“1000 Deaths” folds the old adage about cowards and soldiers into a word about guns, fear and desperation, and contains a message similar to the By Any Means Necessary speech from 1964 by Malcom X. The track should be interpreted as *Black Messiah’s context. The album was supposed to be released in 2015, but after the unarmed Michael Brown got shot by a police officer in Ferguson, D'Angelo decided he couldn’t just stand and watch. He and his label RCA Records spent a month working many all-nighters to be able to finish the album as soon as possible.

According to the 2019 documentary Devil’s Pie,, D'Angelo also wrote “1000 Deaths” as a direct response to the fan hysteria over his infamous music video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” which became larger-than-life and turned him into a sex symbol instead of the visionary, once-in-a-generation musician he and his peers saw him as.