 
D'Angelo
Occupation: Rhythm and blues singer
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
While his older brothers were interested in athletics, such as football, Archer was studying the broad tradition of African American music, readying himself to create his own interpretive yet inventive sound. D'Angelo started playing piano at age three, then at age four he also took up the organ in his home and in his father's church, where he was exposed to gospel and choral music. D'Angelo told Vibe magazine of his recent adult revelation and understanding of his religious background while visiting his grandfather's church: "I learned that the music part of the service was just as important as the actual preaching. Someone might not be ready to hear preaching, but a song will touch him. Music is a ministry in itself."
D'Angelo's mother, Mariann Smith, introduced him to jazz and soul greats such as Miles Davis and Marvin Gaye along with acclaimed gospel musicians such as Mahalia Jackson and Mighty Clouds of Joy. Smith remained involved in her son's musical career by purchasing for him his first keyboard and critiquing his first songs. In GQ, she explained, "When he started writing he'd write a song and bring it to me right away. He'd run it by me first. And he knows I will critique him. I've always given him the opportunity to express himself, but I'll tell him what I think."
From all of the talented and acclaimed musicians D'Angelo heard, Marvin Gaye stood out as his earliest musical mentor. Beyond the musical affinity that D'Angelo had for Gaye and his work, he also saw in himself a striking resemblance to Gaye, the man. Both men were intensely involved in their music and both had fathers that were ministers of the church. The bond that D'Angelo felt towards Gaye was so profound that he became distraught following Gaye's violent and tragic death. He experienced continuous nightmares and finally had to undergo therapy. Counseling was crucial to D'Angelo's later acceptance of Gaye, both the musician and the man. D'Angelo now acknowledges the connection to Gaye and his feelings towards other artists of Gaye's time. "I don't think being called a 'son of soul' is weird. It's natural. Anybody who's coming up now is a son of that stuff or should be. We're just doing what the fathers were doing back in the day," D'Angelo told GQ.
At 16, D'Angelo formed his first band, Michael Archer and Precise, and began singing and writing his first original songs. They went on to win several local talent shows and play for family reunions and other local events. The group performed a combination of original material and covers of their favorite Al Green and Smokey Robinson songs.
As much as his gospel, jazz, and soul roots inspired him, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince showed D'Angelo how to create music which was also innovative and original. In the December 1995 issue of EM, D'Angelo recalled, "I was one of those guys who read the album credits and I realized that Prince was a true artist. He wrote, produced, and performed, and that's the way I wanted to do it." D'Angelo then began to learn other instruments such as drums, saxophone, guitar, bass, and keyboards to enhance his musical style and expertise. This later aided him in the production of his own music and other artists' work. His dedication to playing all of his own instruments also makes him an innovator because he does not rely on sampling other artist's music for more lush melodies or heavier rhythms.
Along with The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, hip-hop also influenced D'Angelo as modern music with a feel for the music of his forefathers. "Rakim and KRS-One were my heroes. We used to [have rap competitions] in the bathroom during high school, and I used to call myself Chilly Chill. That stuff is definitely still in me too. All rap is street soul. They just have a different method," D'Angelo explained in the Los Angeles Times. D'Angelo's earliest affinity with hip-hop continued into his professional debut through the help of Ali-Shaheed Muhammad from A Tribe Called Quest who coproduced Brown Sugar.
Archer used all of his musical experience and inspiration to lead him to three big wins on Amateur Night at Harlem's Apollo Theater in 1989. With the money and exposure gained from these wins, D'Angelo bought more equipment, quit school, and moved to New York at age 18. Between the ages of 17 and 18, he wrote most of the material which would later appear on his Brown Sugar debut album. Then at 19, he secured a three-hour impromptu piano recital for an EMI record executive which got him a record deal and the release of his first song, "U Will Know." He produced and cowrote the song with his brother Luther for the Black Men United Choir which included great contemporary R&B artists such as R. Kelly, Boyz II Men, Tevin Campbell and Lenny Kravitz on guitar.
July of 1995 was finally the time for the release of D'Angelo's debut double platinum album, Brown Sugar. The album had three crossover R&B/pop hits with "Brown Sugar," the gold-selling first single; "Cruisin," the remake/tribute to Smoky Robinson; and "Lady," which hit number one on the R&B chart and number five on the pop chart. At age 21, D'Angelo made his debut performance in support of Brown Sugar at the Supper Club in New York City where crowds of celebrities such as Wesley Snipes, Snoop Doggy Dogg, and Salt-n-Pepa gave their enthusiastic approval to the young musician. The anticipation of D'Angelo's debut was so big that his hero, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince was not allowed into the celebrity- packed theater.
His debut performance at the Supper Club made an impressive mark on his new audience of musical peers as well as many other celebrities and R&B and hip-hop fans. D'Angelo's stage performance rivals only his unprecedented studio work. Some of the songs he covers live are "Can't Hide Love" by Earth Wind & Fire, the Ohio Players' "Sweet Sticky Thing," and "Give Me Your Love" from Curtis Mayfield. Since his debut performance, D'Angelo has honed his show on some legendary stages. He performed at the 1996 Grammy ceremonies where he appeared with Tony Rich singing and performing a duet in tribute to Stevie Wonder. D'Angelo also performed at the 1996 Essence Awards with Smoky Robinson where they performed "Cruisin" together. In addition, he has appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman, the Rosie O'Donnell Show, NY Undercover, and Soul Train.
Along with working on more of his own music, D'Angelo has continued to do production work for artists such as the Boys Choir of Harlem, Brandy, SWV, The Roots, Mary J. Blige, and Vertical Hold. He has also done music and production work on some movie soundtracks, including Get on the Bus, High School High, and Space Jam. He has been recognized by his peers with numerous award nominations for best new R&B artist and/or song, including three Soul Train Music awards in 1996, four NAACP awards in 1996, three Grammy nominations in 1996 and one in 1997, and also another nomination in 1996 for the MTV Music Awards. In 1997 he won an American Music Award for Best New R&B Artist.
As D'Angelo continues to blend musical tradition with new hooks and grooves, contemporary soul and R&B will also continue to grow with the depth and skill of young multi-faceted musicians like himself. He explained his musical aspirations in the Los Angeles Times: "I just want to make some dope black music, some good soul music. I could not care less about a hit song. This is only my first album. I feel like I'm growing musically, that now I know what I want to do, and how better to do it. I just want to keep elevating my music to a new level."
PERSONAL INFORMATION
Born c. 1974 in Richmond, VA; son of Mariann Smith (a legal secretary).
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D’Angelo
Born: February 11, 1974 in Richmond, Virginia, United States
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Shaken by Gaye's Death
Three-Hour Audition at EMI
Sophomore Release Showed Hendrix Influence
PERSONAL INFORMATION
ADDRESSES
AWARDS
CAREER
WORKS
FURTHER READINGS
CITATION   
D’Angelo
Feb. 11, 1974—Soul singer;songwriter;instrumentalist
With the release of D’Angelo’s debut album, Brown Sugar,in 1995, accolades
began pouring in from many quarters, proclaiming this singer, songwriter, and multi-
instrumentalist the savior of R&B, a musical genre that had been in decline—in the
opinion of many—since the 1970s. “Marrying Marvin Gaye’s senusal vulnerability
with Stevie Wonder’s earnestness,…Prince’s rascally falsetto to Curtis Mayfield’s
grain [hoarseness] and poignancy, D’Angelo brings hope and delight to R&B fans
who have been numbed by prefabricated, oversexed and all-too-obivous acts and
recordings,” the poet, novelist, and journalist Rohan B. Preston wrote for the
Chicago Tribune (October 24,1995). “And yet he does not so much imitate
these masters; they simply inform him as he attempts to take that knowledge to
another level.” More than two million copies of Brown Sugar were sold.
D’Angelo’s long-awaited sophomore effort, Voodoo (2000), featured
the smooth vocals—delivered in his famed falsetto—and solid instrumentation
that characterized its predecessor, while offering more improvisational nuances.
Some critics speculated that Voodoo’s more experimental character and lack
of hooks might keep the album off the charts, but it has turned out to be at least as
commerically successful as Brown Sugar. As of early 2001 D’Angelo remained
at the forefront of the “new soul” movement that he helped to create.
D’Angelo was born Michael D’Angelo Archer in Richmond, Virginia, on February
11,1974. His father and one of his grandfathers were preachers, and at an early age
he began singing in a church choir. He started learning piano at three. “My oldest
brother was playing classical music, and I remember hearing him play ‘Flight of the
Bumblebee’ and Bach, and it made me really want to play,” he recalled for
CNN (June 20,2000, on-line). “I used to go to the piano after he finished practicing
and bang on it.” Beginning when he was nine, each Sunday D’Angelo would play the
piano and organ at his grandfather’s church, and after a while he directed the choir
there, too. His musical taste was never restricted to church-related music, however.
His mother, Mariann Smith, was a big fan of Marvin Gaye’s and other soul musicians,
and D’Angelo—who has identified Gaye as one of his major inspirations—would
spend hours at the piano picking out tunes by such artists or acts as Donna Summer
and Earth, Wind and Fire. In time he became proficient on drums, bass, and guitar
as well as piano.
In his teens D’Angelo added rap to his diverse list of musical influences. “Rakim
and KRS-One were my heroes,” he told Cheo H. Coker for the Los Angeles
Times (August 18,1995). “We used to [have rap competitions] in the bathroom
during high school, and I used to call myself Chilly Chill. That stuff is definitely
still in me too. All rap is street soul. They just have a different method.” At about
16 D’Angelo formed a band called Michael Archer and Precise; in addition to their
own material, the group interpreted songs by Al Green and Smokey Robinson,
and they won several talent shows. D’Angelo was performing with a rap group
called IDU (Intelligent, Deadly but Unique) in 1991 when he signed a publishing
deal with EMI, which led to a record contract. Soon after joining EMI’s roster, he
was invited to compete on Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater, in New York
City’s Harlem, the venue where such legendary figures as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah
Vaughn, and Pearl Bailey got their first major exposure. He won three separate
competitions at the Apollo. With his prize money, he bought musical equipment
so that he could do his own recording.
In 1994 D’Angelo’s song “U Will Know” was released as a single by the group
Black Men United, and was used as the theme of Doug McHenry’s movie
Jason’s Lyric. The next year EMI released Brown Sugar. Taking after
Prince, another of his favorite musicians, D’Angelo played nearly all the instruments
on the album. The songs, most of them lean and stripped down, without complex
orchestrations, are dominated by throbbing drum beats and bouncy bass lines
and are punctuated by D’Angelo’s electric-piano riffs and splashes of guitar.
Overshadowing the instruments, D’Angelo crooned in his smooth, buttery style,
often soaring into a falsetto, as in the album’s title track, a veiled tribute to
marijuana that became a hit single. Most of the songs, however, are about traditional
romances, in the style of classic soul music. In “Me and those Dreamin’ Eyes of
Mine,” for example, D’Angelo sings, as quoted on the D’Angelo’s World web site,
“Ooh wee baby,you’ve redefined my vision of love it seems/Your love be da cherry
in my chocolate covered dreams/ So it seems, my oh my,/Me and those dreaming
eyes of mine.”
Critical reponse to the album was overwhelming positive. In the London
Guardian (July 7,1995), Garry Mulholland wrote of Brown Sugar,
“The range of talent on display here…leaves you breathless to hear what the
wonder kid will come up with next. History and relevance, heartbreak and strutting
confidence. Brown Sugar is the best soul album since….since….you know,
I really can’t remember when.” A reviewer for Rolling Stone (May 13,1999)
named Brown Sugar among the best albums of the 1990s and wrote, “After
years of imitators, a true son of Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone, Curtis
Mayfield, and Prince…emerged from an attic in Richmond, Virginia.” To many
critics D’Angelo embodied a new, more musically interesting alternative to the overtly
commercial R&B that ruled the airwaves in the mid-1990s. Coker, for instance, noted,
“It’s easy to see why critics and fans are beginning to dub him the savior of soul.
This entertainer appears to be a figure who can single-handedly bring an integrity
and purity back to a genre that has sacrificed true feeling for over-production and
cliché.” Brown Sugar, which went double platinum, earned D’Angelo an
American Music Award as favorite new artist, two Soul Train Music Awards,
and five Grammy nominations.
The extent of his sudden fame was illustrated during the summer of 1995, when hordes
of people gathered outside the site of a D’Angelo concert in New York city, clamoring
to get seats to see the new R&B phenomenon. Even such celebrities as the R&B trio
TLC, the film director Martin Scorsese, and Prince were turned away. The doorman
denied D’Angelo himself entry for more than a half hour, until his identity could be
confirmed. Though new-soul releases by Maxwell, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, and Macy
Gray came on the heels of Brown Sugar--and, by seeming to cast D’Angelo
in the role of leader of a new musical trend, might have buoyed his confidence—the
expectations stirred by his album had an inhibiting effect on him, resulting in a five-
year hiatus before his next recording was released. “I felt pressure,” D’Angelo admitted
to Kimberly Davis for Ebony (April 2000), ‘but I held on. It was important
for me to hold on to what I was believing in, to what I was thinking about. I was just
trying to make some good music.”
Although he was not recording during those five years, D’Angelo was not inactive.
In 1996 a recording of his concerts, Live at the Jazz Café, was released
overseas by EMI U.K. He was a guest on B.B. King’s album Dueces Wild
(1997) and on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998) and contributed to the
soundtrack albums for the films Scream 2 (1997), Belly (1998),
and Down in the Delta (1998). In February 1997 his son, Michael, was born
to his fellow R&B artist Angie Stone, who by the time of the baby’s birth was no
longer his girlfriend.
At the end of January 2000, D’Angelo released the long-awaited Voodoo.
Whereas Brown Sugar was largely a solo effect, on Voodoo
D’Angelo collaborated with a half-dozen artists, among them the drummer
Ahmir (“?uestlove”) Thompson, the trumpeter Roy Hargrove, and the rappers
Q-Tip, Method Man, and Redman. “There’s strength in numbers, especially
with what we’re doing,” D’Angelo told Davis. “We all share like-minded
visions, so it’s important for us to network, to get together and to talk and vibe
and play together.” The album had a looser, more improvisational feel than
Brown Sugar. “A lot of stuff is live and it’s the first take,” D’Angelo explained,
as quoted by Shawn Rhea in the New Orleans Times-Picayune (March 10,
2000). “We’d come in and just tape for hours and hours and just play and play,
and I would pick the best of the batch and write the song to the jam session.
A lot of what you are hearing is just us up in [the studio] jamming.” Voodoo
also offered a larger musical palette than Brown Sugar: “Spanish
Joint,” for example, careens through syncopated Latin rhythms enriched by a jazzy
bass line and the trumpet work of Roy Hargrove; “Devil’s Pie” eschews prominent
vocal melodies for a laid-back, funky groove and low-key singing. In Voodoo’s lyrics,
D’Angelo dealt not only with the topic of romance but also with faith and fatherhood,
the latter of which he experienced anew with the birth in the fall of 1999 of his
daughter, Imani, whose mother’s identity he has refused to disclose. In “Africa”,
for instance, as transcribed on http://www.geocities.com/dangelosworld, he sang,
“Every since the day you came/my whole world began to change/I knew then to
dedicated my life,/for your own/everyday I see you grow/ and remember what you
already know/ I receive the love/ that radiates from your glow.”
The publicity surrounding Voodoo was greatly escalated, and almost
overshadowed, by the video for the single “Untitled (How Does It Feel),”
in which D’Angelo, nude from the waist up and looking muscular and fit,
stands against a black background and sings about love. Most critics agreed,
however, that Voodoo offered a lot more than D’Angelo’s highly
marketable image. In the Village Voice (March 28,2000), Robert
Christgau wrote, “The pecs and pubes of the video are a feint, one of many;
although the music can be sexy and lunky and fun and woman-centered,
that’s just part of the sonic concept. Which is unique.” Assessing the album
for Entertainment Weekly (January 21,2000), Matt Diehl quipped,
“[D’Angelo’s] falsetto just may serve as women’s answer to Viagra,”
and then advised, “If you’re looking for an antidote to the processed-cheese-
disease that’s infected today’s pop, a little of bit o’ Voodoo is just
what the witch doctor ordered.” Shawn Rhea, appreciative of Voodoo’s
eclecticism, wrote, “The singer seems to have channeled the brilliance of his
musical forefathers, living and dead, during the crafting of this album. It is
a complex, intricate collection of songs that, like voodoo, is simultaneously
secular and spiritual, sensual and sacred, earthbound and ethereal.” By the
middle of 2000, Voodoo had sold more than 1.3 million copies and
had earned D’Angelo three nominations for the 15th annual Soul Train Music
Awards, held in 2001.
The singer maintains residences in New York City and Richmond. His musical
mission has changed little in the past decade. “I consider myself very respectful
of the masters who came before,” he told Davis. “In some ways, I feel a
responsibility to continue and take the cue from what they were doing musically
and vibe on it. That’s what I want to do. But I want to do it for this time and
this generation.”---Peter G. Herman
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