Niela Orr

In July 2021 my Uncle Bilal was dying of lymphoma. In the days before his death, our family gathered at his hospital bed to ‘keep him comfortable’. Comfort was a sponge dipped in icy water for his dry mouth – I think they’re called ‘oral care swabs’ – and loved ones in the room. A week or so earlier, so many of us wouldn’t have been allowed in; only people who were ‘actively dying’ could have more than three visitors at a time.

It’s an understatement to say that Dolly Parton, who died on Tuesday, was many things to many people. She was multifaceted in a way that few are: she was a popular, well-respected, beloved iconoclast, a true original, and she also radiated the self-referential camp of a celebrity impersonator. She operated both as a person and as an idea.

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl half-time show was a magic trick that revealed what those who refer to other people as ‘illegal aliens’ would prefer to keep hidden or otherwise misrepresented: the contributions made by people of colour to America’s national story.

The percolating instrumentation of ‘New York’, Ja Rule’s piercing 2004 posse cut, was playing on my TV, and Zohran Mamdani strolled out to deliver a rousing victory speech: ‘New York City, breathe this moment in. We have held our breath for longer than we know.’ 

D’Angelo, that Pentecostal preacher’s son, the man Robert Christgau called ‘R&B Jesus’, has died, and, with him, a way of seeing and interpreting the world has been withdrawn. Every one of his records was rapturous. There are few people with a singing voice as sensitive, as patient, as sensuous.