The greats are never afraid to break the rules of musical convention or to rewrite them entirely. They, too, might be operating under the influence of those who came before them, but they dare to take those influences somewhere radical – D’Angelo, the neo-soul phenom who died last week, aged 51, is a case in point.
To quote MusicRadar’s resident professor of music, Ethan Hein, D’Angelo was “wildly unconventional” to say the least. He did things that no one else could do. He would play with the physical architecture of rhythm itself, and he would not only get away with it, this radicalism would give its sound a groove and feel as good as a thumbprint.
