D’Angelo, Or: Sleeping Through the End of the World

I’ve been falling asleep to D’Angelo every night since the files were released.

Intentionally. Like medicine.

There’s something about his music that lowers my nervous system in a way nothing else quite does. The tempo, the patience, the refusal to rush. My breathing deepens and slows without me even realizing it’s happening. It’s only in the quiet that I notice how much anxiety I carry through the day—how braced my body is, how tight my chest stays, how vigilant I’ve become.

I think often about animals that are afraid of men. No one calls that an irredeemable flaw. No one tells a skittish horse or a rescued dog that their nervous system is “biased.” We understand instinctively that fear is learned through experience, that caution is a form of intelligence.

And yet, when I express not even fear but hesitancy around men—especially new ones—society gaslights me into thinking I am somehow oppressing them. As if my body’s memory is a moral failure. As if distrust is cruelty. As if survival is an accusation.

Sleep, in that context, is political.

My nervous system is always anticipating the next horror to cross my Instagram feed, the next viral cruelty, the next piece of evidence that the world is uncovering the darkest sides of itself, something I'm not quite ready for. Threads feels like a live feed of grievance. I don’t ever fully relax. I hover and scroll and brace. I try to rest and yet, my body stays on watch.

Then D’Angelo comes on.

“Untitled (How Does It Feel)” is my favorite—not because of sex, but because of safety. The song doesn’t grab. It waits without demanding something of me. It offers. His voice doesn’t crowd my body; it creates room inside it. When I fall asleep to that song, it’s the closest I come to remembering what it feels like to be unguarded.

I’ve lived my entire life under patriarchy knowing that it was bullshit architecture. A rigged system built by and for men in power. But knowing something intellectually and having it confirmed, exposed, and then detonated in real time are two very different experiences. Watching the scaffolding come down is… a lot.

I graduated high school in 2011. I grew up a young Black girl in the early 2000s, which to say the least was needlessly difficult. I struggled with depression. With disordered eating. With a body that was constantly being surveilled, evaluated, and corrected.

I remember dressing rooms vividly. The fluorescent lights. The mirrors angled just wrong. Trying to force my new curves into Abercrombie & Fitch jeans that were never designed with me in mind. I remember standing there, hot and silent tears streaming down my face, watching my reflection refuse to cooperate. It was humiliating to walk out of a store eager and empty-handed, clutching nothing but shame. At the time, I thought my body was the problem. Now I understand the design was.

To learn later that so much of that harm was manufactured and strategically produced to benefit men in power, sometimes it feels like too much for my brain to metabolize. The grief doesn’t arrive neatly. It arrives in my body in waves. Especially at night.

And in the last ten years, the manosphere hasn’t faded—it’s metastasized.

I remember hearing the term “red pill” for the first time in 2015 in an upper-level sociology class. Even then, I was wary. It carried the stench of something reactionary, something invested in restoring dominance under the guise of “truth.” Now that rhetoric saturates everyday life. It’s in algorithms, comment sections, dating culture, and political discourse. It shapes how men talk to women, how boys learn to see girls, how violence is rationalized.

I don’t know a single woman or queer person who hasn’t been impacted by it—through fear, through exhaustion, through self-doubt, through direct harm. It’s intimate. It shows up in our nervous systems.

Against that backdrop, I find myself returning to D’Angelo at night, and I keep asking the same question.

I identify as a lesbian—just as Audre Lorde did. I consider her an ancestor. My erotic life, my romantic imagination, my sense of self are not oriented toward men. So why am I so drawn to his music?

The answer has nothing to do with sexual attraction—though I won’t pretend he isn’t a beautiful man. It has everything to do with reverence.

Audre Lorde taught us that the erotic is not about sex; it is about aliveness and depth of feeling. Being present. About the full inhabiting of oneself and one’s connections. By that definition, D’Angelo’s music is profoundly erotic—not because it desires women, but because it honors them.

He worships women.

Not in the hollow, pedestal-building way that still centers male fantasy, but in a way that feels mutual, grounded, relational. His music is a dance of partnership. Listening to it, I don’t feel consumed or claimed. I feel met. His songs move with women, not over us. They assume our subjectivity. They trust our interior worlds.

In today’s language, the manosphere would probably call him a “simp”. I genuinely don’t know how far his career would go if he emerged now, in an era so hostile to men who love women openly, gently, without irony. There is a tenderness in his work that feels almost anachronistic—like proof from a different timeline.

And that’s exactly why it heals me.

I believe that some artists are time travelers. Not prophets. Maybe griots. Artists who somehow step outside the narrow confines of their moment and create work that lands where it’s needed later. D’Angelo feels like that to me. So does Keep Ya Head Up.

There is something almost unbearable about realizing that, in semi-recent history, men existed in the public imagination who could look directly at women—especially Black women—and say, I see you. I honor you. You matter. Not perfectly or without contradiction. But sincerely.

Going to sleep knowing that is stabilizing. It reminds me that masculinity did not always have to be built on resentment, domination, or grievance. Tenderness once had a place in the mainstream. That reverence is not imaginary.

So I let D’Angelo play while I sleep. I let his voice remind my body that partnership is real. That love without conquest has existed. In a moment where so much feels hostile and unrelenting, that reminder is enough to carry me into rest.

To my younger selves—and to all the younger selves of Black American women who learned too early to brace, to shrink, to doubt their own bodies and instincts—I want to say this: there are places of reprieve. Sometimes they come through sound. Sometimes through memory. Sometimes through a man who loved women well enough to leave behind a record of it.

Tonight, if you can, try listening before bed. Just once. See if your breathing slows. See if your shoulders drop. See if your body remembers something it was taught to forget.

Grief is heavy, but rest is still possible. And for now, that steadiness is enough.