My Ghost Vapes

“From where?” Richmond, that’s where

In 1995 and 1996, two kids from this city put out debut albums that New York had to take seriously.

, 4 minute read

In the mid-90s, hip hop and R&B had two addresses. New York and Los Angeles. If you were from anywhere else, the first thing anyone asked was where.

Richmond answered that question twice in about twelve months.

Southside, 1974

Michael Archer was born on Southside in February 1974. His father was a Pentecostal preacher, and the story goes that he was picking out songs on the piano at home when he was three. He grew up playing in church.

As a teenager he was in a local group called Precise. In 1991 they went up to Harlem for Amateur Night at the Apollo, the toughest crowd in American music, and won three times in a row. He left school and moved to New York not long after.

In July 1995, as D’Angelo, he released Brown Sugar. It went platinum. People were calling it the start of something new before the year was out, because it sounded like church, 70s soul and hip hop drums all at once, played by one guy from Richmond who was barely old enough to drink.

The first time I heard Brown Sugar was the summer before I started fifth grade at Jacob L. Adams Elementary on Laburnum Avenue. I wasn’t a regular at Skateland on Williamsburg Road yet, but that was the summer I started going every now and then, and that’s where I heard it.

I was a little lover boy who grew up on R&B, but the soul in Brown Sugar was different from your Boyz II Men and your Jodeci. It was grittier and more primal. That closed hi-hat and snare over a funky bass line sounds like making out in a dark washroom. These days it reminds me of movies like Belly, for some reason. Turns out there is a reason. His song “Devil’s Pie” was on the Belly soundtrack in 1998, before it ever showed up on Voodoo.

He didn’t really claim Richmond out loud back then. As far as I ever saw, he didn’t talk about it on a big platform or in his music until the late 2000s and into the 2010s. Around 2009, word got out that the album he was working on was going to be called James River. But we knew long before that. Everybody knew.

The question mark album

Skillz was born in Detroit, spent part of his childhood in North Carolina, and came up as a rapper in Richmond. In 1996 Atlantic Records put out his debut, and he named it after the question he kept getting: From Where???

That title is the whole chip on this city’s shoulder in two words and three question marks. He went on to write for other people and to make the yearly Rap Up a tradition, and he has taught a hip hop course at the University of Richmond.

Why it matters to me

A few years after those two records, Virginia was everywhere. Missy Elliott, Timbaland, the Neptunes and Clipse all came out of Hampton Roads. But in 1995 and 1996 there was no Virginia sound to point to. There were two guys from Richmond and a question.

D’Angelo died on October 14, 2025. He was 51. He made three albums in thirty years, and every one of them changed what the people around him thought was possible.

Richmond, and Central Virginia in general, gets overlooked a lot. D.C. is on one side of us and Tidewater is on the other, and both of them overshadow us. But there is so much talent, culture and soul here. He said so himself. On stage in Brooklyn in 2014, asked about the musicians back home, he said, “It’s like mad talent down there.”

So when one of ours gets recognized across the whole country, we notice, and we celebrate them.

Richmond is throwing him a show

This year the Richmond Folk Festival built a tribute into its lineup. It is called Soul of the City: Richmond Celebrates D’Angelo, and it is a ninety-minute celebration of him put on by Richmond musicians. That link has the full list of who is playing.

It is Saturday, October 10 at 5 p.m., on the Center for Cultural Vibrancy Stage at the Allianz Amphitheater on the riverfront. The festival runs October 9 through 11 and all of it is free.

One heads up if you go: the amphitheater does not allow lawn chairs and has a clear bag policy.

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