FEATURE:
The Root
D’Angelo’s Voodoo at Twenty-Five
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ONE of the first classic albums…
of the twenty-first century arrived on 25th January, 2000. A new millennium welcomed in different sounds and scenes. 2000 was a remarkable year for music. Perhaps the finest album from that year came from D’Angelo. His second studio album, Voddoo, was a commercial and critical success. A number one in the U.S., in 2001, Voodoo won a Grammy Award for Best R&B Album at the 43rd Grammy Awards. D'Angelo recorded the album between 1997 and 1999 at the legendary Electric Lady Studios in New York City. Voodoo features is defined by a looser, groove-focused Funk sound. It is a bit of a change from his 1995 debut album, Brown Sugar. An astonishing and deep album whose lyrics explore themes of spirituality, love, sexuality, maturation, and fatherhood. I want to come to a few features about Voodoo prior to ending with some reviews. In 2020, to mark twenty years of a classic, NPR spoke with engineer Russell Elevado about making Voodoo sound timeless:
“Black radio was changing quickly at the end of the 1990s, as artists like Jill Scott, Maxwell and Lauryn Hill melded R&B with slick hip-hop production and a coffee-shop poetry-night sheen. But D'Angelo had spent the past few years indoors, away from the vanguard. As part of The Soulquarians, a collective that also included superstar drummer Questlove, keyboardist James Poyser and heady, trippy producer J Dilla, he had logged countless hours holed up in Greenwich Village's Electric Lady studios, whose vintage equipment had previously helped artists like Stevie Wonder, The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix make their masterpieces. As Nate Chinen of NPR's Jazz Night in America described in The New York Times, The Soulquarians were in their own world — jamming out to old Prince and Stevie bootlegs, transporting themselves and the music they made there to the past, not the future.
Russell Elevado was there, too. A rising producer and engineer, Elevado had been tapped a few years earlier to finish mixing D'Angelo's 1995 debut, Brown Sugar, after the original engineer left the project. As he got to know the artist, he introduced him to his favorite '60s and '70s rock records and grittier, more stylized production methods, and the two began enthusiastically plotting their next venture together.
"I grew up on classic rock and soul — like, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, that's really where my roots are," Elevado says. "My whole concept was, hey, people are sampling these records. I can create those sounds — using the microphones they were using, using the consoles they were using, the same techniques — and make it our own thing organically."
Elevado recorded and mixed Voodoo with D'Angelo and his band over the course of three years, going to great lengths to ensure everything about the album and all its influences melded seamlessly. When it finally arrived in 2000, it came as a stealth throwback at a moment when R&B and soul felt caught up in something new. But while many today think of it as a masterpiece, it seems we still haven't figured out how to make sense of Voodoo: what box to place it in, how to pay it the respect it deserves, all the nuance and depth of a young black artist making a previous generation's black music.
Voodoo is so many things. It is jazz, soul and funk all at once. You can hear hip-hop's footprint in some of the songs, but it never dominates. While the influence of Prince and Funkadelic and Marvin Gaye is there on every track, it draws just as much inspiration from Hendrix and The Beatles. And for the artist, it was such an important statement that he waited nearly 15 years to follow it up. If it took time to see that Voodoo didn't live in the same music world as its peers in 2000, by now it has stopped feeling vintage — and started feeling timeless. I spoke with Russell Elevado about what it took to make Voodoo sound the way it does, and the legacy it maintains on its 20th birthday.
Sam Sanders: You had been working in studios for over a decade when you were hired to engineer Voodoo, but it took a while for you to move into R&B and soul. Why do you think those artists eventually started to notice you?
Russell Elevado: When I first started engineering I was doing a lot of house music, with Frankie Knuckles and David Morales. I first started getting my feet wet with that, and doing hip-hop remixes with this producer Clark Kent. From there, more R&B people started recognizing what I was doing, and I started going through the R&B circuit.
Later on, I realized how much it was like the work I was doing on house music. Because the bass has to be right. And the kick drum should have its own presence to not get in the way of the bass. Striving to get that in my early part of my career, think I intuitively started to know how to make the bass pump without being too large, and get the impact of the drums. House music is all about the bass and drums, and I guess that filters into everything else I did.
When did D'Angelo come into your orbit, and how?
I had been working on an album for Angie Stone, who was managed by the same manager as D'Angelo, Kedar Massenburg; he also managed Erykah Badu at the time. They were looking for another engineer to finish Brown Sugar. He'd heard what I was doing, saw my mixes were sounding good. He played me the songs that were finished so far, and I was like, "Yeah, get me on this album. I'll do whatever — I love it." So he introduced me to D'Angelo.
How was that first meeting?
When we met, he introduced himself as Michael — and I thought this was just Angie's boyfriend. They were dating at the time, and he was coming in to visit Angie a lot.
Do you think it's fair to call Voodoo a neo-soul album?
No, I don't think so. Brown Sugar, I would call neo-soul. Voodoo, I think, stands on its own: It's really a soul and funk album, versus an R&B album. I consider it like how we would call a soul album back in the day, like Sly Stone, or even Sam Cooke. And I'm starting to recognize over the years that there's a lot of fusion on that album, too, where we were fusing a lot of rock elements.
Which songs? Give me an example.
"The Root" has sort of a Jimi Hendrix guitar lick, but it also reminds you of Curtis Mayfield — so, blending this psychedelic rock thing on top of funk-soul. "Playa Playa" is another good example: It's really funky, but there's a lot of these psychedelic elements. It was kind of like he was schooling me on a lot of funk music, and I was schooling him more on the rock side.
What kind of rock were you showing him?
Like, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles. Because he grew up in a black community and was not exposed to a lot of quote-unquote "white music," which would have been rock or pop. He knew "Purple Haze," but he had no idea. Once he got it, it was like an epiphany: "Wow, I can't believe it — everybody was influenced by Jimi Hendrix." Prince was heavily influenced by Hendrix. Even Sly Stone, and especially Funkadelic and Parliament, they were all about Jimi, and if anything they were continuing what Jimi was doing after he died.
What song on Voodoo has the most spirit of Jimi in it?
I would have to say "The Root" — and in fact, that song grew out of a Hendrix jam at Electric Lady. It was Charlie Hunter and Questlove and D'Angelo, and they had just covered two or three Hendrix tunes: I think they played the actual song "Electric Ladyland," and maybe "Castles Made of Sand," something from Axis. "The Root" came from those jams, for sure”.
I want to move on to a brilliant and in-depth feature from Stereogum. Published in 2020, it argues that Voodoo is possibly the greatest album of the twenty-first century. A bold claim, but one that is backed up by real detail and passion:
“Twenty years after its release Voodoo remains the greatest album-length synthesis of hip-hop and R&B ever made, as well as a work saddled with one of music’s more fraught and complicated legacies. Voodoo sold 320,000 copies in its first week of release and debuted at #1, a startling feat for a dense and challenging work from an artist who’d released one previous studio LP that hadn’t cracked the top 20 and was nearly five years old. (It’s hard to believe, but five years actually once felt like a really long time to wait for a new D’Angelo album.) There are a number of reasons for this — Virgin promoted the hell out of it; D’s fans were cultishly devoted and ravenous for new stuff — but the biggest was probably “Untitled (How Does It Feel?),” a song that had first appeared in October of 1999 as the B-side to “Left & Right” and had been officially released as a single on the auspicious date of January 1, 2000.
D’Angelo’s physique did not naturally look like that — no one’s does — and was the result of prolonged work with a personal trainer in the run-up to Voodoo’s release. Touring life is unconducive to such regimens; Questlove recalled that D would sometimes postpone shows in order to frantically do stomach crunches. Delays and cancellations abounded, until D’Angelo retired from the road and public life for over a decade, turning a man who was briefly pop music’s greatest sex symbol into its most mysterious and, at times, troubled recluse.
It’s worth emphasizing here that “Untitled” is an incredible recording and performance, a slow-burning ballad that channels a tradition running from Ray Charles to James Brown to Al Green to Prince. Since his emergence as a prodigy out of Richmond in the mid 1990s, D’Angelo had been seen as one of the leading lights of the movement/subgenre dubbed “neo-soul,” and for much of his early career, he didn’t shy away from this. He was an obvious student of musical history, and his renown as a singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist invited obvious comparisons to Stevie Wonder and Prince. He’d covered Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin'” on his debut, Brown Sugar, and had taken on Marvin Gaye, Eddie Kendricks, Howard Tate, and Prince himself on various soundtrack albums and compilations. In early 2000, “Untitled” seemed to fit snugly within this lineage, provided you ignored its subtle hints of refusal: the false start; the cut-the-tape ending; the very title itself.
As anyone who bought Voodoo in January of 2000 can tell you, it took only a few moments into the album to realize that “Untitled” was far more outlier than forerunner. Voodoo has sometimes been described as the apotheosis of the neo-soul movement, a superlative that strikes me as entirely wrong. It was an utter break from that movement, a resignation letter that doubled as a prophecy. If neo-soul had been a back-to-roots movement that largely stemmed from the too-slick production and performance styles of much of mainstream 1990s R&B, Voodoo was something else entirely, the sound of an artist grabbing an entire, illustrious tradition of American music and declaring, “Now we’re going here.”
In fact, “Untitled” itself had been something of a false “beginning.” Voodoo’s actual first single, released well over a year before the album came out, was a far better indicator of what D’Angelo had in store, had anyone bothered to notice. First released on the soundtrack to Belly, the DJ Premier-produced “Devil’s Pie” was a rattling and pummeling work of profane, gospel-inflected boom-bap, like Curtis Mayfield’s “(Don’t Worry) If There’s Hell Below, We’re All Gonna Go” reimagined through an MPC powered by pure premillennial dread. “Fuck the slice, want the pie/ Why ask why, till we fry” were the song’s opening lyrics, half-spit, half-slurred by a multi-tracked D’Angelo, his voice split between registers, teetering on atonality.
There had been nothing on Brown Sugar like this; the apocalyptic imagery, the sonic abrasiveness, Premier’s signature cuts and scratches on the bridge. “Devil’s Pie” was an audacious and completely extraordinary piece of music; it was also a flop. An almost violent departure from his prior work that was buried on a soundtrack to a movie that bombed, promoting an allegedly forthcoming album that wouldn’t arrive for 15 more months, the song evaporated into the void until it resurfaced as Voodoo’s second track.
Still, in retrospect “Devil’s Pie,” much more than “Untitled,” was the harbinger of Voodoo. The album opens with the ambient and foggy murmurings of a crowd, recalling the beginnings of soul classics like “We’re A Winner” and “What’s Going On” but augmented by the sound of a drum, distinctly ritual in character. As musicologist Loren Kajikawa notes, the sound connotes the album’s title, “suggesting that some mystical power is being invoked, a power that will be made manifest as the introduction gives way to D’Angelo and his band.” After about 15 seconds these mysterious, beguiling sounds — which will recur periodically throughout the album — bleed into Voodoo’s first track, “Playa Playa.” The song begins in spare and atmospheric fashion, as a slowly repeating, three-note riff is increasingly augmented by light drums, finger snaps, backwards cymbals, bass, ever-growing layers of vocal, guitar, keys.
The opening minute or so of “Playa Playa” is a rhythmic mission statement for the rest of the album to follow: flamboyantly unhurried, irrefutably funky but also distinctly off-kilter, the constituent parts never completely lining up and instead creating an ever-creeping, hypnotic soundscape of uneven strokes, microscopic archipelagos of sound and space bound by slink and slippage. For a group of people to play like this, at this tempo, for any prolonged period of time is almost impossibly difficult, and requires a virtuosity that both entails and exceeds the mastery of practice and technique and history. Musicians — particularly those who ply their trade in rhythm sections — often speak in vaguely mystical tones of the concept of “feel,” a word that collapses the individual and group into a particular sort of sensual experience that underlies (in my opinion, at least) music-making in its highest form, and R&B music in particular.
This particular feel that we hear at the outset (and throughout) “Playa Playa” — which, despite the paragraph above, is entirely indescribable, but you absolutely know it as soon as you hear it — is the defining sound of Voodoo, heard on tracks like “The Line,” “One Mo ‘Gin,” “The Root,” “Greatdayindamornin’,” and elsewhere. The musical brain trust around Voodoo was a loosely-knit collective known as the Soulquarians. Founded by Questlove, D’Angelo, keyboardist James Poyser, and hip-hop production maestro J Dilla, the Soulquarians soon included Welsh bassist Pino Palladino and jazz trumpeter Roy Hargrove. Throw in guitar virtuoso Charlie Hunter on several tracks and Voodoo featured some of the best players of their generation doing some of the finest work of their careers.
And yet the skeleton key to Voodoo’s rhythmic magic is Dilla, whose influence over the album is massive even if he’s never credited as a producer. In his great book Playing Changes, Nate Chinen writes that “[e]ach of the principal musicians on Voodoo traces this revolution in rhythm back to J Dilla.” Questlove in particular has repeatedly invoked Dilla, telling writer Jason King, “The thing that really attracted me to D’Angelo’s music was this inebriated execution thing that he had, which we both got from J Dilla.” Dilla, who passed away in 2006, was one of the great musical geniuses of hip-hop, a producer whose brilliant ear for sampling coupled with his stubborn refusal to use quantization — a tool that allows beatmakers to snap their sounds into “proper” rhythmic place at the push of a button — led to one of the most unique and influential sensibilities in modern music, forging digital worlds that were nonetheless shot through with tactile intimacy and idiosyncratic humanity.
The sound of Voodoo is the sound of some of the world’s finest instrumentalists setting out to replicate the sound of deliberate glitch and willful technological misuse, a virtuoso rhythm section in Questlove and Palladino whose point of spiritual departure was a sample-based musician who programmed like a percussionist in some altered state. (In a 2013 Red Bull Music Academy interview, Questlove recalled hearing Dilla for the first time as “the most life-changing moment I ever had… It sounded like the kick drum was played by a drunk three-year-old.”) That sound is, in many ways, the collision of the two centuries, an intoxicating mobius strip of analog into digital into analog, human into machine and back, round and round and back again”.
I am going to end with a couple of reviews. The first is from 2015 and is by The Line of Best Fit. Reviewing the reissued edition of Voodoo, it is a towering album that still has this incredible power and genius. One of the greatest albums of all time, if you have never heard it, I would advise you to do so now:
“D’Angelo made those comments some time in 2000, when he was promoting what we now know to be his magnum opus, Voodoo (recently given a long-overdue vinyl reissue). The lay-off of five years between that record and its predecessor, 1995’s Brown Sugar, looks positively paltry in retrospect, set against the fourteen years the world was made to wait for the album that was originally known as James River and would eventually become the fiery Black Messiah. If ever the term ‘rush-release’ has been used with scything irony, it was in relation to D’Angelo’s decision to drop that third LP in the no-man’s-land of mid-December - in response to ongoing racial unrest in America - rather than stick with the already-slated date of early 2015.
There’s certainly no shortage of entirely feasible explanations for those wilderness years that followed Voodoo; disillusionment with the music industry, drug and alcohol issues and D’Angelo’s well-documented track record of perfectionism to a fault are all amongst them. The question of whether the passage of more time than his two-year tour for Brown Sugar constituted was necessary for the thematic material that makes up Voodoo itself, though, is another matter entirely, and one worth saving for a little later; after all, this album’s strength lies primarily - but by no means exclusively - in the sheer virtuosity of the musicianship on show.
D’Angelo is a man of prodigious talent, and on Brown Sugar, he demonstrated as such; he recorded the vast majority of the instrumentation himself, sprinkled in clever guitar licks and smartly considered orchestral flourishes with a wisdom beyond his years, and applied real intelligence in keeping the entire piece so unremittingly economical. Accordingly, the album is a study in restraint and minimalism, but there was perhaps always the sneaking feeling that he might have been underselling himself. Sure, that approach was far preferable to him throwing everything he could at the record for the sake of it - bringing in every possible big-hitting guest, attaching bells and whistles to every aspect of his instrumental repertoire, and putting his inimitable falsetto very much front and centre - but at the same time, Brown Sugar felt in some respects as if it only represented the tip of the man’s talent.
And so, on Voodoo, it would prove. This is a record that has few, if any, points of genuinely valid comparison. Brown Sugar was easy enough to pick apart; R&B with flecks of soul, jazz and hip hop. Voodoo is a different beast entirely. It by no means does away with those points of genre reference; instead, it expands upon them tenfold. Across thirteen tracks, the complexity of the stylistic construction takes the breath away. This is no longer an R&B record with nods to other genres; D’Angelo brings in his soul influences wholesale, pitching the album halfway between them and something else entirely, something that, in many ways, provides the genuine lifeblood of the record - funk.
On “The Line” or “Chicken Grease”, you’ve got a veritable chorus of D’Angelos singing at you - these multi-layered, harmonic vocals, a new development post-Brown Sugar, seem to have held the key all along to him having uncovered his true soul man. In anybody else’s hands, you suspect that this kind of delivery wouldn’t work when set against an instrumental backdrop concerned mainly with groove and texture, but it comes off spectacularly. The ultimate result is that whilst D’Angelo sounded aggressively focused on Brown Sugar, he absolutely strolls through Voodoo. More than that, he positively swaggers; this was one of the last huge records of the pre-digital era, of a time when artists on majors could take as long as they needed to find their stride - the confidence that oozes out of every proverbial pore here suggests D’Angelo did just that.
After making Brown Sugar with limited outside involvement - especially surprising in terms of the lack of collaborations, which were staples of the R&B genre at the time - he was more open to the idea on Voodoo, especially given that both Common’s Like Water for Chocolate and Erykah Badu’s Mama Gun were being recorded at Electric Lady in New York at the same time. A loosely collaborative atmosphere ensued at the studio, with Questlove - on production duty on both Common and Badu’s albums - quickly taking his rightful place behind the kit on most of Voodoo. Those three records would quickly come to form the crux of the finest output from the Soulquarians, the soul and hip hop movement that counted those artists as members alongside the likes of Mos Def, Q-Tip and the late J Dilla.
When D’Angelo gave a lecture at the Red Bull Music Academy last year, he said, “I never claimed I do neo-soul. I always said I do black music.” His more relaxed attitude to the idea of working with his peers held the key to the complex, intelligent and ultimately, more visible way in which he referenced his black influences on Voodoo (funnily enough, the biggest obstacle faced early on in sessions for album number three was that he wanted to go back to doing everything himself, an indicator of his ongoing fixation with Prince.) “Left & Right”, with a well-judged guest turn from Method Man and Redman, didn’t just nod to hip hop - it incorporated it. "Devil’s Pie" chops up no fewer than six samples from the likes of Fat Joe, Raekwon and Teddy Pendergrass; having master sampler DJ Premier behind the desk on that track couldn’t have hurt, either. The verses on “One Mo’gin”, meanwhile, are straight-up delta blues, and whilst he’d tackled a quiet storm-style blues cover before with “Cruisin’”, his take on Roberta Flack’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love” has been moulded unmistakably into his own style - in fact, it was originally intended as another collaborative effort, with Lauryn Hill, in the early stages of production.
Questlove told Spin that the fluid nature of the album’s personnel made Voodoo’s recording sessions feel like “a left-of-center black music renaissance”; you kind of get the impression that it wasn’t until years later that those involved realised the degree to which they’d captured lightning in a bottle. This was a special kind of alchemy in instrumental terms. Questlove, on drums, worked with Dilla to put together programmed rhythm tracks that, by design, couldn’t be distinguished from a live kit; in one of the record’s many ingenious instrumental turns, they would deliberately fuck with the inch-perfect programmed tracks to lend them a human feel, resulting in the languid - almost sloppy - percussion that stands up as one of Voodoo’s hallmarks. Another of those is Pino Palladino’s contribution; his basslines are of monstrous importance to the album’s sound, particularly on “Devil’s Pie” and during the so-called “virtuoso part of the record” - Questlove again - that comprises “The Root”, “Spanish Joint” and “Greatdayindamornin”. All three were recorded totally live and are riddled with the kind of elaborate twists and turns that you can get totally lost in - however many times you hear them, you always come out the other side feeling like you’ve picked up on something new. Of particular note on that hat-trick are Charlie Hunter’s smartly considered guitar lines, as well as D’Angelo’s gravitation towards Latin jazz on “Spanish Joint”.
In 2015, with the benefit of hindsight on Voodoo and Black Messiah, there’s no question that D’Angelo is a genuine intellectual; his take on America’s recent civil unrest along racial lines on the latter record, for example, was clearly born of both deep thought and real soul. Listen to Brown Sugar, though, and the themes feel relatively rudimentary; a bunch of love songs in a classic style. Voodoo saw a wholesale expansion in conceptual terms; lyrically, he ruminates upon faith with real depth, as well as studying maturity (“Send It On”), psychological challenges (“The Line”) and, quite prominently, his then-recent entry into fatherhood - closer “Africa” deals both with that and his heritage in general. On top of that, he cherry-picks ideas from his favourite genres to suit both his own tastes and the album’s cerebral approach; “Playa Playa”, for instance, embraces the traditional competitiveness of hip hop, but “Devil’s Pie” is an out-and-out dismissal of its obsession with material wealth. The fact that the lyrics are actually difficult to discern on first listen for the most part, thanks to the heavy, Let’s Get It On style vocal multi-tracking, is one of many excuses to less give Voodoo repeat listens than approach it with the same meticulous ear for detail that D’Angelo himself lent to it in the studio.
And then, of course, there’s the penultimate track, and his most famous. “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” is ultimately better-known in the popular imagination for extracurricular reasons; the video, which features nothing but an apparently nude and by no means gym-shy D’Angelo against a black background, turned him into an unlikely - and reluctant - sex symbol. Both the track and the video utilise a sledgehammer touch that contrasts jarringly with the album’s otherwise largely subtle approach to sexuality, and the ensuing attention at live shows - with feverish female fans packing shows more in the hope that he’d flaunt his torso than deliver a musical tour-de-force - was a major factor in forcing D’Angelo into the reclusion - and substance abuse - that kept LP number three on the back burner for so long. That shouldn’t, though, detract from the quality of the song itself; if you’re going to shoot for unabashed sensuality, at least do it like this. Prince, again, apparently provided the inspirational blueprint for “Untitled”, but Gaye, White, Wonder and Summer are all in spiritual attendance, too, in a manner that made the likes of Boyz II Men and Ginuwine sound trite by way of comparison. “Untitled” was released as a single on January 1st, 2000. The next millennia of R&B songwriters have plenty of time to top it, but I still wouldn’t hold my breath; it’s hard to imagine anybody absolutely nailing sensuality like D’Angelo did with this cut. It’s brazen, but still nuanced.
Like the reissue of Brown Sugar, this new press of Voodoo isn’t a remaster, and again, why would it be? It often feels as if D’Angelo was walking a bit of a tightrope by making the album so unrelentingly complex - there are so many deft touches, and so much going on at all times, that to go back and tamper with either the mix or the masters would surely detract from what makes Voodoo truly great. It’s an album scored through with tiny intricacies; the little instrumental turns of phrase and carefully woven textures make this a masterful construction project, but the scarcely-there spoken word snippets that wax and wane in and out of the intros and outros mean that it’s a human one - you can feel Electric Lady circa 1999 living and breathing on this LP. It is at once both intimate and monolithic. In terms of twenty-first century soul, R&B and funk - even blues - it is utterly without compare”.
I am going to end things there I think. You can read more about the album here. The accolades it received Ahead of its twenty-fifth anniversary on 25th January, I wanted to spend some time with D’Angelo’s staggering second studio album. It still sounds fresh to this day. One that artists should be listening to. It has doubtless inspired many, though it is hard to point at an artist today that reminds you of D’Angelo. His latest studio album, 2014’s Black Messiah, is another masterpiece. Let’s hope we get more material from him soon. This amazing artist is in a league of his own! After the brilliant Brown Sugar in 1995, D’Angelo took another big step and created…
A timeless work of brilliance.