R&B icon and neo-soul pioneer D’Angelo died Tuesday at 51 years old after a fight with pancreatic cancer, according to a statement from his family. While the four-time Grammy winner is most widely known for the song “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” and its accompanying music video, D’Angelo’s work as a whole embraced a more stripped-down style of music that began the neo-soul movement.
D’Angelo’s distinct style
“We’ll be able to look back and talk about something so brilliant yet so simple all at the same time. You think about his video of ‘How Does It Feel’ and how much acclaim that garnered, and it wasn’t overproduced. It was a guy with a black background standing there bared, both physically and in soul,” said Jerome Kyles, an assistant professor of voice and the neo-soul ensemble at Berklee College of Music. “It was sensual, but it was more than that. It was a simplicity that I think it will always be classic.”
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Kyles, who was an intern at Universal Music while the record label started to promote neo-soul music, said D’Angelo’s signature style paired both instrumentals and vocals back to a raw but rich form not typical in the R&B genre at the time.
“D’Angelo was new and old,” Kyles said. “If you think of the old show groups, The O’Jays and these people, it was almost like D’Angelo was sent from the ‘60s and the ‘70s into the ’90s and the 2000s to give us this sound again and remind us that this music is impactful, important and necessary.”
His focus on authentic vocals and instruments instead of electronic or produced sounds laid the groundwork for what Kyles called organic music to take center stage.
“It’s being recognized as something that is real, impactful and even needed,” Kyles said. “I felt that his sound, his lyrics, were what we needed at the time.”
D’Angelo’s lasting influence
Soul music, and more recently neo-soul music, has frequently explored political and social topics “of society’s consciousness,” according to Kyles.
“It was classic, old and new, the perfect blend of what was going on in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but then bringing it into the ‘90s and the early 2000s,” Kyles said. “That was masterful.”
While D’Angelo released just three studio albums between 1995 and 2014, his lyrics combined with a stripped-back musical style kept him top of mind in the music community.
“The albums he did put out were so impactful that they last,” Kyles said. “We were still waiting. In between all of that, the sound was still important.”
D’Angelo also brought that style and lyricism to music he worked on with Lauryn Hill, Snoop Dogg, Questlove and J Dilla, a producer on rapper Common’s early albums.
