Micheal Eugene Archer, the singer and musician better known as D’Angelo, had no use for “neo soul,” the label critics used to describe the type of music he helped personify in the 1990s and 2000s. “I never claimed I do neo soul,” he said in 2014 . “I make Black music.”

D’Angelo, who died of pancreatic cancer on Tuesday at the age of 51, certainly did. His music helped define what it meant to be Black at a time when that meaning was in flux, an age where some African American intellectuals feared that their community’s most popular cultural export, rap, was overly coarse and primitive. Over three incomparable albums— Brown Sugar (1995), Voodoo (2000), and Black Messiah (2014)— D’Angelo made art that was unquestionably Black in its embrace of gospel’s history, as well as its exper

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