REST IN POWER D'ANGELO - Really Love
By Bradley
I would have never guessed that my next article on this blog would be in memory of D’Angelo. A true musician’s musician and simultaneously an accessible popular icon, it might be most effective to sum up Michael D’Angelo Archer’s impact on music as simply an artist “loved by people who enjoy music”. So pretty much loved by every human on this planet I guess. Or yet to be loved by those who have not listened to any one of his three seminal albums.
Echoing the beautiful statement put out by Tyler the Creator earlier today when the news broke, I truly feel lucky to have discovered Voodoo by D’Angelo when I did. In retrospect, it was divine intervention that led me to pick up the album on CD by chance at the Colorado Springs Goodwill bins, not knowing how my musical DNA would change. It is a blessing to love music and exist at the same time as this album. If anyone reading this has not listened to the album in its entirety, I sincerely, desperately, implore you to do so.
On that note, either of his two other studio albums deserve the same attention, as Brown Sugar undeniably changed the sound of R&B forever, while Black Messiah is an amazing testament to how D’Angelo took back control of his image from the music industry while also seamlessly integrating political activism.
In a year marked by the passing of other music icons who changed the landscape of soul and funk, the likes of Sly Stone, Roberta Flack, and Roy Ayers (along with one of my personal icons Flaco Jimenez), this truly feels like a gut punch. Perhaps it’s D’Angelo’s comparative youth that makes his passing feel so truly inconceivable. But maybe a more accurate answer lies in the fact that it feels fundamentally wrong that an artist who created music so human, so transcendental, doesn’t also enjoy the same immortal privileges that their art does.
Part of my hypothesis might provide precisely how to go about the passing of another great. During each of the countless times that I have listened to Voodoo today, D’Angelo feels alive as ever. Maybe moving forward we don’t just wait until an artist’s passing to effectively immortalize them with each listen.
If you need even more reason to cry your eyes out, or more proof of this whole "immortalizing" argument, here’s D'Angelo's performance of “It Sometimes Snows In April”, a tribute to one of his dear friends, Prince, another great gone too soon.
Sometimes it snows in April
Sometimes I feel so bad
Sometimes I wish that life was never ending
And all good things, they say, never last
All good things, they say, never last
And love, it isn’t love until its passed