The Archer King.

I woke up this morning with a strange feeling.

One premonitory, singed by a sense of inexplicable nostalgia. I felt myself back in 2018. It was the morning of February 9th, and I discovered an article in The Guardian on the death of a musician named Jóhann Jóhannsson, an innovative Icelandic composer. He was only 48. After reading several articles on Jóhannsson, out of keen curiosity, I downloaded his album “Orphee.”

It was love.

Fast forward to 14 October 2025.

In the afternoon, as thoughts of Jóhannsson’s early death haunted me, it was announced that D’Angelo, an incredible musical talent of an entirely different genre, had died of pancreatic cancer.

He was 51.

D’Angelo was one of the most strikingly unusual R&B musicians of the 90s and 2000s.

Possessed of a rare kind of genius, he was, in the words of New York Times writer, Jonathan Abrams, “a reserved visionary,” an introvert.

In 2000, D’Angelo’s sophomore album, “Voodoo” was released, the follow-up to his universally lauded 1995 debut, “Brown Sugar.”

But it was the video for the third single from “Voodoo” that helped to turn D’Angelo into, in the words of Abrams, “a cultural touchstone.”

In the sexually charged video, D'Angelo had been talked into appearing partially naked. Women seemed to go “completely bonkers.”

His highly provocative performance of “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” brought the singer a heightened level of fame and attention, a level of attention he did not want.

The song won a Grammy Award for Best Male R & B Vocal Performance. In 2001, Rolling Stone magazine named it the fourth best song of the year 2000, and the fifty-first best song of the 2000s.

But the soon-to-be infamous video left the musician so horribly embarrassed, it nearly derailed his career.

D'Angelo simply could not cope with the attention. Perhaps in an unconscious psychological attempt to thwart the unwanted sexual attention, he gained an enormous amount of weight. He developed a serious substance abuse problem. Deeply depressed, he retreated.

But thankfully, he recovered and re-emerged.

After a fourteen-year absence from the public eye, having licked the bite wounds inflicted by lustful hounds, in 2014, D’Angelo would return, and bless us with one last album. But this time, he was wiser, more sanguine, more in control of his image — and as musically sophisticated as ever. His third album “Black Messiah” cemented him even further as an innovator, a dynamo of composition, a wild, sensuously intelligent talent.

Thank you, King D, for the music.

You are already missed.