D’Angelo’s Voodoo: The Embodiment of Neo-soul
To explain the neo-soul movement we have to rewind it back to the 90s and see what the contemporary R&B soundscape was at the time. To do that, let’s take a look at the album that changed everything: D’angelo’s Voodoo album.
Prior to the arrival of the neo-soul movement, 90s R&B was blended together with hip-hop to create more dance, party type records. This genre would be popularized as ‘New Jack Swing’, think Bell Biv Divoe, Bobby Brown, Color Me Badd and the list goes on. However, during this time there were artists that were starting to revive the whole soul sound and movement that was birthed during the 60s and 70s.
The combination between the understanding of classical soul of the 60s and 70s with the fusion of 90s sonics would create the genre that would be dubbed as ‘neo-soul’. In comparison to contemporary R&B at the time, neo-soul would dive into deeper subject matter and lyrical content. Neo-soul in a sense was a humanization of R&B through resurrecting the timeless feel of classical soul while creating a balancing act by injecting these feelings with the contemporary soundscape of the 90s in comparison to the ‘factory-made’ R&B that was being produced. It is also important to note that neo-soul is a reflection of the African diaspora. Neo-soul is built upon the amalgamation of different African and Afro-descendant music genres. Without soul music, jazz, blues, funk, hip-hop, latin music there would be no neo-soul.
Some artists that would push this movement were Erykah Badu, Raphael Saadiq, Maxwell, and of course D’Angelo. Michael Eugene Archer a.k.a. D’Angelo, born in Richmond, Virginia had always been destined for musical stardom. As a kid he had taught himself to play piano, at eighteen he would win the amateur talent competition at the Apollo theatre in Harlem three weeks in a row and his debut album Brown Sugar (1995) would spend over 65 weeks on the Billboard 200 chart and receive platinum certification within a year of its release. However, his sophomore album Voodoo, released on January 25, 2000, was the album that would be his most critically acclaimed and may even be considered the magnum opus of the neo-soul genre. Voodoo is an album that embodies the whole aesthetic and identity which neo-soul manifests, through the cross-pollination of classic and contemporary Afro-centric musical styles.
Electric Lady Studios - The Soulquarians Stint & Voodoo Sessions
As the neo-soul genre is about the call backs and revival of past inspirations, it is only fitting that Voodoo was crafted in the famous Electric Lady Studios in the Greenwich Village neighbourhood of New York City. Originally commissioned by Jimi Hendrix, Electric Lady Studios became a recording hub for many artists in the 70s including Led Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder and David Bowie.
D’Angelo and his band The Soultronics
Much of Voodoo’s timeless feel can be attributed to the people in those studio sessions at Electric Lady. Backing D’Angelo were Questlove (The Roots) on the drums, Pino Palladino on bass (John Mayer Trio), guitar veterans Spanky Alford and Mike Campbell, James Poysner (The Roots) on the keys, and renowned jazz trumpeter Roy Hargrove providing the horns for the album. What would also span in this time at Electric Lady would include the sessions for multiple acclaimed albums such as The Roots Things Fall Apart, Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun, Common’s Like Water for Chocolate and Bilal’s 1st Born Second. Questlove has referred to the recording experience at Electric Lady as a “left-of-center black music renaissance” with all the sessions and artists collaborating with one another to create such special music.
Throughout the session D’Angelo had also employed vintage recording techniques and used instrumentation which paid homage to his influences. Within Electric Lady Studio contained a Fender Rhoades keyboard and organ originally used by Stevie Wonder for Talking Book (1972) and the original recording board that was used by Jimi Hendrix himself. The employment of these techniques and sonics would give Voodoo the rich, soulful and vintage sound which it is known for. D’Angelo has stated that he could feel Jimi’s presence during those sessions.
“Jimi, Marvin Gaye, all the folks we were gravitating to. I believe they blessed the project.”
An Eclectic Sound
As the album opens up, ‘Playa Playa’ hits the listener’s ear with a distinct funk and jazz infused track with D’ Angelo crooning basketball metaphors blanketed in a gospel-sounding melody.
“Steal you with my two shot / control you with my drop / blaze you with my handle and / bless you with my pop”
‘Playa Playa’ is just the start of what Voodoo brings to the table - intoxicating, hypnotizing, and infectious grooves packaged with D’Angelo’s psychedelic and soulful vocals. The intro is just a piece of what the listener gets with Voodoo. In a sense the album embodies the title itself as the whole experience is quasi-spiritual with the layers of musicality and soul that D’Angelo and the production brings.
The follow up track ‘Devil’s Pie’ produced by the great DJ Premier combines both elements of hip-hop and funk, in which D’Angelo critiques the excess and materialism that is displayed in hip-hop.
“Main ingredients to this dish / goes like this here’s the list / materialistic, greed and lust, jealousy envious / bread and dough, cheddar cheese / flash and stash, cash and cream / temperatures at a high degree.”
‘Devil’s Pie’ is littered with religious imagery and themes to connect these ideas of materialism and excess to the “slice of the Devil’s Pie”. What is interesting about ‘Devil’s Pie’ is that it is a combination of contrasting ideas. The song itself is a fusion of funk and hip hop; while the lyrical content is a critique to the genre in which the song is rooted in.
The next track ‘Left And Right’ would serve as the “party track” of the album as D’Angelo, Method Man and Redman go back and forth over a funk-infused, hip-hop jam with themes centred around lust and pleasure.
From the first three tracks, Voodoo takes the listener through twists and turns with regards to its spontaneous structure and the blending of a combination of soundscapes from funk, hip-hop to soul. At its core, this is what neo-soul is - the combination of these classical and contemporary sonics to create something ‘new’. D’Angelo himself has said that Voodoo is a funk album, as funk is the natural progression after soul music. Throughout the album this statement rings true as the instrumentation contains layers of guitar-based funk as well as funk bass riffs. You can hear these overtones being executed in songs like ‘The Line’, ‘Chicken Grease’ and ‘Send It On’.
As Voodoo hits its second half you can start to hear the influence of the classical and contemporary styles of Afro-centric genres in which the album encapsulates into one package. On ‘One Mo Gin’, D’Angelo sings over strong jazz and blues inspired harmonics while reminiscing over a former lover. ‘The Root’, a mid-tempo heartbreak ballad, guitar and bass sections played by Charlie Hunter were inspired by his jam sessions with D’Angelo to Jimi Hendrix’s music. ‘Spanish Joint’ is a song that is a fusion of soul, latin jazz and salsa which has the ability to transport the listener to a salsa club in Havana. On ‘Feel Like Makin’ Love’, D’Angelo pays tribute to Roberta Flack by covering her 1974 soul classic of the same name. While ‘Africa’ is a dedication to D’Angelo’s heritage, history, God and his son. It is also important to notice that ‘Africa’ embodies the ideas of the African diaspora in which the themes presented are a reflection of finding a sense of belonging amid displacement from their motherland.
Untitled (How Does It Feel)
‘Untitled’. This track deserves it’s own section due to the impact it would have on D’Angelo’s career musically, but also due to the legacy the video would leave behind.
J. Dilla and his famous MPC
Sonically the track is reminiscent of the guitar styles of Jimi Hendrix and Funkadelic’s ‘Maggot Brain’. Drum wise the pattern at first sounds messy and uneven until it fleshes out between the guitar and D’Angelo’s vocals. However, this was done purposely as he pulled influence from the late, great hip-hop producer J. Dilla. One of J. Dilla’s signature production techniques would be removing the quantize on his drum programming (quantizing your drums essentially means that the drums would automatically snap to the proper timing of the beat), this would allow the sound of the drums to be more off-kiltered but at the same time ‘humanize’ the drums in a sense through creating an organic drum pattern / feel compared to the robotic element of the machine automatically programming the drums. Questlove has attributed this ‘drunken drumming style’ to J. Dilla’s influence and D'Angelo would often tell him to “use the force” while drumming.
‘Untitled’ was also originally intended to be a tribute to the late, legendary Prince. If you really start to listen you see the resemblance ‘Untitled’ has to Prince’s music from the themes of pleasure and intimacy in the lyrics and also the vocal performance of D’Angelo’s falsetto which emulates that of Prince.
“In the era of the cover song, redoing a Prince song was taboo. This (‘Untitled’) was the second best thing.”
With ‘Untitled’ you can’t just mention the song without also mentioning it’s video. The music video for ‘Untitled’ would leave an everlasting impact on D'Angelo and his career moving forward. In order to transform D’Angelo’s image and appeal, he had been under an intense training regimen and the video would become a centerpiece for promotional strategy. The video would feature a ripped D’Angelo, lip-syncing while appearing nude and alone on camera. In a time prior to the existence of social media such as Instagram and YouTube, the release of this video could be equivalent to ‘breaking the internet’ due to the impact it would have.
Not only did it prove to contribute significantly to the album’s commercial success, it would also cement D’Angelo’s image as a sex symbol at the time to fans. Met with divided reaction between female and male viewership, the publicity surrounding the video would completely overshadow the album itself. The new image D’Angelo had garnered would also lead to frustrations and a lasting effect on D’Angelo as becoming known as the “naked dude from the video” and consistent pressure of maintaining the sex symbol from the video. Many of D’Angelo’s peers have said that the success of the ‘Untitled’ video played a part in D’Angelo’s hiatus following the Voodoo tour.
Voodoo is not your typical R&B album and D’Angelo isn’t your typical R&B artist. Voodoo challenged the sound at the time and a critique to contemporary R&B/soul and hip-hop. The album is a reflection of the artists that came before and an evolution of that musicality and sound they established.
“I consider myself very respectful of the masters who came before. In some ways, I feel a responsibility to continue and take the cue from what they were doing musically and vibe on it. That’s what I want to do. But I want to do it for this time and generation”
Voodoo had shaken up the soundscape of the time, through drawing influences from the past and present it embodies the whole idea and spirit of the neo-soul genre. To push past boundaries, pay homage to the ones before and create something totally new is what D’Angelo and the Soultronics wanted to do and they did. Consistently pushing the evolution of music and sound is not an easy thing to do, but to execute it the way Voodoo does is at least to me is why I consider it as not just the magnum opus of the neo-soul genre but one of the most groundbreaking albums of our time.
Listen to D’Angelo’s Voodoo below: