D'Angelo leaves behind an era-defining legacy

In the long history of horny sex jams, nothing quite matches up to the brilliance of D’Angelo’s Untitled (How Does it Feel?) It's a seven-minute slow-burn that thrums with a tension both erotic and divine, its entreaties to his lover to “take the walls down” with him delivered by a choir from the heavens.

- BHANUJ KAPPAL

D'Angelo playing in New York City, 2015.

(GETTY IMAGES)

It's a song that channelled decades of Black musical excellence—controversy-era Prince’s fusion of raw desire and tender vulnerability, the yearning of Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing, Jimi Hendrix’s volcanic guitar playing—into a meisterwerk of pop eroticism.

If Untitled (How Does it Feel?) was the only song that D’Angelo ever wrote, it would already guarantee him a spot in the pantheon of pop music greats. But the American musician—who died last month aged 51, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer—leaves behind a body of work that is full of such moments of sonic wizardry. With just three albums, released over two decades, he helped birth the neo-soul movement, influenced artists as varied as Tyler The Creator, Alicia Keys and KeiyaA, and laid the blueprint for the contemporary Black avant-garde.

D'Angelo was born Michael Eugene Archer, the son of a Pentecostal minister in Richmond, Virginia. He was three years old when his elder brother discovered him playing the house piano, and he was soon performing gospel songs to his father’s congregation. By the time he was a teenager, he was dominating school talent competitions and playing local gigs as part of Three Of A Kind, a band that consisted of him and two cousins.