Related Articles
D’Angelo, the neo-soul trailblazer and modern visionary whose three albums were widely acclaimed as masterful works of art, died on Tuesday. He was 51.
“The shining star of our family has dimmed his light for us in this life … After a prolonged and courageous battle with cancer, we are heartbroken to announce that Michael D’Angelo Archer,known to his fans around the world as D’Angelo, has been called home, departing this lifetoday, October 14th, 2025,” his family said in a statement.“We are saddened that he can only leave dear memories with his family,but we are eternally grateful for the legacy of extraordinarily moving musiche leaves behind. We ask that you respect our privacy during this difficult time but invite you all join us in mourning his passing while also celebrating the gift of song that he has left for the world.”
DJ Premier mourned the singer on X, writing, “Such a sad loss to the passing of D’angelo. We have so many great times. Gonna miss you so much. Sleep Peacefully D’ Love You KING.”
D’Angelo was one of the most widely revered artists of the past 30 years. A childhood musical prodigy, he quickly asserted himself as a star with his 1995 debut, Brown Sugar, released when he was 21. A key part of the Soulquarians, a loose collective of musicians, singers, and producers that included Questlove, Erykah Badu, J Dilla, Q-Tip, among others — he was at the forefront of a movement that charted new paths in soul, R&B, and hip-hop while maintaining a deep admiration for the past.
D’Angelo, and this movement, were often pegged as “neo-soul,” but in a 2014 Red Bull Academy lecture, the singer-songwriter chafed at the description: “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 want to be in a position where you can grow as an artist.” He added: “I never claimed that. I never claimed I do neo-soul, you know. I used to say, when I first came out, I used to always say, ‘I do black music. I make black music.’”
D’Angelo’s three solo albums — Brown Sugar, 2000’s Voodoo, and 2014’s Black Messiah — all earned critical acclaim and cracked the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 albums chart, with Voodoo reaching Number One. His biggest Hot 100 charter was “Lady,” but it was “Untitled (How Does it Feel),” with its memorable one-shot video of a naked D’Angelo belting the track, that arguably became his signature song.
Nominated for 14 Grammys over the course of his career, D’Angelo won four awards, including Best R&B Album twice for Voodoo and Black Messiah. He also won Best R&B Vocal Performance for “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” and Best R&B Song for Black Messiah’s “Really Love.”
His small but spellbinding output was borne from a process rooted in committed perfectionism. Speaking with Rolling Stone in 2000, Questlove, D’Angelo’s key collaborator on Voodoo, joked that they might’ve finished the album two years earlier had the drummer not kept “bringin’ treats every week” — a reference to the copious concert videos and bootleg tapes they consumed and studied while working on the album. During the 14 years between Voodoo and Black Messiah, D’Angelo set out to master the electric guitar, with the results of all that hard work coursing through the celebrated LP.
But D’Angelo was also often dogged by label issues, writer’s block, and struggles with cocaine and alcohol. He was hit with drug possession charges in early 2005, and later that year, not long after he was given a three-year suspended sentence on a cocaine possession charge, D’Angelo was injured in a car crash.
Speaking with Rolling Stone in 2015 after the long-awaited release of Black Messiah, D’Angelo acknowledged that “the shit that happened in my personal life” hadn’t helped his creative process, but neither did changes on the industry side of things.“The music business is a crazy game, especially for somebody like me who is really a purist about the art,” he said. “Trying to balance the pressures of commercialism, it’s a tightrope. It’s a fine line between sticking to your guns and insanity.”
Michael Eugene Archer was born Feb. 11, 1974 in Richmond, Virginia and revealed his musical talents at an early age. His older brother, Luther, remembered coming home one day and finding a three-year-old Mike playing the piano — “not banging,” he recalled to RS, but playing “a full-fledged song, with melody and bass line.” D’Angelo was soon playing music at the churches where his father and grandfather preached, and winning school talent shows so convincingly he wasn’t allowed to enter them in the future.
“This is really the only thing I ever could see myself doin’,” D’Angelo told RS in 2000. “I knew when I was three. My brothers knew. They geared me for that. I always knew this is what I was supposed to be, what I was gonna do.”
With Prince as his guiding light, D’Angelo soon started performing local gigs with two of his cousins under the moniker, Three of a Kind. When he was 16, he debuted on Amateur Night at the Apollo, placing fourth with a nerve-wracked rendition of Peabo Bryson’s “Feel the Fire.” (D’Angelo joked that his fear was so apparent, the crowd “booed before I even came onstage.”) One year later, though, he returned and won with an exhilarating performance of Johnny Gill’s “Rub You the Right Way.” With his $500 prize money, he bought a four-track recording machine and started writing songs.
Around the same time, D’Angelo inked his first publishing deal through his high school hip-hop group, I.D.U. (Intelligent, Deadly but Unique). He soon secured a recording deal of his own, but his first success was co-writing and -producing 1994’s “U Will Know,” a one-off hit by the R&B supergroup Black Men United (Raphael Saadiq, Lenny Kravitz, Boyz II Men, and a 16-year-old Usher were among those involved in the track).
As for his own music, D’Angelo wrote and recorded much of Brown Sugar at his mother’s house in Richmond, Virginia, though at the behest of his label he finished it in a professional studio. D’Angelo wrote, arranged, and performed almost the entire album album by himself, with some additional contributions coming from Saadiq, Q-Tip, and his main collaborator, A Tribe Called Quest’s go-to engineer Bob Power. “There are very few times in history where a real innovator comes along,” Power says in a statement to Rolling Stone, “with a truly original way of constructing their art, and an undeniable depth that everybody hears: Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell, Prince…and D’.”
Though happy with the album, D’Angelo did admit in the Red Bull Academy conversation he felt like he “lost something between the demo version and all the production that went into it… like it got a little homogenized in my opinion, for me at the time.”
Brown Sugar was a modest success upon its original release in July 1995, but its singles — “Brown Sugar,” a cover of Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’,” and “Lady” — helped make the album a hit. It peaked at Number 22 on the Billboard 200 in March 1996, spent 65 total weeks on the chart, and was eventually certified platinum.
D’Angelo spent two years touring in support of Brown Sugar, after which he suffered a bout of writer’s block. Over the next few years, he released a few covers for movie soundtracks, like Prince’s “She’s Always in My Hair” for Scream 2, and a version of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Your Precious Love” with Erykah Badu for the High School High. The one new song he dropped, “I Found My Smile Again,” was written for the movie Space Jam.
It was during this period that D’Angelo also struck up a fateful artistic and personal relationship with Questlove. Soon, the pair had set up shop at Electric Lady Studios in New York where they, along with the rest of the Soulquarians, began sessions that would eventually lead to Voodoo (as well as other albums by the Roots, Badu, Common, and more). The prolific, late-night jams with various musicians floating in and out of Electric Lady, combined with D’Angelo and Questlove’s intense studying of their predecessors, made the multi-year experience feel like going to school in the best way.
“I ain’t never went to college, so this was my equivalent,” D’Angelo told Rolling Stone. “It was a return to what we love about music. After Brown Sugar, I lost my enthusiasm to do all this. I coulda done without goin’ to 7-Eleven at three o’clock to get a pack of cigarettes and find yourself swarmed, signin’ autographs. I had to reiterate why I was doin’ that in the first place, and the reason was the love for the music. I was gettin’ jaded, lookin’ at what go on in the business. But, I had to say, even if I didn’t do this, I’d still be fuckin’ with the music. So I’m cursed, and I’m gon’ be cursed till the day I die. So this is what I’m gon’ do.”
D’Angelo shared the first track from Voodoo, “Devil’s Pie,” in 1998 on the Belly soundtrack, then dropped the first official single, “Left & Right,” with Method Man and Redman, in October 1999. By the time Voodoo finally arrived in January 2000, anticipation was so high it sold more than 320,000 copies in its first week, debuting at Number One on the Billboard 200.
As much as Voodoo was the critically lauded, long-awaited follow-up from a generational talent, its success was also driven by the blockbuster video for the album’s second single, “Untitled (How Does It Fee).” Directed by Paul Hunter and Dominique Trenier, the clip simply captured an exceptionally muscular D’Angelo performing the track while wearing nothing but a small gold crucifix necklace. (The singer-songwriter reportedly spent months working with a physical trainer to beef up for the video, and was apparently wearing a pair of pajama bottoms below his waist and just out of frame.)
The instantly iconic video enjoyed near-constant rotation on MTV and BET, while also garnering its fair share of controversy both for its striking suggestiveness and the way it upended gender expectations over ways men and women appearedd in hip-hop and R&B videos at the time. D’Angelo shrugged off any controversy, telling The New York Times at the time, “With men, if there’s any negative reaction, I’m not really going to get an honest feedback. The women love it, most definitely. But for me personally, the response I’ve got from both men and women has been pretty cool.”
But he also expressed reservations at his newfound sex symbol status. As noted in that 2000 Rolling Stone profile, D’Angelo concerts frequently featured “Take! It! Off!” chants from the crowd, and the singer would often oblige. But while stripping down did feel good, D’Angelo said, he was wary of it becoming “a thing where that’s what it’s all about. I don’t want it to turn things away from the music and what we doin’ up there.”
By the end of the Voodoo tour, D’Angleo’s fears had come to fruition. In a 2008 Spin article, Questlove recalled how the constant catcalls riled up D’Angelo: “The audience thinking, ‘Fuck your art, I wanna see your ass!’ made him angry.” His tour manager, Alan Leeds, added, “I didn’t realize how vulnerable he was and how deep his issues ran. He’s cursed now with fretting over how much of his fan base is because of how he looked as opposed to the music. It took away his confidence, because he’s not convinced why any given fan is supporting him.”
D’Angelo retreated from the spotlight and though he continued to work on music, he resisted pressure from his label to quickly pull together a Voodoo follow-up. But D’Angelo’s personal troubles were mounting: He was drinking and using drugs, and increasingly isolated from friends and family. In 2002, he was charged with resisting arrest after he allegedly spit at a woman at a gas station. And in 2005 he was arrested again for drug possession, driving under the influence, carrying a concealed weapons, and other charges. The leaked mugshots raised significant concerns about D’Angelo’s health and a subsequent stint in rehab didn’t stick. A new record deal with Clive Davis’ J Records was reportedly pulled after D’Angelo crashed his car in September 2005.
After a second spell in rehab, D’Angelo slowly started to return to music, but mostly as a contributor to other peoples’ projects (he appeared on albums by Snoop Dogg, Common, J Dilla, and Q-Tip). His own future, though, remained as murky as ever, even after Questlove leaked snippets of a song called “Really Love” on Australian radio in 2007. Reports of a new record deal emerged later that year, alongside hopes that an album might be out by the following fall or winter.
While that deadline came and went, by 2011 Questlove and D’Angelo’s other collaborators began to insist the album was actually close to done. In 2012, D’Angelo returned to the road for the first time since 2000, playing a run of shows in Europe and North America. The setlist mainly comprised songs from Brown Sugar and Voodoo, with a few new tracks scattered in as well. While D’Angelo played some additional concerts over the next two years, there was no further news about the long-awaited album.
Then, suddenly, in December 2014, a teaser for Black Messiah appeared online, and just a few days later, the album was released. While D’Angelo and his label, RCA, had planned to release the album in early 2015, its arrival was bumped up in response to the protests around the police killings of unarmed Black men like Michael Brown and Eric Garner. “I was like, ‘Man, I gotta fucking contribute. I gotta participate,’” D’Angelo told Rolling Stone. “And I’m done trying to be a perfectionist about it.”
Like its two predecessors, Black Messiah earned rave reviews. It was celebrated as much for D’Angelo’s ever-inventive musicality and arrangements — copious guitars, and vocal tracks stacked to the heavens — as well as his politically trenchant lyrics. “Aretha Franklin was as important to the civil-rights movement as Malcolm X and Medgar Evers,” he told RS. “Artists can choose to take on the tremendous amount of responsibility we have, or choose to ignore it. I can’t knock a motherfucker for not singing what I feel like I should sing. But I know it’s time for me to say it.”
D’Angelo and his band, the Vanguard, embarked on a successful tour in support of Black Messiah in 2015. Over the next few years, he continued to play scattered shows and, in 2018, shared a new song called “Unshaken,” for the Red Dead Redemption 2 soundtrack. In 2024, he joined Jay-Z on the song, “I Want You Forever,” recorded for The Book of Clarence soundtrack.
While D’Angelo’s cancer battle was not revealed publicly until his death, he was forced to cancel a performance at the Roots Picnic festival in Philadelphia earlier this year. At the time, the singer-songwriter cited an “unforeseen medical delay” following a surgery he underwent earlier in the year.
At the time he released Black Messiah, D’Angelo noted that he was working on a lot more material, and rumors about a fourth album characteristically followed him during what would become the final act of his career. Just last fall, Saadiq told the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast that D’Angelo was “in a good space” and working on a new record.
Thinking about what was ahead following the arrival of Black Messiah, D’Angelo told Rolling Stone, “I want to do what Yahweh is leading me to do. Do I know fully what that is? No, I don’t. I’m trying to keep myself open, my heart open, to receive and to know what that is.”
Yet, there was one thing he was certain about, just as he’d always been: “I do want to put a lot of music out there. I feel like, in a lot of respects, that I’m just getting started.”
