D'Angelo

D’Angelo is an American R&B singer-songwriter, producer, and instrumentalist. He was one of the most influential musicians during the rise of the neo-soul movement, often drawing comparisons to his influences, Marvin Gaye & Prince. 

When D’Angelo’s Voodoo hit record store shelves on January 25th 2000, its muggy grooves captured the sound of premillennial anxiety. The album is the product of perfectionism, obsession, and paranoia. His 1995 debut Brown Sugar had already strategically positioned D’Angelo—born Michael Eugene Archer and raised by a Pentecostal preacher father in Virginia—as the next Hendrix-like deity in Black music, after Prince and maybe Lenny Kravitz. But since its release, D’Angelo had become distracted by weed and weightlifting, been shaken by the deaths of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G., and was debilitated by sophomore pressure. In the interim, he’d fathered two children, switched managers, and jumped to a new record label. D’Angelo was looking to the warm sounds of the past. He wanted to be like Sly Stone, George Clinton, Al Green, and most of all, he wanted to be like Jimi Hendrix. Electric Lady’s Studio C became his brand new creative laboratory. His aim, he said, was to reclaim R&B by putting together a brilliant ensemble of R&B musicians, recording them live, in real-time, jamming face-to-face in an effort to capture their conviviality and chemistry. What happened next only added to D’Angelo’s myth. Having hit mega-stardom with the single “Untitled” and its intensely sexual video, a follow-up was slow to come. Though he’s since performed sporadically, his silence–both musically and in his refusal to talk to the press–has only helped his cult of status grow. In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked D'Angelo at number 75 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.