D’Angelo Gave Us Back to Ourselves He redefined Black genius and turned survival into a song

When I saw the headline, “D’Angelo dead at fifty-one,” it felt as if somebody had taken the bass out of the world. Everything suddenly thinner, hollower. It didn’t seem real at first, the way most deaths of artists never seem real, because their voices live in so many rooms of your memory that it’s hard to believe one person contained all of them.
The first thing I did was text the friends who would feel it the way I did. Each message felt like lighting a candle. Replies came back without punctuation—Nah you lying. Stop playing. D’Angelo? For real? Then the quiet that comes when grief hasn’t settled in but already knows where to sit. I stared at my phone, wondering how to explain in a post that this wasn’t just another celebrity gone. It was a piece of the language we spoke to survive disappearing mid-sentence.
I opened my music app, hovered over the album Brown Sugar, and paused. I wasn’t ready to hear his voice again, not yet.
A few minutes later, my phone buzzed. It was a voice note from my brother and fellow writer, Robert Jones, Jr. His voice was shaking, soft at first, the way people sound when they are trying not to cry but already know they have lost that fight. He said, “I can’t fucking believe this shit.”
In a later voice note, he spoke about how D’Angelo’s music had saved his life in some of his hardest moments. “I can’t tell you how many times that nigga’s music saved my life,” he said.
I listened to both messages twice, each time hearing something new in the silence between his words. It reminded me that mourning D’Angelo was not just about losing a musician. It was about losing a compass that had helped us, as Black people, as Black men, navigate tenderness and survival.
What I heard in Robert’s voice was not sorrow, but recognition. An understanding that D’Angelo had been a mirror, showing us how to survive ourselves. He didn’t just sing about love. He sang about how to stay alive inside it, how to find yourself in the small moments when the world asked too much of you. His music was a rhythm we built homes out of, a sound that told us we could be divine.
Listening to his voice through my brother’s tears carried me back to the first time I heard D’Angelo. It was 1997, maybe 1998, before I could name that ache, before I learned what a groove could do to a woman’s hips or a man’s spine.
It was one of those hot summers on our block, where the heat rises off the pavement like breath. The older guys were out front shooting dice, laughing between sips of whatever was in their brown paper bags, the kind of joy that makes you want to grow up faster. They were beautiful in that way men are when they forget they are being watched, shirts damp at the collar, gold catching the sun, sneakers crisp as the moment they bought them. Somebody had a radio propped on a milk crate, and the song Lady was playing. D’Angelo’s voice poured out the speaker like a gift for everyone in earshot.
I remember standing at the edge of it all, small but hungry to belong. I wanted to stay, to be one of them, to know what it felt like to laugh that easy. But my mother’s voice came sharp from the window, calling me inside. I hesitated just long enough to memorize the sound of that song, the way it made me feel grown for a second.
Upstairs, she was stirring a pan on the stove, the apartment heavy with the smell of grease and Sunday. I kept humming the hook under my breath for the rest of the day, even though I didn’t really know the words. You’re my lady, my lady, You’re my lady.
It was the kind of sound that stayed with you, that felt like it was teaching you something your spirit already knew but your mind hadn’t caught up to yet.
Later that day, my mother asked, “You really like that song, huh?” I nodded. She went to the entertainment center drawer and pulled out an old cassette case with the handwritten label Brown Sugar. “I got the tape right here,” she said. She slid it into the deck, pressed play, and the room filled up again with that voice.
I think maybe that was the day I first met part of myself, a boy on the edge of becoming, learning that Black manhood could be slow, and tender, and sexy, and authentic, and whole.
In the years after, I like to think I became a student of music. I studied it not for melody but for meaning, for the sacred places where rhythm meets revelation. And much of that education began with Brown Sugar. It wasn’t just a debut album; it was a kind of permission. A reminder that a Black man could sound sensual without apology, could let his voice quiver and still call it strength. Before that, many of us were raised on the gospel of survival and the sermon of stoicism. The men we knew wore silence like armor, their emotions hidden beneath the hum of basslines and bravado.
But then D’Angelo appeared, his voice a soft thunder, unbuttoning something in the culture. He made vulnerability sound holy. Every note on Brown Sugar felt like it was whispering a new theology: that Black men could make love, could ache, could praise and plead and still be us.
It was music that made room for breath in a world that had trained us to hold it. We didn’t know then that D’Angelo was teaching us a language we’d need later—how to be both gentle and strong in a country that kept asking us to be steel. Brown Sugar was the first time many people understood that a Black man’s sensuality could be revolutionary.
Then came Voodoo. I was entering teenage years, trying to figure out what it meant to live inside a Black boy’s body. The first time I heard the record it felt less like an album and more like a pathway. It was the year 2000, the world tipping into a new century, and D’Angelo gave us a sound that felt ancestral and yet ahead of time, something pulled through the folds of a Black future we had not reached yet. It was gospel stretched through funk, soul baptized in distortion, a ritual disguised as groove. Voodoo was a sacred text for those of us trying to understand the body as both sanctuary and battlefield.
Every song felt like a psalm for the weary and the wanting.
He sang like a man who had seen God in the mirror and was still learning what that meant. His voice blurred the line between need and desire, and told me there was no shame in wanting a woman, that maybe the wanting itself was a kind of faith.
And then came “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” Like most people, I still remember seeing that video for the first time. The screen showed him bare from the waist up, sweat catching the light. I felt proud, confused, seen, and embarrassed all at once. Here was a Black man allowed to be beautiful, not because he was strong or dangerous, but because he was vulnerable. Because he looked like flesh, like possibility.
Still, I could feel the world taking him apart. The way people talked about that video in hair salons, and classrooms, it wasn’t reverence—it was hunger. Everyone wanted a piece of his body, few cared for his spirit. Even at that age, I understood that kind of gaze could kill. I understood because I knew what it felt like to have my own young body taken without my permission. Years earlier, my babysitter had crossed the boundary between care and harm, turning what should have been safety into confusion. Watching D’Angelo’s body consumed by the world, it made me wonder what it meant to grow up in a body that could be loved, feared, and fetishized in the same breath.
The industry crowned him a sex symbol, then demanded he stay that way. Every performance after that, they wanted the same skin, the same stillness, the same ache. I think that’s when the joy in his music began to sound like work. The light that had made him free became a trap.
He once confessed to Rolling Stone in 2000:
“It feels good, actually, when I do it. But I don’t want it to turn into 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. Sometimes, you know, I feel uncomfortable, to be onstage and tryin’ to do your music and people goin’, ‘Take it off! Take it off!’ ’Cause I’m not no stripper. I’m up there doin’ somethin’ I strongly believe in.”
Sometime after Voodoo, D’Angelo began to vanish in the way only people who have seen too much can vanish. Not suddenly, but like smoke leaving a room. One day the interviews stopped, then the sightings, then the stage lights.
It would be fourteen years before the world heard from him again. Fourteen years of silence that the media mistook for ruin. In that span, they turned his absence into a spectacle. Paparazzi photos showed a heavier man, his once-sculpted frame now wrapped in ordinary flesh, his face fuller, his clothes looser. They called it a downfall. They called him troubled, broken, gone. As if a man who no longer fit their idea of beauty must be lost. As if the only acceptable form of Black genius is one that never ages, never aches, never hides.
They wrote about his weight like it was a sin, about his quiet like it was cowardice. They dissected his body the same way they once worshipped it. They said all the things people say when they can’t imagine that a person might simply be saving themself.
Because what happens when a person’s tenderness becomes the thing that breaks them? When the body that was once called divine begins to ache under the weight of being everyone’s altar? We forget how heavy visibility is. We forget that to be seen, for us, is also to be hunted. Every note he ever sang about love was turned into an invitation to consume him. And when he chose not to feed the world anymore, they called it madness. But what if it was medicine?
But he was not gone. He was rebuilding, relearning the parts of himself that fame had scattered. And when he finally returned in 2014 with Black Messiah, it was not a comeback. It was a coronation. And for me, it was especially monumental, as it was his first album released during my adulthood. I remember the night it arrived—how it sounded like a man who had walked through the fire and returned carrying water for us all.
Black Messiah wasn’t a claim of divinity. It was a reflection on collective deliverance. D’Angelo wasn’t saying I am the messiah. He was saying we are. That the salvation we keep waiting for might already be among us. In the small mercies, the shared songs, the hands clasped in protest. It was exactly what we needed as Ferguson burned, New York City cried out, and every part of America with a police precinct felt like a battlefield waiting for the next name to mourn.
The title itself was instruction: to believe in the god who dances inside our grief, the groove that carries our fury and still makes it sing. Each note was a map toward freedom. He built community through rhythm, through the kind of funk that refuses to surrender to despair. And for that, and for all the lessons D’Angelo gave and left behind, I believe he was among the bravest Black men to ever walk this earth.
What made D’Angelo brave was not just that he lived on his own terms, but that he dared to center Black love in a world built to cheapen it. He placed Black tenderness at the altar of his art, insisting that Black men could be romantic, spiritual, and flesh all at once. In doing so, he waged a quiet war against the machinery that has never wanted us to love ourselves too deeply or each other too freely.
Our systems were not designed to grant a Black man the luxury of desire without danger, affection without suspicion, or sensuality without punishment. Yet D’Angelo, in all his trembling beauty, insisted upon it. He stood before us not as an image, but as a question: what does it mean for a Black man to be seen in full color, to love and be loved without apology? His refusal to perform anything less than that truth was a gospel of its own. He would not flatten his heart to fit the industry’s hunger or turn his music into spectacle. He would not give the world the comfort of a Black genius stripped of his humanity.
There is, in America, a particular cruelty reserved for those who dare to love themselves aloud. It is the same cruelty that makes caricature out of our beauty, commodity out of our joy. D’Angelo saw the trap and refused to enter it. He would not become a brand. He would not let his skin, his body, his voice be carved into currency. He would not surrender the holiness of his own humanity for the satisfaction of their gaze. That was his rebellion. That was his love letter.
He understood, as all prophets do, that to protect the soul you must sometimes disappear. His silence was not a collapse but a covenant. A pact with himself that his spirit would not be auctioned. In that choice he offered us a lesson: that vulnerability is not weakness but witness, that to tremble and still create is to testify. Through him we learned that the Black man’s heart need not be armored to be strong, that there is holiness in stepping away to heal, in refusing to let the crowd define the art. These are the lessons that reshaped how I love, how I write, how I reach for others. And though he is gone, the sound remains. It lingers in barbershops thick with laughter and cologne, in kitchens where grease hisses like applause, in the cars that roll slow through summer streets with the windows down.
I imagine him now, somewhere between heaven and a studio, a guitar resting across his lap, coaxing a chord even the angels haven’t heard yet. Maybe the ancestors have gathered around, nodding to the sound, smiling because they know he has done what they asked of him—he made beauty out of burden.
The world will remember his records, his awards, his legend. But what I will remember is that he gave us back to ourselves.