Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker:
This week, the R. & B. singer D’Angelo died at age fifty-one, of cancer. He was best known for deftly combining the heft and tenderness of soul music with the ingenuity and nerve of hip-hop, and while he was acclaimed in all the usual ways—four Grammy Awards, two platinum-selling albums, a music video so sexually charged that it still feels dangerous to watch in mixed company—he was also reclusive, enigmatic, unknowable. D’Angelo was a generational talent—an unusually artful singer, and an experimental and idiosyncratic songwriter. But he largely eschewed the accoutrements of stardom, releasing just three albums in nineteen years. (His final record, “Black Messiah,” came out in 2014.) It’s dangerous to codify that sort of resistance to celebrity as evidence of genius, but in a way, of course, it is—we all have an instinct to shield whatever feels most pure, and most rare.
D’Angelo, who was born Michael Eugene Archer, in Richmond, Virginia, is often compared to Prince, and rightly so, I think—each wielded a carnal, otherworldly falsetto. But, perhaps more crucially, they shared an exquisite sense of pacing, as if they were attuned to some elegant internal rhythm. Neither could be hurried. That feeling—stately, easy, deliberate—is inherently sensual.
more here.
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