Album Anniversaries: 20 Years of D’Angelo’s Genre Changing 'Voodoo'

With his release of Voodoo, the pinnacle of neo-soul, D’Angelo changed not only his life but the fate of R&B.

In Album Anniversaries, writers honor their favorite aging albums and their subsequent legacies, revealing which projects have stood the test of time.

Written by Dylan Keesee

Stemming from the neo-soul era, alongside the likes of Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun and Common’s Like Water For Chocolate, D’Angelo’s sophomore album was a push away from the mainstream R&B of the late ‘90s. With Voodoo, he hoped to make a return to the roots of soul, funk, and jazz, but also infuse modern hip-hop and R&B. The result was an effective homage and reintroduction of the genres into modern music.

Within the first 20 seconds of “Playa Playa,” the first song on the album, it’s evident he reached his goal; the funk guitar softly comes in and plays two notes as snaps keep the beat. D’Angelo’s layered mumblings soon enter the song and the trumpet sounds out, letting the listener know that those old genres are back in a way that has never been heard before. The album progresses seamlessly, moving from the first song to the commercially marketed Method Man and Redman collaboration, “Left to Right,” to D’Angelo’s more well-known hit “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” D’Angelo’s groove remains consistent throughout all 12 songs and sets the perfect backdrop for classic soul themes: love, spirituality, and growth.

Voodoo was set apart from other albums by D’Angelo’s ability to make the project sound imperfectly perfect. Someone listening to the album for the first time may find it difficult to focus on just one aspect of a song — the guitar lays down a groove while the bass slaps at the same volume. D’Angelo’s lyrics are muddled by his own falsetto voices that are layered on top of each other. While, admittedly, it sounds like something a SoundCloud rapper would do on accident, the effect is deliberate and creates songs that are full of human emotion and meant to be taken in as a whole. This unorthodox mixing highlights the use of live drums, bass, and guitar during the recording sessions that lend their organic sound to the project and break away from the electric drums and artificial instruments popular at the time. Questlove, who is credited with co-writing a few songs on the album, said that most of the songs were done with live instruments, away from computers, but when it had to be done, they would “deliberately insert the little glitch that makes it sound messed up.”

The result is an album that plays perfectly from front to back and elicits emotions regardless if the lyrics are understood or not — something that can be found lacking in a lot of today’s mainstream R&B. For example, both Drake and Trey Songz make perfectly fine music, but all their tracks are missing feeling. Each song is put through a formula for radio hits, overly produced using software that can automatically mix a song, and put out into the world sounding just like every other song they have released.

In the more alternative R&B scene, however, D’Angelo’s influence is still greatly evident. Many big names of today have cited Voodoo as an inspiration. Solange credits it as “the church in which we all come to worship the religion of soul music.” Janelle Monáe said the album inspired her to always bring in live instrumentation on her albums, and Thundercat believes that without the album he would not have learned how to step up as a bass player. Other artists have an even more direct connection to Voodoo: Daniel Caesar mimics the start of “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” on his song “Japanese Denim” and Noname raps who “Somebody hit D’Angelo, I think I need him on this one” during the seemingly Voodoo influenced “Don’t Forget About Me.”

With so much influence on today’s biggest artists, it seems amiss that Voodoo does not have more recognition. This can be largely attributed to the fact that D’Angelo only has three albums despite his first being released in 1995. After Voodoo, he took more than a decade long break before releasing his next album, Black Messiah, because of the detrimental impact Voodoo’s marketing had on him, even though it was critically acclaimed and won best R&B album at the 43rd Grammy Awards.

Looking at the shirtless album cover or even at his overtly sexual hit music video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” there is no indication that D’Angelo is the son of a Pentecostal preacher. Though, to those who knew him, this was all too obvious. D’Angelo, who had to train for months to obtain the body present in the music video, was, as his previous manager Dominique Trenier put it, “a real musician who wears glasses and plays video games.” This wasn’t to discredit him, but rather to illustrate how uncomfortable he was filming a music video that featured him completely naked.

The goal was to make a video that would turn D’Angelo into a sex symbol to promote Voodoo for the record label. It worked, but almost too well. During his Voodoo tour, D’Angelo faced many screaming fans who would hear one song and then scream at him to take his clothes off. Clearly feeling discounted musically, the singer would “get angry and start breaking shit,” according to Questlove.

Even just the idea of being seen as a sex symbol was distressing to D’Angelo. Suddenly the music he made with gospel-tinged vocals was now being consumed lustfully, conflicting with his religious convictions. The music that he made was no longer his; his songs and melodies were just something that added to his sex appeal. This culminated in a serious substance abuse problem for the singer and found him unmotivated and on a dark path, at one point resulting in a DUI. D’Angelo eventually recovered, however, and found himself back in the studio recording for his next album.

Although the impact of Voodoo has been felt for 20 years and continues to be felt, it’s worth noting the amount of distress it caused D’Angelo. Seen as a masterpiece by many, the album can act both as inspiration and as a cautionary tale for self-image control.

ANALYSISAfterglow ATXJanuary 23, 2020