Lining Up

Travesties on the end of the line

"On the end of a line/hanging on the edge of a lie."
        —Sade

Here is a catastrophe so lucid, its incidents are scripted in our music, homicidal scenarios in muffled suicide notes. When D’Angelo died, on October 14, 2025, at the age of 51, my heart traced a line, an inescapable coherence between him and my father. That line daggers through me as rage, resolve, true love, the hollow always lurking in never’s wake, nailed to the impossible for thou art with me etched in permanent ink near D’s shoulder. Walk its valley with me if you dare. Here are two catastrophes so perfect: My father was 52 when he died of heartbreak over his own abuse of those he loved too effusively to stop hurting us, those who had made him too domestic to separate tenderness from brutality, or nesting from thrashing. He died singing no’s into his bleeding throat, choking on refusal and his own blood, I will fear no evil. The dark couplet here is that Dad and D’Angelo were born 40 years apart, my father in Mississippi, D’Angelo, née Michael Archer Jr., in Richmond, Virginia. I walk the tightrope between them asking, why is the lifespan of a black soul singer a destiny in unfinished melancholy and sonnets keeling over before their volta, fifty years and a huddle of dark months? Why don’t we change this line or defy it, defile it? Why can’t we resist the thresholds sent to disappear us?

Here is a catastrophe so perfect, I had to call somebody. Here are two black Christs of the Black Crisis Action Network sharing a lineage by having fallen for and with one another, as members of a dying tribe in love with dying for rather than of something, enamored with honor and effort and the kind of folly begotten by either. Their conversation is private and on display, a series of you too’s that becomes incoherent the more honest, the more coded in glib rebuttals against revealing too much. Their symmetry distracts me, a conspiracy that proves itself by how well it distracts and distorts the truth, or the truth’s potential. I walk slower through the shaded valley, joined by D’Angelo’s daughter, son, friends, lover, lured on a leash of allegiances back into and beyond my own experience. And there is nowhere to get to, no solace, no clean break, only better enjambment against the false glamor of their ascents collapsing, rain/dance/scene. A catastrophe so perfect it encourages us to cherish the flood of recognition it sends as a good omen.

Liner Notes for D’Angelo’s “The Line”

"Dyin’ young is hard to take/ Sellin’ out is harder."
        — Sly Stone

Here is a suicide note so subtle it impersonates the survival instinct. Or is it the inverse, Black survival outwitting Black slaughter by pretending to abide it lyrically, by tending to it as vigilante and witness? It begins with the singer furtively grieving the occasion of his own birth, trespassing against his own becoming in microtones of ecstatic fatalism so soothing they demand the very arrival they defer before fading into an eternal present baited forth by deferrals. I’ve been gone, gone so long — but the departure rings triumphant, deliberate, before it is qualified by the urge to sing that inspired this return. A bard and a recluse entire the studio in the same body; only one can leave. An epic anti-hero lured home to recount his misadventures and purge his dread of facing the familiar.

Call D’Angelo’s listless approach limbo, the undercurrent’s overture, call it surrender at the lip of the self-imposed crucifix-hillside, call it edging, subterranean maroonage, gluttony for punishment, faux distress luring arousal, hunger awaiting itself from the throes of anhedonia, the vain hope that the consequence of these antics will be a second chance, rebirth, Sisyphus mannerisms, the broad-edged silly music the wind makes when running—, when the destination is always between terminals or ideas, between and blurring senses. Call it selfish synesthete nursing, that addiction to indecision and non-arrival and post-arrival sweetness and dissociation, that affective restlessness of an almost-man, an eternal apprentice, never quite ready, never quite retreating. The line he paces is iron-clad yet flimsy, he’s restrained by trouble rather than his personal will, reliant on the dejected whimsy of the prison yard, the frightening shuffle-march of the mercenary feigning inspiration for his audience of overseers and sadists; he refuses to decide between heroic acts and moping in submission to (or pursuit of) punishment for that refusal. They follow him over what appears to be a cliff and are ambushed by meadows and shallow lakes, the minor stakes of an escapist who also enjoyed the excuses that accompanied captivity.

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The pressure is on/from every angle, translates to a bluff in the song. He is his own obstruction. The line, the limbo rope, frays into redacted phrases mumbled so nimbly you’re made fluent in what he withholds, confronted and teased with it. Betrayals fold in on themselves until they’re revelations. A pendulum erupts by which grunts and pants become moans, then threats gather momentum before a phantom gun is announced by its trigger and the thread disperses and the line is nearly but still-not-quite traversed. I’m gonna pull it, you gon’ see, another nearly-empty threat trembling from within itself. The line extends from torment to retribution, from wincing to sunning, to summoning, from victim to survivor, from childhood to manhood to piece of a man, to hungry ghost, to sinner, to repentance, to God, to good girl, to cruel woman, to bleeding heart, to whodunit, to hoodoo, to Houdini, to I’ll stay, to the erotics of feinged restraint, to the cathartic existential murder in The Stranger invading distant mythogenetic spheres with romance and remorse. Shameless on the precipice of unraveling, the line is crooked and bargains with your eyes to be justified, rigged into something better than itself. Pride is its faulty anchor and the center will not hold. The hymn implodes into requiem.

D’Angelo’s grief is gentle, austere and lush with self-abnegation. It registers at first as messianic seductiveness and calls forth his biography of sacrosanctification. He plays dirges at 3; imagine the pliant, pensive look in his toddler eyes while singing a routine medley, the line hot stuff baby this evening into “Old Ship of Zion.” The line between the lure and the ship is intervened upon by Miles Davis playing “My Ship” in slow gulps of waveform, by traditions of shipwreck turned toward redemption, by the unearthing of any Black psalm’s backstory. But D’Angelo deflects from discussion of motive on the line, and in this dodging and weaving that lends the lyric its suspense he also implicates reluctant assassins, convoluted dejection and unsolved crimes in lives of peers and Albert Ayler, James Baldwin, Sun Ra, The Whispers, Baraka whose first book was a preface to this tension between suicide notes and love notes unsettling Black sound, this precognitive zone wherein you become your own devil’s advocate, Leviticus, Crispus Attucks. Never front on a clique you can’t evaluate is implicated as admonition. You have the simulacra alone. You don’t have all the evidence. You don’t differentiate between privacy and secrecy in entertainment. ODB is implicated, and J Dilla, and Otis Redding, Whitney, Michael, Aaliyah, my father, my featherweight dawn.

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D’Angelo’s “The Line” is a hesitant death note interrupted by a cradle of ghost notes and imitating Black survival, pretending to be about honor or vengeance as it threatens self-annihilation. The unnamed villain the song hunts is the shadow-self, the inside-out hero, the pulp of ruins at the center of a healer’s hand, and anything that reminds us of it. Those closest to this mist of self-mystification, those who love him most, will be casualties too: They obstruct the myth of his alienation with their loving attention; if they don’t disappear the line collapses and ushers everyone to green pastures, restoring their souls. On his arm, D’Angelo has tattooed Psalm 23.4: Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. “The Line” is his factless map of that shape-shifting valley and its infinity loop of cul-de-sacs. He fabricates an opponent beyond and between good and evil as an excuse to keep walking toward some false light or flame till it consumes and absolves him. He speaks as if duty-bound here, under siege and bound to the purification ritual for which he is both master of ceremonies and sacrifice. He leans out on faith as it abandons him, and its rhythm floats with the levity of fallen angels landing nowhere there. And if I can hold on/I’m sure everything will be alright, he finally muses, and the line is a muse leveraged then disabused, an outgrown identity that can’t join him in heaven; he enters purgatory to save it.

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We know this parable well, though its familiarity doesn’t make it any less terrifying or cryptic: Mortal man risks everything in the service of his gifts and calling, and finds himself hallucinating demons where the poems used to be, inventing boundaries between the body and the soul that don’t exist and making them real as the devil’s interval, until he’s too paranoid to defile that broken event horizon he’s rendered of his consciousness. The narrative collapses, the soul takes refuge beneath the debris and stakes are scrambled and balked at until there are none left besides dissipation. D’Angelo almost never performed “The Line” live, because it is a requiem for a dream unraveling, an incoherent but lucid goodbye, a so long, or Drylongso. He dies in the song — I’m gonna pull it, you gon’ see, insinuates the death scene — and returns to perform it as a clairvoyant haint reenacting the future. Here is an adventure so merciless it outlives the ones who animate it, the anatomy of the narrow path carved by and as the Black American soul singer made so famous his spirit is forced out of his body and into the radio where it’s enforced as law and property, regulated, ejected from flesh, appropriated and maimed on the air, in the wind, by something so sinister we call it “winning our hearts” to endure it. He is a zombie retracing his steps under roving moonlight or stage lights, and when he asks you for directions back to himself, you cheer, like he’s a riddle you can solve by intensifying degrees of idolatry and sentimentality. He is blighted, and you delight in this for the sound his ache emits. The dazzling savior is left for dead in the middle of singing you to sleep by hologram at his own homegoing. Dismissed after he lifts you up into his position, which you cannot maintain, which you blame him for vacating as you search for clones and counterfeits, for consolation. The line collapses into barbed fences enclosing holographic scenes.

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‍Alternate Take

If you leave a station of the relay open, you risk possession by false messiahs, passing the baton to a fraud or a cop. We walk that disrupted relational pattern off a plank to upend it, and fail. “The Line” cannot be recorded or performed live before an audience because it is a posthumous revelation made in the middle of dying backwards, a voided revenge fantasy that preempts its author’s early leaving, and dilates time to incite his eternal return. He haunts us with its nonlinear circumstantial evidence. Its interminably spiraling length prevails because the wills of the men walking these parallel lines and intonations are stronger than our love for them. They destroy themselves in moments of altruism, to stop destroying and deceiving us. Another trustfall from grace for the sake of grace. Such brave duets as clones make. As an unpaved road in the decelerating future fake come true, the line is fading into rusty arrows, eros cracked with logos and the narcotic hope of abandoned daughters, for reunion, for apology, for forgiveness. The line is our territory now, we take it on and define it, cross it, cover for it, hover over it, and just like our fathers’ recording contracts read, the territory of our interminable backlash shall be the universe. We grieve their lines’ omissions because they invade us with unanswerable questions, unsingable songs, psalms at half-mast pivoting toward hostile silence — the silence behind the fine-print of tabloids or suicide notes penned by homicidal imposters, the silence of the tattoo ink on necrotic muscle in a coffin in Richmond, for thou art/with me in the valley.

By phantom firing squad, in deference to some relentless evil, the recording industry slow-killed my father, the recording industry slow-killed D’Angelo. Their souls disengage from their contracts and expand with the universe, which is what the contract’s subtle body demands. This is true obedience, a truce. Perhaps selling out would have been easier. We are left here to finish the job or avenge them, both. Admitting that they are forever young is now our cross to bear as we inhabit their afterlives as our rite of passage into true womanhood, the line between a girl ago and after they go. Heartbreak, I mean, becomes conflated with success, with self- actualization, healthy ambition. Here is an inheritance so ruthless, so devastated, so protected. Here are archetypes so deathless, disappearing, reconfiguring, as to trick us into trapping them in our lucid dreams again. Here’s an assembly line of men who made it out the mud when the mud’s purifying filth was what nourished them.

Moth-eaten mud cloths, martyrs, mothering themselves past earth, the soul singer trained in church and battle, leaves before he can be made into a relic or mechanical falcon, before he can be humiliated into making himself the line he double-crosses. Here is our geophagy, our consuming of the dirt and germ they’re cultured in to taste and discover the truth of what happened, before it submerges us too. The line is mine now, this scar tissue bracing my inherited wounds and war cries, friendship with fellow daughters of and in its limbo, the distinct feeling of being defined by what was stolen and returns to us as prophecies of an impending mercy wherein we take it all back and outwit the vindictive edge of the line only to sharpen it.

So many are left to bleed out in anonymity on that axis that when I insinuate a story onto this tradition of lining ourselves up for tender, triumphant slaughter, when I invite a deliberate narrative thread, the conspiracy is that it’s too reasonable a gesture, too obvious a malicious compliance with false fate, too American Gothic. The characters disperse, bloodline turns frontline turns spellbind turns encrypted murmurs from the center of a ritual circle, and meaning breaks free with the sound, almost. One more stutter-step over, one more threat to looking straight ahead. Here is a line so broken it borrows our skein of words to exist. If D’Angelo had performed his manifesto on the line in public, it would have catalyzed too many reenactments. We’d all enter its trance, preempt the pattern it implies, and disappear together, instead of one-by-one when we listen alone traveling back and forth between worlds to tell ourselves secrets about being sacrificed on stages, by degrees: They were 51, and 52, walking backwards blindfolded while singing to you, pleading, not yet free. I am the remains of their upward mobility and the pressure is on/from every angle. How they line us up, how they walk us through the valley we invented.