a signature sound that was Afrofuturistic in breadth and depth. He delivered the past, the present, and the future in a falsetto that held us captive and with lyrics that lifted our souls from the drudgery of the mundane. In his visionary approach, he sought to honor our cultural legacy but now, we also add him to the annals of the aural gods that came before him. What a stellar experience he gave us with just three albums and some highly-celebrated features with other artists. Whenever we hear his music, we will revere him, hold him dear and send that love right back to him over there with the Ancestors. He deserves this love throughout the ages.

“Send it up, send it through…send it right back to you…”

Thank you, D’Angelo. May your spirit soar high throughout Eternity.

My heart goes out to his family, especially his children, Imani, Morocco, and his son with Angie Stone, Michael Eugene Archer, Jr. Angie Stone passed away earlier this year in a tragic car accident.