D'Angelo

Side A – Intro: Devil's Pie

Writer's block is a nasty beast, especially for those who, by nature, dwell in that sensitive middle ground between brilliant ambition and debilitating insecurity. One moment you feel on top of the world, the next you find yourself face down in the wet ground. In music, few have known this better than Michael Eugene Archer, aka D'Angelo, a true son of a preacher man from Virginia, who at just twenty-one had already released "Brown Sugar" (1995), the debut album that crowned him a champion of alternative soul in the Nineties. A brooding yet imaginative songwriter, romantic and fierce beneath leather coats and Timberland boots, as well as a polished multi-instrumentalist and a phenomenal vocalist, D'Angelo is every good-music lover's dream – on stage, every song becomes an adventure, the fruit of years spent singing gospel, listening to jazz, and building a natural rapport with his fellow musicians. It's practically destiny, really: the Black community is loudly demanding a new hero, and the music industry wants to cash in on the next sweet-eyed heartthrob.

But by the end of the tour supporting "Brown Sugar", D'Angelo is wrecked; that pace just isn't for him, and being treated like a number goes against every fiber of his being, especially when he thinks of all those ancestors who, on America's bitter soil, shed blood and sweat only to get back, at best, some trinket of false emancipation – something he himself calls the "devil's pie." That's partly why the first song he writes for the new album is so loaded with meaning and so snarling in sound, squeezed on both sides by viscous digital cascades, cymbal scratches, and funky horns lifted straight from hip-hop – in short, "Devil's Pie":

Fuck the slice we want the pie

Why ask why till we fry

Watch us all stand in line

For a slice of the devil’s pie

Drugs and thugs, women, wine

Three or four at a time

Watch them all stand in line

For a slice of the devil’s pie 

Side B – Mens sana in corpore sano

His name is William "Kedar" Massenburg, a record executive heading up Motown, but for D'Angelo he's more like a second father, since his oversight goes well beyond the strictly musical. To manage an artist, you first have to give him the right environment; aware that he has a particularly sensitive soul on his hands, Kedar applies the theory of infinite patience, giving D'Angelo all the time he needs to reconnect with the part of himself lost during his first run through the record industry. These are the years his first two children are born, Michael Jr in 1998, from his relationship with Angie Stone, and Iman in 1999, with a woman who remains unnamed to this day — clearly, these are also years of great passions and free love, but for D'Angelo fatherhood is an immediate source of pride and inspiration, the spark that lights the fire to create.

Rounding it all out is a tight-knit web of people with kindred human and artistic intentions, who bring him back to the piano and then, through conversation and the occasional joint, launch him back into the celestial space of inspiration. They're called the Soulquarians, a loose collective of musicians who in those years haunted the Electric Lady Studios in New York's Greenwich Village, the famed studio commissioned by Jimi Hendrix in the late Sixties. At the core are Questlove, D'Angelo's right-hand man and already leader of the Roots, and the visionary beatmaker J Dilla; soon they're joined by the voices of Erykah Badu and Bilal, musicians like Roy Hargrove (trumpet), James Poyser (piano), Pino Palladino (bass), and the Native Tongues crew, made up of Q-Tip, Mos Def, Talib Kweli and Common. Not everyone takes a direct hand in writing "Voodoo", but it's within this warm creative bubble at Electric Lady that D'Angelo rediscovers his ambition: now he wants to create a new Black esperanto, something that draws from the past, speaks to the present and looks to the future — Kedar calls it neo-soul.

Writing "Voodoo" thus becomes a slow, sprawling affair, admittedly a bit obsessive once he's behind the mixing desk, the relentless and imposing construction of an imaginary world whose word-of-mouth, within the African American community, builds hype well before the record even comes out. But for now D'Angelo is doing fine; free of outside pressure, with enough money to take care of his family, he spends his days in the studio working in total freedom, or helping colleagues out on their own projects, including his own partner Angie, whose debut "Black Diamond" arrives in September 1999. Kedar has even set him up with a personal trainer, with whom he works out at Central Park every afternoon to burn off tension: mens sana in corpore sano. These are the most serene months of his life. Amid pearly funk flourishes and handclaps, his cover of "Feel Like Makin' Love", originally by Gene McDaniels, opens up like a sunrise, revealing a new smile, sensual yet a world away from the gloss of Nineties r&b:

Strollin’ in the park

Watchin' winter turn to spring

Walkin’ in the dark

Watchin’ lovers do their thing

That’s the time

I feel like makin' love to you

Side C – New beat generation

A first full listen to "Voodoo" often leaves you disoriented. This isn't, in fact, an album of traditionally structured songs, even though, on the surface, its inspiration draws heavily on the great songwriters of the past, like James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Shuggie Otis and Prince. But, aided also by two decades of hip-hop production, the songs on "Voodoo" avoid any linear structure, slowly emerging from the speakers like shifts in the earth's crust, incandescent rivulets of pitch-black magma that D'Angelo often puts together alone, seated at the keyboard or behind the drums, or lost for entire nights at the mixing desk, obsessing over a single line of sound, turning it over in his hands like a sock until he finds it the right place.

This is where D'Angelo's soul becomes neo, namely in the deconstruction of melodic structure and the creative displacement of the rhythm section, assembling crooked songs with irresistible propulsion, held up by a sound that's imposing yet relaxed, rough and warm at once, in which analog feeling reigns supreme beyond any rule of meter.

Musically speaking, in fact, the revolution of "Voodoo" is primarily rhythmic — it's not just the traditional bass/drums combo that throws the beat off balance, the rest of the instrumentation is called into play too, whether digital, like samples and drum machines, or played by hand by the rest of the musicians in the room, often arranged so that each one lands on the beat just before or just after the other. But D'Angelo goes further still, using his own voice as a percussive instrument, with brief, often unintelligible phrasing and a heavy use of staccato, a technique rarely employed in the r&b tradition. The result is bold and deep, carnal and celestial: it all comes together in the grand picture of a truly singular album, inimitable and quietly influential.

The effect is galvanizing. On "Playa Playa", D'Angelo asks everyone in the room to recreate what J Dilla calls timefeel, a sort of controlled temporal collapse of the individual sound tracks. Questlove's drums seem to stumble over themselves, while Palladino's bass arrives late, throwing the groove off just enough to leave the track hanging in mid-air, while Mike Campbell's guitar and Hargrove's trumpet round out the picture in their own way — and yet the track never falls apart, in fact the effect is tremendously cohesive, it just feels like being immersed in a psychedelic bath, just this side of reason.

Another important presence in the studio is jazz guitarist Charlie Hunter; "The Root" is the most cryptic move on the tracklist, a song almost "minimal" in intent, yet one that reveals constant harmonic (ir)resolutions in the dialogue between voice and guitar, while the far more extroverted, well-known "Spanish Joint" unleashes stuttering jazz-funk refinements over a groove of drums and congas, for a more communal effect.

But "Voodoo" also works wonders when it sets up the long-awaited dialogue between present and past; conceived as a possessed jump-blues, "Chicken Grease" imagines the ghost of James Brown behind the counter of a takeaway joint, while "Send It On" is built around a creative interpolation of Kool & The Gang's "Sea Of Tranquility", here enriched by a dreamy Palladino bass line that chases D'Angelo's romantic delivery. Even more telling is "Left & Right", with Q-Tip credited in the role of "vocal percussion" alongside raps from Redman and Method Man, while D'Angelo imagines a millennial Funkadelic, in a riot of sensuality, grime and stardust:

Far more personal is the writing of "The Line", on which D'Angelo does everything himself except for the guitar, played by Raphael Saadiq; the song is intimately personal, describing the sense of redemption of a young artist finding his way again after years of confusion and mental block, but the execution is cautious and fitting, even elegant, light years away from the aggression of hip-hop, or even just the energy of gospel, even as it descends from it in spiritual intent. "One Mo'gin" is likewise a rather intimate affair, with only Palladino lingering on bass in a corner of the room; it's the slowest, most imperceptible track on the record, another summation of D'Angelo's worldview, this time brooding over lovesickness — bucking the record's usual style, here it's the vocal overdubs that fill out the track's arrangement.

Different stuff altogether, though, is the tight suite “Greatdayndamornin'/Booty,” a pure clot of pitch-black, reflective neo-soul that, in its entirety, builds toward a brisk-paced finale, turning into a kind of esperanto for the author's condition with the most disarming refrain imaginable: 

Good days

Bad days

Halfway days

But I'm still looking for a greatdayndamornin'

Side D – Dysmorphia (how does it feel)

In other words, the fleeting moment. Toward the end of the tracklist comes a song co-written with Raphael Saadiq, “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” a lean masterpiece of stop-and-go, swirling tonal crescendos and clusters of tactile, sensitive guitar – a mini-suite that, in its album version, stretches past seven minutes of perfect sonic edging, sung by D'Angelo with his heart on his sleeve and an outrageous set of pipes. Released as a single, the track soon becomes the project's most recognizable hit, climbing to No. 2 on the US R&B chart – but what really drives it into the public consciousness is the accompanying video, made somewhat hesitantly from an idea suggested by his partner, who knows exactly what awaits her in bed every night.

The result is explosive: the camera moves with slow voyeurism across the exploration of a naked body, studying every detail of the skin; the subject has no way out but to let himself be watched, unprotected, betraying a virile yet at the same time vulnerable sensuality, incredulous and slightly awkward, as if those half-mast smiles and glances were a way of mocking himself in the face of such an invasion of intimacy. In the four minutes of the single version, the film captures the Vitruvian image of a twenty-six-year-old man at the very peak of his physical and spiritual form:

It's hard to put into words the impact of a video like that. The perception of Black masculinity in American society has always been a double-edged sword, tied either to heavy images of slavery or relegated to a specific corner of pornography that fetishizes the body, confining its expression to a handful of unhealthy stereotypes that, in those years, offered only two paths: aggressive, like the gun- and gold-chain-toting gangster, or steeped in strip-club sensuality, embodied by talented but plastic-looking figures like Ginuwine, Tank and Jodeci. D'Angelo, on the other hand, hits American screens like a hurricane, with a mix of shyness and swagger that makes him magnetic yet vulnerable – all the more so when paired with a musical product so viscerally different from the polish of contemporary chart R&B. Within days of the video entering rotation on MTV, D'Angelo is America's new sex symbol.

And that's where things get complicated. The world tour for “Voodoo” kicks off on March 1, 2000; the dates sell out, the band is fired up, the setlist is a three-hour experience, a proud Black celebration of everything the album stands for. But from the very first shows, D'Angelo barely makes it to the microphone before the stage is buried under bras, with the female crowd keeping up an obsessive chant – “Take it off! Take it off!” – throughout the entire show, especially when it's time for “Untitled (How Does It Feel).”

The pressure becomes a prison; D'Angelo becomes convinced that no one is there for the music, and in trying to keep up the image he believes he has to present to the public, he grows increasingly paranoid and difficult. Some nights he lets the crowd devour him like a piece of meat at the zoo, masking his discomfort behind the music. Other nights he refuses to go on stage, sometimes just minutes before showtime, with the audience already packed into the venue. Not even Questlove can talk him into it, despite devising a whole routine of distractions to keep him inspired throughout the day; locked in his dressing room, D'Angelo studies every line of his abs, the mirror giving back an image that in his mind has already cracked, he wears himself out doing push-ups, only to give up and head back to the hotel, to everyone's disappointment. By the end of the tour, roughly three weeks' worth of dates have been cancelled in total. D'Angelo is shattered again, this time for good.

Today we'd call it body dysmorphic disorder, but back then the mental health of a young Black American man simply wasn't taken into account. No one considers the artistic ambitions, the meaning behind these songs, the fact that he's a father of two, a musician in love with his craft – certainly not a tabloid-scandal popstar. As soon as he's free of his contractual obligations, D'Angelo begins a forced psychophysical decline aimed at destroying the prison of his own image, an unhealthy and dangerous process made up of fast food, drugs and terrible life choices, which will also see him arrested for indecent exposure and hospitalized after a serious car accident. Apart from his family and a handful of trusted acquaintances, no one knows where he's gone into hiding. Kedar's fears turn out to be well-founded: the guy is too sensitive to function within the industry.

It will take fifteen years of silence and false announcements before a follow-up to “Voodoo” finally arrives – an enormous stretch of time, one the author needed in order to leave behind both its impact and the toxic dynamics that followed its success. When “Black Messiah” finally lands on shelves, it is once again a small triumph, a dark, crumpled record, still steeped in passion, regret and gorgeous songs – “Really Love” alone towers over the rest of the catalogue.

But “Voodoo” remains the great black monolith of neo-soul, one of those rare albums hailed as a classic upon release and still regarded as such today. Listening back now, the record hasn't lost an ounce of the rough, timeless allure running through its grooves. Perhaps because it's such a vital, hopeful album, conceived within an unrepeatable creative bubble, a dialogue between the human and the divine, searching together for the way back home – one song above all captures that message, the gorgeous “Africa”:

Africa is my descent

And here I’m far from home

I dwell within a land that’s meant

Meant for many men my tone

The blood of God is my defence

Let it drop down 2 my seed

Showers 2 your innocence

2 protect u for all eternity

And with this wood I beat this drum

And we won’t see defeat

Ride the wave of great music

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16/11/2025