VOODOO 9781501336508, 9781501336539, 9781501336522

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Track Listing
Acknowledgments
Note on Text
What Is Past Is Prologue
1 The Spell Is Cast
2 Home Cooking
3 Finding the Groove
4 The Means of Survival
5 The Feminine Mystique
6 Video (Almost) Killed the R&B Star
7 Radio Silence
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography

Citation preview

VOODOO Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration —The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough —Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love—NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books—Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

Forthcoming in the series: Blue Moves by Matthew Restall Judy at Carnegie Hall by Manuel Betancourt Timeless by Martin Deykers Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen by Ray Padgett The Velvet Rope by Ayanna Dozier Band of Gypsys by Michael E. Veal From Elvis in Memphis by Eric Wolfson Suicide by Andi Coulter Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth by Zach Schonfeld Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 by Colin Fleming Murder Ballads by Santi Elijah Holley Once Upon a Time by Alex Jeffery Tapestry by Loren Glass The Archandroid by Alyssa Favreau Avalon by Simon Morrison Rio by Annie Zaleski Vs. by Clint Brownlee xx by Jane Morgan and many more …

Voodoo

Faith A. Pennick

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Copyright © Faith A. Pennick, 2020 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pennick, Faith, author. Title: Voodoo / Faith A. Pennick. Description: [1.] | New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Series: 33 1/3 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A look at how D’Angelo’s Voodoo became a touchstone album for R&B/Soul in the early 2000s and its integral role in initiating the “neosoul movement.””– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019037286 (print) | LCCN 2019037287 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501336508 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501336515 (epub) | ISBN 9781501336522 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: D’Angelo, 1974-. Voodoo. | Soul music–History and criticism. | Rhythm and blues music–History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML420.D123 P46 2020 (print) | LCC ML420.D123 (ebook) | DDC 782.421644092–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037286 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037287



ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-3650-8 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3652-2 eBook: 978-1-5013-3651-5 Series: 33 1/3 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents

Track Listing vi Acknowledgmentsvii Note on Text ix What Is Past Is Prologue 1 1 The Spell Is Cast 3 2 Home Cooking 11 3 Finding the Groove 25 4 The Means of Survival 41 5 The Feminine Mystique 55 6 Video (Almost) Killed the R&B Star 69 7 Radio Silence 87 Epilogue93 Notes Bibliography

109 119

Track Listing

1. “Playa Playa” (7:07) 2. “Devil’s Pie” (5:21) 3. “Left & Right” (4:46) 4. “The Line” (5:15) 5. “Send It On” (5:57) 6. “Chicken Grease” (4:36) 7. “One Mo’ Gin” (6:15) 8. “The Root” (6:33) 9. “Spanish Joint” (5:44) 10. “Feel Like Makin’ Love” (6:22) 11. “Greatdayindamornin’/Booty” (7:35) 12. “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)” (7:10) 13. “Africa” (6:13) VOODOO (Virgin Records, 2000) All songs produced by D’Angelo, except for: “Devil’s Pie”—coproduced by DJ Premier “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)”—coproduced by Raphael Saadiq

Acknowledgments

Thank you … Leah Babb-Rosenfeld Craig Belcher Jonada Burson Jason King Bill McGee Laura Rice Megan Rickborn Courtney E. Smith Gretchen Stoeltje Briana Younger To my friends who graciously allowed me to share their comments. To everyone who agreed to be interviewed and granted me your valuable time. Keidra Chaney, THIS. IS. YOUR. FAULT! (P.S.: I love you.)

ACKNOWLED GMENT S

To my editor, Michelle Chen, for helping me get this book into shape. Immense thanks to Gayle Wald for putting me in the 33 1/3 lineup and for your thoughtful input, even when you didn’t have the time and especially because you didn’t have to do it. You are my Voodoo priestess! And to the bashful, complicated Aquarian from RVA who kills me softly with his songs, thank you most of all.

viii

Note on Text

Direct quotes from individuals that are not attributed by footnotes are taken from interviews conducted for this book by the author or from anecdotes and/or comments that were made directly to the author.

x

What Is Past Is Prologue

“I like your T-shirt!” A young man shouted out to me as I walked past him at the Richmond Jazz Festival. We were in an air-conditioned tent on a pretty warm day in August 2018, admiring the furious passion of pianist Christian Sands. Weather had delayed Sands’s flight, which delayed his set and delayed my trip to the nearest port-a-potty. As I walked past this man who was standing in the back near the tent’s entrance, intently watching Sands with a friend, he called out to me and I turned around, noticing that he was wearing the same concert tour T-shirt as me. A clothing doppelgänger with good taste, I thought. I smiled and walked back toward him. We hugged immediately. The man who complimented me, an up-and-coming jazz guitarist, asked me if I attended the same show from that tour as him, which he gushed about. (I didn’t. I saw the artist in New York City.) Seeing my T-shirt twin made me less selfconscious. For what I’m sure are unfounded reasons, it felt like wearing the cover of this singer/songwriter’s most recent

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album on my chest was the equivalent of saying “Beetlejuice.” That his was not the name to be raised from the tombs of his birthplace. I nearly chickened out of that choice of apparel. When I threw the T-shirt in my suitcase while packing for the trip, it felt so obvious and possibly trite to wear a piece of clothing repping one of Richmond, Virginia’s most successful, acclaimed—and vexed—musical artists. Do people in Minneapolis have the gall to walk the streets with Prince ablaze on their chests? Is that accepted fan etiquette? As I got dressed in my downtown hotel room earlier that morning, I decided, “Why not? It’s just a T-shirt.” If nothing else, it would be a reminder to his native city that he remains a vibrant and distinctive artist. His importance as a musician and a Richmonder had not been erased by the dark clouds of criminal arrests and personal degeneration that engulfed him for most of the previous decade. He still matters, here and beyond. I swung open the door to the armoire in my hotel room and pulled out my souvenir from D’Angelo’s 2015 Black Messiah: The Second Coming tour. I pulled the black T-shirt over my head and onto my torso, then proceeded to put on my makeup, art deco earrings, and sunscreen. I grabbed my gear and my coffee, and headed out for a sunny day filled with music sitting on the lush green grounds of Maymont, not far from where he began his prodigious journey.

2

1 The Spell Is Cast

voodoo (noun) or less commonly vodou\vō- dü\: a religion that is derived from African polytheism and ancestor worship and is practiced chiefly in Haiti. —Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary My friend, Michelle, made a cassette tape for me. She had done this a few times before, usually of albums I hadn’t heard yet. We lived a couple of blocks from each other in what was in early 2000 the center of “Black bohemian” life in New York City: Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It was easy to meet up with her and have her deposit her latest musical discovery in my hand. Napster had been in existence for a few months, but “mix tapes” and the like were still the popular way we and many others shared music. Like me, Michelle enjoys a wide breadth of genres, so I trusted her judgment. The album she copied was one that was highly anticipated by her and most of the singer’s fans. It had been five years since his previous album, a debut that

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many critics and listeners hailed as the discovery of R&B music’s next great talent. By concordant declaration, this singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist was an ambassador of true soul music, exhibiting a sonic lucidity that many believed fell away from the genre during the 1990s. D’Angelo’s proemial release, Brown Sugar, sounded like the music that underscored the childhoods of Black Generation Xers: music that played while our parents danced, drove, grilled, and procreated. It had echoes of Marvin, Al, Sly, Stevie, Curtis, Smokey (literally, a cover of Robinson’s “Cruisin’” was a popular single from this album). The title track was a sultry craving—a double entendre for his adored, beautiful, Black woman and his beloved cannabis. The 1990s featured superstars like Janet Jackson and Whitney Houston who had outgrown their R&B and gospel roots, respectively. Janet’s brother, Michael, had completed that transcendence a decade prior. Mariah Carey was the covert Black woman with the overt Black voice, exploding into the pop music consciousness with her immaculate fiveoctave range and “doo wop”-tribute power ballad, “Vision of Love.” Other female singers and “girl groups” dominated R&B music during the decade: Mary J. Blige, Deborah Cox, SWV, Brandy, TLC, and Destiny’s Child—a young quartet out of Houston propelled by its lead singer’s nascent formation. These women, however, stuck to a tried-and-true structure of danceable grooves and sing-along love ballads perfect for showers, cars, and karaoke bars. From the late 1980s through the 1990s, several male songwriters and producers were also key in setting the standard for what was played on Black radio. Rising in the 4

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East was Teddy Riley (Guy, Wreckx-N-Effect, Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative”), who brought the “new jack” sound to R&B airwaves. Minneapolis saw the emergence of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the architects of Janet Jackson’s reborn music career and the city’s two biggest musical names who weren’t royalty. Two other Midwesterners, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds and Antonio “L.A.” Reid, stepped out of the shadows of their former group, the Deele, and took their place as the go-to R&B hit-making duo (with Babyface creating his own niche as an adult-contemporary-charttopping balladeer). In L.A., the legendary Quincy Jones produced compilation albums under his name, as well as music for James Ingram, Patti Austin, Tevin Campbell, and most famously, Michael Jackson. To the north—specifically Oakland, California— was Tony! Toni! Toné! with its radio-friendly hits “Feels Good,” “Anniversary,” and “It Never Rains (in Southern California).” The group’s lead singer and co-songwriter, Raphael Saadiq, cowrote the song “Lady” for Brown Sugar and would leave another significant imprint on D’Angelo’s sophomore venture. But who was doing the mutating, genre-busting work in R&B? The obvious answer to that question is Prince, who like Michael Jackson exploded in the 1980s. 1999 and Purple Rain vaulted Prince into a stadium-filling demigod whose virtuosity as a singer, songwriter and musician defied classification. There was the audacious 1997 debut of Dallas native Erykah Badu with Baduizm, an album that meshed earthy 1970s R&B vibes with hip-hop sensibilities and Badu’s smoldering voice infused with hues of Billie Holliday and 5

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Dinah Washington. Maxwell, a vocalist with a seamless falsetto that matched his free and easy image, also challenged successfully what R&B music could be, modernizing the “quiet storm” sound that grew in popularity in the mid1970s. Maxwell’s quirky good looks and charming presence also proved to be assets with female fans; he and D’Angelo were frequently lumped together in the “neo-soul girl crush” fish bowl. The growing popularity of rap and hip-hop in the 1980s influenced a number of artists that launched the following decade. Musicians in the 1990s who grew up on hip-hop decided to take it above and beyond rhymes and samples, creating musical alchemies. Similar to Badu, groups like the Roots, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Arrested Development, Digable Planets, and the Fugees constructed playgrounds for fusing R&B, hip-hop, and jazz that spoke to folks in and “of ” the hood. Fugees member Lauryn Hill took that formula to even greater heights with her multiplatinum, multi-Grammy-winning solo album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. These and other like-minded musical creators fashioned a soundscape that lifted a new generation of Black strivers. Needy soul survivors were making do with these offerings and others from exciting, but arguably not as gifted recording artists. No matter the significant love shown to these performers by fans, it was the follow-up to Brown Sugar that had so many waiting breathlessly since its 1995 release. Fans embraced Brown Sugar as the “modern throwback,” but this new collection of music … this would be the water to quench our collective thirst. D’Angelo was, in a sense, 6

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perfecting the concoction that he and his contemporaries had slipped into the water stream. His new release, titled Voodoo, not only tore down the walls between genres but in effect vaporized his own well-made but in comparison musically straightforward first album. D’Angelo upped the ante in production value and songwriting craft, working with some of the industry’s top musicians. They jumped at the chance, as his then manager Dominique Trenier put it, to “spar with the champ.”1 But a funny thing happened when the champ returned to the ring … a video. THE Video. A music video of D’Angelo, presumably naked, singing squarely into the camera. The video that appears to have been done in one take. His mouth asking “how does it feel?” while beads of sweat crawl down his sculpted, chocolate torso. Released two months before the full album dropped, “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)” became a cultural sensation, especially among African American women. The Video (as it came to be known among Black folks) was a tsunami of lubricious imagery and metaphorical longing that literally left many a woman speechless. The music video hit a grand-slam home run as an attentiongrabber, but arguably overshadowed the actual music it was created to promote. The expectation for D’Angelo to be soul music’s Superman is unfair, but that pressure didn’t faze him then. It was the “sex symbol” label that proved to be his Kryptonite. More on that later. The album had been out for nearly a month before I received the tape from Michelle in February 2000. She sent a disclaimer via email saying she didn’t really care for Voodoo. 7

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That it wasn’t as good as his previous release. Mentally, I filed her comments away for reference. For what it’s worth, I felt Brown Sugar was overrated. I liked the singles fine—my standout was “Lady”—but I didn’t agree with the superlatives many others had offered. To me, Brown Sugar sounded like a knock-off Marvin Gaye album. Why listen to an imitator—his musical faculty notwithstanding—when I can play the real thing whenever I want? I didn’t have the high expectations that others had when Voodoo was unveiled, so I gave it a neutral hearing. When I inserted the cassette into the deck and pressed “play,” the sounds of African drums and tribal chanting grew in volume, filling my small apartment. Then, a creeping, growing murmur of the singer and his craftsmen stopped me literally in my tracks. It was a welcome and new awakening of artist and listener, a spontaneous musical fete. Those first few seconds I thought, “Oh SHIT! Something’s about to happen!” That early into the record, I couldn’t articulate what that “something” would even be. I felt my soul shift like quaking fault lines when D’Angelo’s vocals pierced through my speakers. The horn arrangement that opens the album’s first track, “Playa Playa,” was a clarion: you have entered a space adorned by an old soul with new ideas about music, about love and sex and pain and pride and spirit. Soon, I was dancing to his music like the heathen the devil wanted me to be. The snake has shed his old skin and slithers anew. This is the voodoo that he do. Voodoo is a gumbo of rock, soul, gospel, hip-hop, jazz, and indigenous African and Caribbean music, exploring the pitfalls of fame, love found and lost, carnal desires, and the 8

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blessing of a child. At the end of the record, I stared at my stereo for a few minutes like it was a body snatcher about to take me. I had heard my life lived and my life change in those 79 minutes. How did he know my passion? Articulate my fears? Embody my desires? WHO THE FUCK TOLD HIM?!! I couldn’t believe that this “PK” (preacher’s kid) from Virginia’s capital city who I dismissed out of hand as a throwback Motown wannabe had constructed this sonorous banquet that melted my brain, electrified my emotions, and occupied my CD player for eight months straight. As impressive as the advanced musical aptitude was the high level of emotional intelligence D’Angelo—né Michael Archer—demonstrated on Voodoo, considering he was a mere twenty-five years old at the time of its release. Voodoo belied his youth; this was the effort of a grown-ass man and a formidable force in the music industry. Voodoo is a soulful and sincere opera that requires taut engagement. Despite or arguably because of its musical precision, Voodoo was not a radio-friendly album. For some fans, it failed to be the singalong-ready follow-up to Brown Sugar that they hoped for. Both were impediments preventing the album from winning over a large mass audience outside of core R&B aficionados, particularly in contrast to the popularity of the “Untitled” video. In the end, Voodoo was a platinum seller and won two Grammys. The adulation from music critics was nearly unanimous. Voodoo is nothing less than a masterwork, aptly described by session guitarist Charlie Hunter as “the perfect blend of the intellectual and the visceral.”2 The passing of time (and a 2014 album, Black Messiah, that picked up creatively from 9

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where Voodoo left off) has likely facilitated this release’s accessibility. Distance may have allowed detractors or casual listeners to hear fully the intricate tapestry woven by D’Angelo and his collaborators on Voodoo, opening the door to appreciate the leaps and bounds made by a young Black artist coming into his own. This book will delve into how Voodoo came to be, the people who worked on it, the abstract imprint of its songs, how it taps into the fears and vulnerability of African American men, and how the music video with no title enveloped the album and nearly destroyed its star. I bought the CD the week after my friend gave me that tape, and it remains a staple of my musical nourishment. Even if the album failed to speak to Michelle, I am forever grateful to her for the call to experience the soul-changing ritual that is Voodoo.

10

2 Home Cooking

I’m not doing this for the critical acclaim or to make money. I’m going to be involved in music all of my life. That’s me, that’s what I do.1 —D’Angelo Richmond, Virginia, is a city with a narrative of resilience rising from turmoil. It is named after its sister location in London, a city similarly halved by a pulsing river. It was built on land taken from a collective of Native American Algonquin tribes led by the Powhatan and thrived on the valuable leaves of tobacco that were harvested by the toiling limbs of kidnapped Africans. Fostered by enslavement, Richmond was also forged in fire. After the city was burned down by British troops during the American Revolution, Richmond emerged as the capitol of the Confederacy before it was burned down again by its own defenders to deny the Union Army an unfettered victory six days before the Civil War ended. The phoenixes rising from the ashes of antebellum Richmond have manifested itself in the form of commerce

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and culture. Glass-encased skyscrapers line the edge of the James River, threatening to overshadow the Virginia State Capitol building. The expansion of Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) is having mixed results depending on one’s perspective. It has led to growing revitalization resulting in quirky shops and boutiques along Richmond’s main thoroughfare, Broad Street. The growing VCU campus, in addition to more than two decades of generous tax benefits for real estate developers, has also fed the gentrification of nearby neighborhoods such as Jackson Ward and Church Hill. The positive benefits that arrive from this type of urban planning tend not to extend to many African American residents of metropolitan areas. Like many cities in the Southern United States, Richmond is defined by the current racial segregation of its neighborhoods and schools while also bearing the scars from its history: in Richmond’s case, as the Confederacy’s crown jewel. Viewing a few of the South Side neighborhoods by car during a visit in 2018, I saw communities dotted with vacant lots, boarded-up buildings, and fast-food restaurants. The area never fully recovered from the “white flight” that took place in the 1960s. Other blocks were adorned with modest homes, churches, and a few newly built apartment buildings, spillover of the ongoing gentrification happening in bulk across the river. Nevertheless, there are African Americans who proudly claim Richmond as their home. “There’s a connection here,” one Black, middle-aged Richmond native told me. “If you don’t know a person, you know someone in their family.” For many Black Richmonders, their communities are influenced 12

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and moored by its churches.2 Places of worship have been the spiritual, social, and the political core of African American life since the era of slavery. Locals also take pride in the city’s musical legacy. The roll call of successful singers and bands from Richmond and the commonwealth of Virginia is impressive. Pharrell Williams, Missy Elliott, Tim “Timbaland” Mosley, Dave Matthews (a South African who started his eponymous band in Charlottesville), Jason Mraz, and Chris Brown have reached the upper echelon of international fame and success. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a gospel singer and guitarist who was the under-recognized, prototypic influence of many white rock & rollers, made Richmond her home and a performance hub as her career progressed. Others who may go unknown to audiences outside of Richmond maintain devoted local followings, like the funk-jazz group Plunky & Oneness and the late Maggie Ingram, frontwoman of gospel staples Maggie Ingram and the Ingramettes. All of these things, in specks and in waves, contributed to the evolution of D’Angelo. Michael Eugene Archer was born February 11, 1974, the youngest of three sons, into a family steeped in the church. As a very young boy, Michael sang in the choir of his grandfather’s church, Refuge Temple in Powhatan, a suburb about 30 miles west of the city of Richmond. The legend goes that his oldest brother, Luther (who graduated into one of his songwriting partners, cowriting three songs on Voodoo), stumbled unto Michael playing the piano—an actual, structured song—at age three. By age five, the boy played organ for his Baptist minister father’s congregation in 13

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the city’s Church Hill neighborhood, where he lived during parts of his childhood. He is self-taught on piano, bass, guitar, and drums. Michael absorbed the music and witnessed church members speaking in tongues when they “caught” the Holy Ghost. The rituals, the organs, the prayers, the screams of those enraptured by the spirit influenced his formative years. Gospel music was his foundation, but it was iconic soul music from artists like Michael Jackson, James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, and Earth, Wind and Fire that young Michael Archer followed as his guide map to hone his musical gifts. To avoid possible condemnation or punishment from their parents, Luther Archer sneaked Prince albums into the house for him and his little brother to enjoy. Michael credited Luther specifically for making him a Prince devotee3 and for being an inspirational figure of his own. Their grandmother, Alberta Cox, also provided early encouragement. The youngest Archer boy merged his spiritual gifts and secular influences (he even found inspiration from the Bee Gees and the most distinctive falsetto from the disco era, Barry Gibb4) and sculpted them into an advanced level of musicianship. Men have been the much-cited molders of D’Angelo’s sound and legacy. Yet the musical artist that D’Angelo resembles the most in this writer’s opinion is not Prince, Hendrix, or Wonder. A pianist and vocalist who transcends gospel priming while retaining it as a vital bloodline to musical expression. A “PK” who’s difficult, soaring, sensitive, and exacting. Peerless in pure talent, whose music has and will continue to inspire listeners for generations. 14

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Sounds like Aretha Franklin to me. Walking into the home studio of Bill McGee, it is apparent that it is his creative sanctuary, even in its haphazardness. The room in his south Richmond ranch house is cluttered with microphones, instruments, and CDs: some of them his own recordings, some from local jazz and soul artists he knows personally. I take a seat across from McGee, as he sits behind his phalanx of keyboards. As an aside, he mentions that he will be picking up his grandchild after we’re done. An imposing microphone hangs from its stand, a demarcation of the space between us. It is here where McGee makes music and where I will talk to him about his most prized protégé. McGee is a respected figure in the Richmond music scene. An acclaimed jazz composer and trumpeter, McGee was also a music teacher at Richmond’s Kennedy High School in the 1980s. He saw twelve-year-old D’Angelo perform at the 6th Street Marketplace festival downtown. At that age, D’Angelo was known as Michael Smith. He took his stepfather’s last name for a time and reverted back to Archer when the relationship between his stepfather and mother ended.5 D’Angelo admitted that relations with his stepfather were strained and at one point worried they would mirror the fate of Marvin Gaye, shot dead by his father in 1984.6 McGee shepherded many musical talents that attended Kennedy, what he called the city’s “Black ‘Fame’ school.” When he saw Michael (McGee never stopped calling him “Michael”) on stage, he knew immediately that this boy “had the gift. You could not have taught someone to perform and sing like he did in twelve years. I mean the splits. The 15

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microphone routines. It was James Brown, Michael Jackson, and Prince all wrapped up into one twelve year old.” McGee invited Michael and his band to perform in a citywide talent show—an annual showcase featuring many of McGee’s students at Kennedy—that took place at a theater then known as “The Mosque” on North Laurel Street (now the Altria Theater). This began a mentorship that would last throughout Michael’s teenage years. Although Michael was not a formal student—he attended a South Side high school, Huguenot—McGee groomed him in his off time, guiding him in both performance and professionalism, although McGee acknowledged that he needed very little of either because he usually emerged victorious. McGee recalls how teenage Michael hired band members, some of them his own relatives, and fired those who didn’t perform to his exacting standards. He continues to admire Michael’s showmanship and raw talent, a benchmark he pushed his own students at Kennedy High to reach. “Being an entertainer is a calling,” McGee said. “That’s who Michael is.” It was a gift of which another legendary musician in the city took note. Ellis Marsalis, the jazz pianist and patriarch of the Marsalis family, was coordinator of the jazz studies program at VCU in the late 1980s. Michael played for Marsalis, but the timing to study with the master didn’t work out. Soon after the audition, Marsalis left Richmond and moved back to his hometown of New Orleans. It was only a matter of time before Michael’s talents lured him out of Richmond. Like other singers and musicians who sprout in smaller towns, then pull up roots and replant in 16

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New York, Los Angeles, or Nashville for a shot at fame and fortune, young Michael Archer did the same. He was buoyed by a winning performance during amateur hour at the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1991. Seventeen-yearold Michael performed Johnny Gill’s “Rub You the Right Way” with his group, Precise. The stage presence and musical discipline instilled in him in part by his early mentor paid off in front of the notoriously tough Apollo audience (albeit on his second try, he placed fourth the year prior). Michael dropped out of high school in the early 1990s and moved to New York City. His demo tape caught the ear of music publishing executive Jocelyn Cooper, who signed eighteen-year-old Michael to a publishing deal with her company, Midnight Songs. One song on the demo, “U Will Know,” ended up on the soundtrack for the 1994 film Jason’s Lyric. Another person dazzled by both Michael’s demo and an in-person audition was the late Gary Harris, an A&R man at EMI Records. Harris signed Michael Archer, then nineteen, to his label. Around this time, Michael decided to adopt a new stage name derived from the Italian sculptor, Michelangelo. Once D’Angelo joined the big leagues, some of the professionalism McGee observed in the teenager had started to wane. Kedar Massenburg, D’Angelo’s manager at the time, grew frustrated because his artist “wasn’t focused.”7 To build upon D’Angelo’s skills and introduce him to other composers, Cooper invited him to workshops she curated for her roster of songwriters. D’Angelo didn’t bother attending the majority of them. Cooper was frustrated about his absences, but in retrospect told me D’Angelo was “more 17

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advanced than everyone else and was not interested in that kind of collaboration.”8 D’Angelo’s current manager, Alan Leeds, did not know him during his early years in New York, but when I asked him about this lag in productivity, Leeds speculated that the dips in focus, then and present day, are his client pushing back against the expectations of the music business. “I think he just found himself in an industry that he hated,” he said. “[He] didn’t like the idea of the press getting into his business. Didn’t like the responsibilities that came with [being a recording artist]. “All D wants to do is make music and be left the fuck alone,” Leeds continued. “But when D gets ready to work, and the stars are aligned properly, he works as hard, and as diligently, and as committedly as anybody else. It’s just pushing the ‘start’ button. But the ‘start’ button is always broken.” To speed up the process in making the first album, Cooper paired D’Angelo with a singer and rapper named Angie Stone. Stone was cultivating her own musical imprint. Her professional career started with the Sequence, the rap group she cofounded with two of her high school friends from Columbia, South Carolina. The Sequence had a modest hit in 1979 with their debut song “Funk You Up,” cowritten by Stone. She emerged as a songwriter and session singer for hire and was a vocalist with the 1990s R&B trio Vertical Hold. In addition to being Black and Southern-born, Stone and D’Angelo were both trained in gospel music, the church being an unofficial conservatory for many young African 18

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Americans to develop their musical talents, particularly those without the means to train formally.9 Stone became one of D’Angelo’s industry mentors and cowrote “Jonz in My Bonz” with D’Angelo for his debut release, Brown Sugar. (“Pray,” another song they wrote together, was recorded by Vertical Hold.) Stone is credited with helping a procrastinating, “wet behind the ears” D’Angelo finish his album. “[Stone] had more experience in the studio than him at the time,” said Cooper. “She just made it easier for him [to complete the album].”10 After Brown Sugar’s release, Stone sang backup for D’Angelo’s live performances; she can be heard on the 1996 release Live at the Jazz Cafe, London. As they worked together, their relationship transitioned from professional to romantic. Curiously, D’Angelo thanks his “big sis” Stone in the Brown Sugar album notes,11 even though they were already an item by the time the album was released. Stone painted their relationship as intense and described feeling spellbound with D’Angelo, calling him a kindred spirit. Cooper went as far as saying that the trajectory of Stone’s career was “halted” as she nurtured D’Angelo professionally and personally: that Stone was “consumed” by her love for him.12 But as D’Angelo embarked on making new music, his relationship with Stone started to fracture. Stone has suggested in interviews that their romance was ill-fated, even sabotaged by others, because of its uniqueness in the music industry. In addition to being thirteen years D’Angelo’s senior, Stone is a larger-sized woman in an industry that 19

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insists its charges, especially female artists, be skinny and modelesque in appearance. At one point post-Brown Sugar’s release, Stone—then pregnant with D’Angelo’s first child— was replaced as a date with a thinner and more famous actress at an industry event honoring her boyfriend.13,14 As Stone elaborated in an interview with Essence in 2003, “I didn’t, I guess, fit the image that people thought a sex symbol like D’Angelo should have been with.”15 D’Angelo was becoming the “it” guy in the music world, and Stone was being pushed out of his limelight. The fact that she helped to get him there added insult to injury. The birth of their son, Michael, in 1997 was not enough to salvage D’Angelo’s and Stone’s relationship. They separated soon after, but not before pairing up to compose two dedications to their baby boy. Stone and D’Angelo (along with his eldest brother Luther Archer) wrote “Send It On,” a mid-tempo track set to the music of a 1969 Kool and the Gang instrumental titled “Sea of Tranquility,” as a celebration of their newborn son. “[‘Send It On’] had a spiritual overtone that came with revelation and faith and ‘Thank you, God, for such a beautiful gift,’” said Stone.16 It was released as Voodoo’s fourth single. The song’s breezy melody and sincerity didn’t translate into sales. “Send It On” had lukewarm commercial success, peaking at number 33 on the Billboard R&B/hip-hop song chart. The existence of “Send It On” almost prevented the album’s final track from coming to fruition. “Africa” is a lullaby of sorts—a tribute to both D’Angelo’s son and his motherland. While listening to “Africa,” it’s easy to picture D’Angelo and cowriter Stone looking down on baby Michael 20

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and serenading him in his crib, against a stirring background of drums and chime-like keyboards playing notes floating down like soft rain on his son’s face. Inspired by repeated listens to Prince and the Revolution’s 1986 album, Parade, Questlove declared “Africa” his favorite song from Voodoo. But he had to “beg” his friend to lay it down on tape because D’Angelo figured he already had one song for his son.17 The album is dedicated to Michael II and a daughter, Imani, born in 1999. D’Angelo has stated in numerous interviews that writer’s block hampered his work on Voodoo, and that it was witnessing the birth of his namesake that brought him out of his creative drought. “Voodoo started the day we were with our son,”18 concurred Stone. Parenthood may have been the foregrounded inspiration to Voodoo’s creation, but Questlove posited that it was the impending breakup that froze D’Angelo’s songwriting mojo in the first place. “Angie said to him once,” according to Questlove, “… he wanted to turn what was tumultuous about their relationship into songs.”19 The happiness that stemmed from Michael’s birth was cut short, as Stone was forced to reckon with the end of her relationship with his father. “I did not handle us breaking up well at all,” Stone lamented. “I felt for the first time like a death had taken place.”20 D’Angelo’s split from Stone wouldn’t be the only turbulent, failed love affair that would creep its way onto the Voodoo master tapes. Angie Stone cowrote four songs on Voodoo with her former partner during what could be argued as simultaneously one of the best and worst periods of her life. Stone went on to have 21

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a successful career as a solo artist, songwriter, and sometimes actor. Reportedly, she remains cordial with D’Angelo. (Stone did not respond to numerous requests to be interviewed for this book.) Their collaborations on both Brown Sugar and Voodoo arose out of a mutual respect of talent and became literal labors of love, gifting them the most sacred creation of all, their son. During a 2012 interview with EBONY, Stone accused some in the record industry of disrespecting her by forcing their peers to pick sides. “It’s like if you’re my friend, you can’t be [D’Angelo’s] friend and my friend,” Stone claimed. “So I’ve kind of been left swinging on my own.”21 She spoke further about embracing her accomplishments with D’Angelo as well as accepting the sting of an industry that she believes eclipsed her shine on occasion: I think it is important people know I learned an immense amount of things from D’Angelo. They say he got it from me, but we worked very well together. Together, we were a threat because they know two heads are better than one. At the end of the day, I would keep it 100 and he trusted me with that. But I never get positive feedback from any of [the others.] I never even received a plaque for the work I’ve done. So I am out here doing me and it’s proof that I can take care of my own.22 We live in a world that values getting credit for one’s accomplishments, having your name visible, and people speaking of you in laudatory terms. The bragging rights for successful ventures—inventions, companies, civilizations, creative endeavors—are typically claimed by men, even 22

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when women shared the heavy lifting in bringing those ventures to fruition. Women have sacrificed their ambitions from time immemorial, instead channeling that attention to their husbands and/or children. Calls to “lean in” and pursue higher educations and careers have not rolled back the external and self-imposed expectations for women to stand by their men, even at the detriment of their own goals. There are far too many examples of talented, capable women who were underappreciated or the unnoticed helpers of their “genius” male partners. Names like Lee Krasner and Mileva Marić continue to be unknown to the masses, overshadowed by their more famous husbands. Gwen Verdon, memorialized as a Tony Award–winning Broadway performer and director/choreographer Bob Fosse’s muse, went uncredited during her life as Fosse’s right-hand woman, a co-originator who helped him realize his biggest stage and film achievements. Stone chose freely to bolster D’Angelo’s creativity. With a background in R&B and hip-hop, she was a perfect collaborator in aiding D’Angelo’s expression of vulnerability as well as swagger (“Playa Playa” was also cowritten by Stone). The emotional codeswitching that D’Angelo does on Voodoo is derived from his immersion in gospel and soul music and accentuated by his female influences: professional, personal, and sexual. Like all of the men who worked on Voodoo, Stone deserves credit for contributing to the album’s near-unique sound and helping her ex-partner raise his game like she did with Brown Sugar.

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3 Finding the Groove

Vertical Hold, the R&B group of which Angie Stone was lead singer and co-songwriter, was in the midst of recording its 1995 album, Head First. Several songs on the album were mixed by an up-and-coming music engineer named Russell Elevado. Born in the Philippines, Elevado studied audio engineering and earned his stripes interning at recording studios throughout New York City, where he grew up. Elevado’s big break came from working at Quad Studios, mixing house music tracks. Under the tutelage of famed producers and DJs Frankie Knuckles and David Morales, Elevado rose from assistant to sound engineer. He branched out on his own in 1993. While Elevado was working with Vertical Hold, D’Angelo was piecing together Brown Sugar. Kedar Massenburg, D’Angelo’s then manager, needed a sound mixer to replace Bob Power on the album. By coincidence, Massenburg represented Vertical Hold as well.

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Elevado became Massenburg’s top choice to take over for Power, making the initial introduction that would end up shaking the foundation of R&B music for years to come. Massenburg played five of D’Angelo’s songs for Elevado; like most who heard them, he was awestruck. But when Elevado first met him in 1994, he said D’Angelo was introduced to him as Angie Stone’s boyfriend, “Michael Archer,” unaware for a while—even during their own hangout time together— that this was the same man whose musicianship had wowed him.1 After months of not hearing from D’Angelo (Elevado: “I thought I’d lost the gig!”2), Elevado got the call. He was brought on to mix three songs on Brown Sugar, “Lady,” “Jonz in My Bonz,” and “Let Me Get By.” It was clear from their first meetings during the Vertical Hold sessions that Elevado and D’Angelo were brothers from two mothers. As they worked on D’Angelo’s debut, they started talking—conspiring—about the next album. Unlike the radio-friendly polish on Brown Sugar, E. and D. both agreed that the new work needed to be more raw and earthy. It would be a marriage of all of D’Angelo’s inspirations, equal church hall and dance hall. Elevado’s musical tastes were the perfect fit to achieve this sound: the Beatles, David Bowie, classic soul men like Stevie Wonder and James Brown. Most importantly, Elevado was and remains a ride-or-die analog man: an acolyte of recording and mixing on tape. Why analog? The signals match the pure, recorded sound more accurately than a digital recording. With analog, the variations in air pressure as sound carries are fully captured 26

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in the first pass, whereas recording digitally translates those variations as a series of numbers that are reconverted into analog signals. That extra step renders a digital file a synthetic replica of organic sounds (think GMO foods, but with music). Analog tapes can have imperfections that result in sounds of crackling and popping noises, but it is those quirks and glitches that folks like Elevado live for, because it gives the music a sheen of extra authenticity. Elevado imagined Voodoo as a chance to make “his own Sly Stone record,”3 a throwback to classic R&B albums released in the 1960s and 1970s: instruments—sometimes lush, sometimes raucous—recorded in the moment with dynamic vocals that filled the room when the needle hit the groove. Those recordings embraced the sweat and even the slipups. They are the true live music experience pressed onto vinyl. Elevado was surprised, however, that his renegade-inarms was mostly unfamiliar with the music of one of his idols, Jimi Hendrix. So Elevado proceeded to engage D’Angelo in a tutorial, playing all kinds of Hendrix for him, warming him up to experience what heights the new album could reach. Initially, the two-year Hendrix immersion fell on deaf ears. But the Jimi epiphany finally occurred in 1996. While driving around Richmond with D’Angelo, and again at his house, Elevado played for him the 1968 double album Electric Ladyland. Finally, the scales fell from D’Angelo’s eyes—or in this case, ears. “It clicked,” Elevado said. “He just flipped out.”4 In Electric Ladyland, D’Angelo heard what Elevado already knew, the through line that led to his unique sound. Hendrix was the 27

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high watermark for D’s own inspirations: Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, and the obvious one, Prince. En route to making Voodoo, D’Angelo aligned himself with another young, Black, sonically nubile musician who wanted to tear down staid, commercial soul music and have something new and worthy grow from fertile soil. This agitator shared D’Angelo’s love with the discography of Prince. Similar to D’Angelo, Ahmir Thompson had been surrounded by music since his childhood. Born into a family of musicians and performers, Thompson’s skills on the drums shined while he was a student at Philadelphia’s High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, where he met a talented yet impetuous rapper and visual artist named Tariq Trotter. Their bond of friendship and shared love of hip-hop and R&B continued beyond high school. Thompson adopted the sobriquet of Questlove, Trotter emerged as Black Thought, and together they formed the seminal hip-hop band the Roots. As the Roots continued to expand its audience through the 1990s, Questlove got frustrated with the state of Black music. The Roots were considered the artsy, cerebral hip-hop choice in an era where “being hard” was rewarded more than making bold choices (or, in the case of fellow Philadelphians DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince—the latter is actor Will Smith—being anodyne and charismatic enough to gain mainstream pop chart success). They were also not known for cranking out hit songs. “[The Roots are] an albums band,” said music critic Robert Christgau. “Hip-hop is the great singles music of the post28

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punk era, and they don’t do that. They’re about endurance, wisdom—not things that hip-hop is especially good at.”5 So when Bob Power, a mentor to Questlove when he started out professionally, told him about the budding greatness of a wunderkind out of Virginia, a snobbish Questlove blew him off when they first met informally. He assumed D’Angelo was yet another tumbleweed blowing across the dusty, parched earth of the R&B wilderness in the mid and late 1990s; Questlove described it as the “height of the shiny suit movement.”6 He realized his error the moment he heard D’Angelo’s music. But Questlove figured out a way to win him over. He used an April Fool’s Day 1996 Roots show at the House of Blues in L.A. as a stealth audition. With D’Angelo in the audience, Questlove described playing what he called a “drunken, Dilla style” on the intro of the song “Four” by Madhouse—a jazz/funk fusion side group led by none other than Prince.7 It worked. A close friendship and musical allegiance was born that night. Another soldier recruited to the Voodoo regimen was Welsh journeyman bassist Pino Palladino. With a career spanning three decades and counting, Palladino is the gold standard—regarded as one of the best bass players in the business. Armed with a reverence for R&B and jazz—and a resume gigging with A-gamers including the Who, Paul Young, Jeff Beck, Elton John, Adele, Eric Clapton, and Don Henley—Palladino, as the phrase goes, has the range. D’Angelo checked out a B.B. King concert in 1997 and met him afterwards. Palladino, who was King’s bassist on tour, played an impromptu jam session of soul classics with D’Angelo on keys. The respect was mutual: the veteran 29

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Palladino (ditto his boss) knocked out by the young man with the chops of an instrumentalist from a foregone era. Meanwhile, D’Angelo had found what he and others described as his own James Jamerson—a nod to the Motown bassist who was one of the fabled session players known as the Funk Brothers. Charlie Hunter, a California-raised guitarist who was a street musician in his younger years, appeared onto D’Angelo’s radar after he caught Hunter performing with his trio on a segment of the Black Entertainment Network (BET) show BET on Jazz. D’Angelo tracked Hunter down and asked him to play on his album. Except … “Honestly,” Hunter admitted to me, “I’m embarrassed to say, but I didn’t know who he was at that time.” Hunter’s insularity in the New York City jazz scene meant that D’Angelo “wasn’t in my universe. He called, and then I did my research.” Other musicians at the top of their game joined the undertaking. From the world of R&B came keyboardist and songwriter James Poyser, singer/songwriter/guitarist Raphael Saadiq, and guitar great Chalmers “Spanky” Alford. In addition to Hunter, jazz was represented by Grammy– award winning trumpeter and prodigy in his own right, Roy Hargrove. As the nucleus was formed with what Elevado described as “symbiotic energy … open to experimentation,”8 D’Angelo needed a lab for his grand experiment. Elevado converting D’Angelo into a Jimi-phile made that decision an easy one. Electric Lady, the recording studio Hendrix built in New York’s Greenwich Village named after the album that 30

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converted D’Angelo to his music, was waiting for him to arrive. Along with Hendrix’s imprimatur, D’Angelo was won over after learning that two classic albums by Stevie Wonder, Music of My Mind and Talking Book, were produced there. Elevado’s yearnings to record old school were about to become reality: And there we were, blowing the dust off the original [Fender] Rhodes [electric piano] that Stevie supposedly recorded with in the early 1970s, and blowing dust off some of the microphones. You have to remember that at the time in the mid 1990s, hardly anybody in soul music was doing any recordings with vintage equipment like that.9 Starting in late 1996, these artists put on a Night of the Cookers that extended to three years. D’Angelo and Questlove bought $2,000 worth of records to play at the studio for research and fun. They would also study “treats” of video performances by music greats brought in by Questlove, including 4,000 episodes of Soul Train he obtained from a trip to Japan. They were having a blast doing the extracurriculars for about a year before hitting the homework assignments of recording actual songs for the album. Some of the “jams” made it onto the album— two excerpts of interludes that transition “One Mo’ Gin” to “The Root,” another following “Feel Like Makin’ Love” overlaid with indistinctive chatter between D’Angelo and writer dream hampton, and “Booty” the light, groove-heavy retro outro from the foreboding, existential doubt raised in cut eleven, “Greatdayindamornin’.” 31

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For [“Booty”], Russell took my drums and fed them through a guitar amp, through a processor, and then back to the [mixing] board. It gave them this unimaginable analog sound, like they were drums coming from 1950.10 It was Elevado’s back-to-the-future ideas like that one which Questlove credits with expanding his horizon on recording and producing music. “If Bob Power taught me how to make pizza,” he said, “it was Russell who taught me endless ways to prepare it.”11 Such freewheeling trial and error became a type of inspirational music playroom for D’Angelo et al. Vocal and instrumental arrangements of songs would be refined, even scrapped and redone, take after take. Questlove remembers D’Angelo routinely discarding “brilliant” work, music that “would have been a career highlight for anyone else.”12 One hundred percent of Voodoo was recorded on tape, which—at a cost of about $200 per reel, each reel containing only 15 minutes worth of tape—resulted in “thousands and thousands” of dollars that Virgin Records had to cover.13 The centerpiece of soul music is its rhythm, the beat, delivered primarily by the bass guitar and the drums. Everyone involved with making Voodoo wanted to throw out the rulebooks in making soul music. One step in accomplishing that was essentially taking a sledgehammer to the standard doctrine of a rhythm section; uniform meters were not welcome. Palladino played his bass lines way back behind the beat, a slurred drum groove laid down by Questlove or D’Angelo, when he played drums himself. Palladino told writer Jason King that when musician friends of his listened 32

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to Voodoo when it was released, they told him they were confused by the weird timing of its songs.14 Hunter said D’Angelo instructed him and the other musicians “to play really behind the beat, so far behind the beat that it sounds uncomfortable. “You feel like you’re playing on another song you’re so behind the beat,” he added, a style Hunter says has direct origins from Cuban music (“so incredibly advanced, creatively”). Hunter said he wasn’t sure if he could pull it off, but he thought the idea was “super cool.” Questlove was more pointed in describing his transformation, saying D’Angelo broke him out (or perhaps, set him free?!) of his strict self-discipline as a drummer. “I’m a time machine, and [D’Angelo] just came and deprogrammed me … I was playing like a metronome for him. He was like ‘Nah, nah. Like, lay back a little bit.’”15 The musicians featured on Voodoo were sculpting sounds to create an intentional sloppiness. Questlove described it as “inebriated execution,”16 that many involved with making the album attributed to the influence of another hip-hop heretic—J Dilla (aka Jay Dee, né James Yancey), member of the Native Tongues collective and visionary producer behind the spacey, schizophrenic music of the group, Slum Village. J Dilla was the vanguard of taking old music and beats, disassembling them, and programming unusual and fascinating sounds, a sort of musical origami. J Dilla was not a credited contributor, but he made his presence felt during the Voodoo sessions at Electric Lady. He brought mix tapes and his own Slum Village demos to the studio, encouraging his peers to do a deep dive in deconstructing soul and hip33

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hop music. The musicians involved with Voodoo had to pass “Dilla 101,” Alan Leeds said, half jokingly, before being ready and worthy to play on the album. Leeds detailed J Dilla’s imprint on the album: “How he played with time signatures, and how he would have his recordings behind the beat where it almost sounds like mistakes. Stretching time, that was unheard of.” The messiest example of the inebriated execution Questlove described can be heard in cut six, “Chicken Grease.” This is where the hours of free jams coagulate into 4 minutes of pure funk. An outgrowth of the musicians performing Curtis Mayfield’s “Mother’s Son” in the studio, the song has no real bridge or intro. It’s driven purely by a groove as heavy as lead, a hat tip to Parliament’s 1978 release “Flash Light,” and the band’s head funkmaster, George Clinton.17 D’Angelo was not the intended beneficiary of “Chicken Grease.” Questlove and Poyser came up with the song during a session with rapper Common, who was recording his album, Like Water for Chocolate, at Electric Lady. When D’Angelo eventually heard it, he couldn’t let it go. He coveted the Poyser/Questlove stank for himself, knowing he could do it justice. “Common doesn’t know what to do with that song,” D’Angelo told Questlove. “That’s the funk I need. You know good and well that’s the funk I need.”18 The title evokes the sounds of fried chicken cooking in the frying pan, the grease popping, the sizzle of the flour as it browns the skin. The song itself name-checks Crisco, the lard that many cooks (including my Alabama-born grandmother) use to fry their favorite foods. The metaphor continues as the musicians stay cooking until the funk is burned to a crisp, 34

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the grease yet another reference to the off-balance, yet in sync, rhythm section, what Raphael Saadiq described as “way back in the pocket,” evoking a “rubber band feeling.”19 The players locked into a groove that feels good while sounding slightly discombobulated. The song, like Voodoo itself, is an oxymoron—imperfections that mesh perfectly. “Chicken Grease” is a signifier of the juke joints, the sweaty house parties, the grinding under the hot sun at summer barbecues. But the title had its own origin according to Questlove: music theory code words used by Prince “when he wants his guitarist to play a 9th minor chord while playing 16th notes.”20 The song is also most demonstrative of an issue some fans have with D’Angelo—the lack of decipherability of what he’s singing. There are moments in “Chicken Grease” and other tracks on Voodoo, when a listener may need to refer to the lyrics printed in the CD booklet or album sleeve. The syrupy vocalization—what could be dismissed or demeaned as “mumbling”—is both a reflection of D’Angelo’s musical and cultural canon and a rejection of Eurocentric standards. “Even if I’m mumbling,” he says, “I like to keep a lot of that initial thing that comes out … cause that’s the spirit.”21 His occasional lack of enunciation, said Alisha Lola Jones, assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Indiana University, is D’Angelo engaging in “vocalized, textural embedding.” Jones describes the practice as part of an “African-derived aesthetic” found in gospel, jazz, R&B, even dubstep music. Hard-to-hear lyrics aside, D’Angelo’s sharp way with words equals his abilities as a musician and composer. He makes it plain that he does not privilege music over lyrical content: 35

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Lyrics are very important. It’s like a marriage. To me … I don’t mean to be sexist about it. To me, the music is the man (the bridegroom) and the lyrics are the bride. That union is important.22 Song number nine, “Spanish Joint,” is in this writer’s opinion Voodoo’s most lucid symbiosis of lyrics and music. The title pronounces its lineage: a Latin-infused rhythm (accented with congas played by Puerto Rican percussionist Giovanni Hidalgo) with a bass line intro played by Charlie Hunter on his custom eight-string guitar, of which the top three are bass strings. The bass skips along, melding into a guitar chord held for 6 and 1/8 notes between the first three measures: take those as your cues to dip or caress your dance partner if you have one. Cowritten by Roy Hargrove, his horn arrangement breaks out dramatically into a threepart harmony at the end of the choruses that is pure tribute to Arturo Sandoval. Elevado said he paid extra attention to how Hargrove’s parts were recorded and mixed for the album: Roy’s presence is so strong that if it’s too loud it takes away from what Roy’s actually playing. So we were really careful about how we placed him in the mix. I used a lot of ribbon mikes, old RCA mikes that weren’t in the best condition  … It sounded perfect for his style. I tried to boost him when I felt like it was right to highlight him. Most times, he played right underneath the mix.23 Unlike the majority of the recording process for Voodoo, the assembly of “Spanish Joint” was especially agile. The

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music was arranged in one hour and recorded on the first take (except for Hidalgo and Hargrove. Their parts were recorded later). “[D’Angelo] was very specific about what he wanted me to play on that one,” Hunter said. “He taught me that song and we just played through it.” “Spanish Joint” was recorded during Hunter’s last day at Electric Lady. The song’s technical feat was matched by D’Angelo’s luminescent vocals, as he made a convincing treatise against negativity. He chastises the subject of his ire for not letting go of negativity. What most listeners didn’t know when the album came out, myself included, was that the frustration D’Angelo expressed was directed at the woman he was seeing while making Voodoo. Gina Figueroa is an actress, singer, and songwriter who was a fan of D’Angelo’s music prior to meeting him in 1997. The self-tagged “Nuyorican”—a native New Yorker of Puerto Rican heritage—was introduced to D’Angelo by Dominique Trenier, who also managed her at the time. Figueroa hung out with D’Angelo and his squad at Electric Lady during part of the Voodoo sessions, recollecting the time as “magical.” Figueroa said D’Angelo disclosed to her that she was a “key influence” in how Voodoo turned out. “For me, just sitting there and hearing D put down his vocals and play music was heaven to me,” Figueroa told me via email. “I was so enamored with him. I loved hearing him play the keys and improvise his soulful vocals. His process was raw and organic. “That album is phenomenal,” she raved. Figueroa painted D’Angelo as “fine, humble, and charming with an element of dark mystery. He was quietly electric.” 37

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They shared music they wrote, went dancing, scarfed down burgers together and for a time, he treated Figueroa “like a queen.” But their relationship headed for choppy waters not long after it started. “We were madly in love and having difficulty navigating such emotion during the height of his career,” Figueroa said. “It was rough … we were stupid together sometimes … immature and jealous. We were really co-dependent.” Similar to his previous paramour, Angie Stone, Figueroa talked about feeling overwhelmed by her intense love for D’Angelo, and that she also halted her professional pursuits while she was with him, a decision she regrets. In Figueroa’s case, it was for personal reasons: I lost the drive to continue creating music and stopped acting because my mother was on drugs, and I was spending a lot of time with D. I hid in our relationship. I lost focus and then D and I started falling apart, so I retreated. I placed too much focus on D and not myself. Dominique Trenier had a front row seat to their fireworks. “She’s ‘Spanish Joint’,” Trenier divulged in 2016. “They were tumultuous, right? If you read the lyrics—‘whenever it rains I feel this way … I ain’t got nothing to do with you’—[D’Angelo is] basically saying, I’m getting rid of you, I’m never gonna speak to you again, ever, but it’s gonna be a good thing.”24 Trenier nicknamed the pair after an infamously doomed couple in modern music history: “We were called ‘Sid and Nancy’,” Figueroa revealed. If you don’t get the reference, it didn’t end well for Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. Spungen, who had a notoriously 38

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erratic and drug-fueled relationship with the Sex Pistols lead singer, died of a stab wound in 1978, found in the bathroom of a New York City hotel room she shared with Vicious. It was never determined whether Vicious murdered his girlfriend, if he stabbed her accidently, or if Spungen stabbed herself in a suicide attempt. Vicious died of a heroin overdose in February 1979, four months after Spungen, while awaiting trial for murder. Listening to “Spanish Joint,” you can sense that it stems from noxiousness toward his subject, surmising it was far less violent in nature than Vicious and Spungen’s damaged coupling. Frayed bonds aren’t limited to romantic partners. The fourth verse of “Spanish Joint” was the lightning that struck me at first listen; if you aren’t familiar with this lyric, I urge you to get your hands on the Voodoo CD booklet or look it up online. As someone with a person in my life that I love dearly, but who wears pain and resentment like a warm coat in winter, I found immense comfort hearing D’Angelo sing that fourth verse. The first time I heard this song in my Brooklyn apartment was the moment when I contemplated that D’Angelo had the gift of telepathy. D’Angelo’s directive in “Spanish Joint” is to refuse to see life as a glass half-empty and wishes other doleful souls find their own sincerity in the light, a sentiment informed by his on-and-off again, rollercoaster relationship with Figueroa that lasted under a year. “Spanish Joint” may be the most sensual pep talk put to music. Personal drama aside, in “Spanish Joint” D’Angelo grants himself—and by extension, you—permission and freedom to pursue whatever calling burns in your soul. 39

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Whether it’s people or situations, you have to get around them and do you. “Spanish Joint” remains a germane memo to keep your head up and that umbrella handy. The track’s theme of positivity and perseverance eschews banal sentiment or pie-in-the-sky proclamations, and it speaks beyond the personal tumult that apparently inspired it.

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4 The Means of Survival

Life for most African Americans manifests itself into a push and pull—living fully present in the body you have, while shielding it from threats both institutional and personal. At minimum, a Black person aspires to loosen the grip of racism and historical degradation, even if it’s a temporary respite— loving your family, your friends, your partner, yourself, while living in a country that despises you as it builds upon the foundation laid by your antecedents. African Americans have navigated this complicated maze for centuries and that search for direction and safety continues to this day. D’Angelo was working these things out in Voodoo. He accomplished success and acclaim at a young age and was fighting to maintain his integrity in an industry that has used and discarded many a Black singer. He loved his Blackness in a way that ran deeper than marketing and record charts. D’Angelo and his collaborators made Voodoo with what can be described, borrowing the words of playwright Lorraine Hansberry, as sighted eyes and feeling heart.

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Voodoo was destined to be that album that is both emotional and “masculine,” vulnerable and angry, demonstrating duality as it resides in a Black man’s psyche. The album’s opener, “Playa Playa,” on its surface, alludes to a pickup basketball game. It ramps up into a boast of top-flight musicianship and a callout to all of the other “players” who are unimaginative and lesser skilled, telling them they will succumb to D’Angelo and company’s superior talents. The title and concept of the song were inspired by “I Found My Smile Again,” D’Angelo’s musical contribution to the 1996 film Space Jam starring NBA Hall of Fame player Michael Jordan. “I Found My Smile Again” shares a similar drum groove with “Playa Playa,” but its upbeat tone, created to fit the soundtrack of a family-friendly film, had very little in common with its more down and dirty offshoot. The song begins with vodou chanting from a male voice and the blows of a wooden instrument being struck in a twothree-stroke ostinato, underlying the chants. The sounds float from left speaker to right, surrounding the listener in a spiritual experience. The audible, hollow strikes transitions into Questlove hitting three rim clicks to establish the tempo, then finger snaps, keyboards, and bass playing in unison, the horn section courtesy of Roy Hargrove kicks in, and finally, multilayered tracks of D’Angelo, both talking and singing, growing louder with each measure. The song’s key declaration: they’re the best in the game, the players number one. This association of sports and music is in no way unique; athletes and musicians both rely on rhythm; basketball in particular shares a harmonic synchrony like a band; and those 42

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of the highest level of ability in both fields are unabashed in projecting their talent as ultramasculine.1 The celebration of basketball, as both an accessible activity in African American neighborhoods and a way to assert dominance on the concrete courts, lends itself to the taunting phrasing in the song’s refrain. Like the best ballers on the court, D’Angelo is calling dibs on who elicits excitement in your soul, and it’s done in the very first song. When you call yourself and your critically acclaimed, world-renowned musicians “number one,” is it talking shit if it’s true? Like Miles Davis playing with John Coltrane in a smoky jazz club during the 1950s, D’Angelo surrounded himself with formidable talents and like minds to participate in his lofty creations, the chemistry of game meeting game. The connector in this album is honoring his truth and the truth told by his musical forbears. For D’Angelo, pouring out libations on the ground is the same pouring out his emotions on analog tape. On the album’s following track, D’Angelo’s braggadocio on “Playa Playa” gives way to contempt and uncertainty as he takes aim at an exploitive culture and industry in which artists work to thrive and survive concurrently. The second cut on Voodoo, “Devil’s Pie,” segues from D’Angelo being brash to being burdened. It is a testimonial from a musical artist who embraces a genre that extols materialism. “Devil’s Pie” draws a line in the sand, pushing back against what Questlove describes as a “money hungry jiggafied state of the world … and how the devil will destroy those who will sell their souls to him.”2 43

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The track can also be adopted as a rebuke against underpaying corporate bosses, a corrupt criminal justice system, schools that fail to educate, and a lack of resolution of a country founded on stolen land, erected by stolen bodies and exploited labor. Pressure brought about by race, class, and limited legal opportunities for Black men to be prosperous are key ingredients for a devil’s pie. Track two from Voodoo easily could have been the personal theme song for a morally centered Bigger Thomas. Similar to “Chicken Grease,” “Devil’s Pie” was not a song originally created for D’Angelo. DJ Premier, one half of the hip-hop duo Gang Starr, brought D’Angelo the underlying tracks after an artist he was working with, the rapper Canibus, rejected it. Over a cavernous musical bed, “Devil’s Pie” sings in first person about lying in the bed he made, which could be in a prison cell or a stark graveyard. D’Angelo’s voice is at a low volume as he describes screaming in the spinning sphere— which can serve as a dual reference to a chaotic world at large as well as the turmoil in his own life and mind. He does not put himself above the temptation of wanting a slice for himself; he experiences pleasure from the very things that offend his belief system. In “Devil’s Pie,” D’Angelo brings a stinging criticism to other artists, particularly in the hip-hop arena, as he cops to his own doubts and self-criticism. Samples integrated into “Devil’s Pie” are sly nods to the inner struggle D’Angelo describes. “Big Daddy Anthem” is similar in concept. Shabazz the Disciple commands you to cast out wicked spirits, while Naturel paints a binary reality: you’ve either made it, or you die trying. Ini’s “Fakin’ Jax” 44

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calls out the money and fame-hungry emperors wearing no clothes (“jax” meaning that you’re very successful and sexually desirable, the man that is the center of attention3). But Fat Joe’s “Success” is probably the most conspicuous ode to street capitalism. In Fat Joe’s world, hustling, money, and sex are intertwined. A key line from “Success” centered in “Devil’s Pie” can be interpreted as a white flag, resignation to being trapped in the never-ending hustle. Is the takeaway that no matter how hard you try and how badly you want to walk the straight and narrow, the devil’s hex will win out? These themes were tantamount in the 1999 feature film Belly, which features “Devil’s Pie” in its soundtrack. The film stars rappers Nas and DMX as drug traffickers and dealers Sincere and Tommy, respectively. “Devil’s Pie” is heard for the first time during a montage of Tommy enthusiastically preparing bricks of heroin to be transported to Nebraska and sold on the streets of Omaha. At this point, Sincere is hyped about making the big score, but seeds of doubt about being in this life soon begin to grow. By the end of the film, when an elegiac, a cappella version of “Devil’s Pie” is played, Tommy experiences an awakening of consciousness when he defies an order from a corrupt law enforcement official to assassinate a prominent and influential Harlem minister, the portrayal echoing the murder of Malcolm X in 1965. (The lyrics in “Devil’s Pie” include a callout to the Five Percent Nation, created by Clarence 13X after he split with the Nation of Islam.) Sincere, by contrast, has already left the hustle behind and moved to Africa with his girlfriend and young child. With the music stripped, nothing masks D’Angelo’s 45

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concern for himself and by extension, these characters. Unfortunately, the song is better than the film it serves. Jesus asserted his anger at the money changers and the O’Jays harmonized about the pitfalls of the almighty dollar in “For the Love of Money.” There have been warnings throughout the time of man about how money—and by extension, an unfair system emanating from unchecked capitalism—can be a destructive force, even in its necessity for everyday living. D’Angelo saw this from different angles: the perspective of a Black boy raised in working-class areas of Richmond who became a successful and wealthy recording artist; a single man with temptations; a new father with responsibilities. His choice to pursue secular (nonreligious) music was seen by some in his Holiness church community as its own devil’s pie—D’Angelo turning his back on the church. “I got that speech so many times,” D’Angelo said. “‘Don’t go do the devil’s music,’ blah blah blah.”4 A singer trained in gospel music choosing to go secular and mainstream happens frequently. Many of soul music’s most revered vocalists started in the church: Aretha, Sam Cooke, and Whitney Houston are three who top that list. That was irrelevant to some of D’Angelo’s family members, who pressured him to stay in the fold, as either a minister or gospel performer. One relative who stood in his corner was his grandmother, who D’Angelo affectionately called “Miss Alberta.” She championed her grandson’s ambitions in popular music stalwartly. There’s even a term for that situation. “Folks like [D’Angelo] in the vernacular might be referred to as ‘playing church’,” said ethnomusicologist Alisha Lola Jones, “because 46

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he has not prioritized an ongoing display of his connection to the church and Black Christian religiosity.” The irony of that concept is that gospel music is the underpinning of D’Angelo’s sound, and “Devil’s Pie” is no exception. The song, in particular, is an invocation for strength to fend off evildoers, including the wickedness he sees in the mirror. Vocal scratches and a heavy rhythm section intro “Devil’s Pie.” Floating over the clamorous preamble and popping in throughout the song is a staccato high-pitch sound that crescendos, an uncredited sample from a 1967 instrumental titled “Jericho Jerk.” It sounds like the musical equivalent of a waterfall, symbolizing the fates of too many African American men swept under by violence, drugs, and incarceration. The musical structure of “Devil’s Pie,” with a bass riff that grumbles along like a subway moving down the track, undergirds D’Angelo’s crowded (and at times indecipherable) vocals and scattered samples. D’Angelo is just as pissed as Gil Scott-Heron on “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” but more uncertain about his future. Instead of flautist Brian Jackson underlining Scott-Heron’s rage, the signifiers in “Devil’s Pie” are the chaotic voices and sounds nimbly created and mixed by cowriter and coproducer DJ Premier. D’Angelo knows that it can be him … in jail, in economic or political struggle, in quietus. Nationally, African Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at a rate five times higher than white citizens. African Americans in his home state of Virginia are 19 percent of its population, but make up more than half of its prisoners.5,6 Even with his fame, success, and talent, D’Angelo does not exclude himself from the pitfalls 47

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of life as an African American man. The fears he extols in “Devil’s Pie” come to fruition a few years after its release, with D’Angelo’s descent into drug use and criminal conduct. The music industry is arguably its own devil’s pie. “Securing the bag” versus protecting your creative integrity has a particular, gnawing resonance for Black recording artists. There is a long history of African American singers and songwriters who were denied their rightful royalties. Regardless of how “evil” the pie may be, in this context “Devil’s Pie” also becomes a nod to the inequality of the music industry, evoking the innumerable Black artists who were screwed out of their fair number of slices. As musical creators become more dependent on commercial and film licensing in an era where artists receive only slivers of revenue from the most popular form of consuming music so far in the twenty-first century (streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music), can any level of creative purity be sustained? D’Angelo himself describes “Devil’s Pie” as a blues song, in the spirit of a melody sung by a “chain gang. Or like a field of slaves … picking whatever the fuck massa had us picking.”7 In this case, the wardens or masters are the CEOs of the record labels and streaming companies, and the artists are those who toil in the fields with little power over their craft and their careers. D’Angelo is also singing about the implicit chains that bind him, smelted from the heavy weight of fame itself: the demands from the press with whom he rarely interacts and even from his fans who may desire more emotional bandwidth than he is ready to extol.

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“What does it mean to sell your soul to the devil?” asked Imani Perry, professor of African American studies at Princeton University, when I spoke to her about Voodoo. “In order to get a piece of the pie, what’s the spiritual cost? And the whole album in some ways is this invocation of these deep, spiritual questions.” Perry encapsulates “Devil’s Pie” as the conundrum of hip-hop itself. D’Angelo and other Black artists depend on capitalist America. Inversely, they use their commoditized blackness to critique and push back against a system and country built on the exploitation of African Americans.8 On a personal level, D’Angelo reached a point in his career where he had access to pretty much anything he wanted. His first album was a commercial success. Musicians of all ages and genres admired his talent and yearned to work with him. (“D is better than all of us,” proclaimed Questlove more than a decade after Voodoo’s release.9) Women desired him and wanted to be with him. These are the typical rewards bestowed upon the victors of capitalism and fan culture. That kind of privilege can be blinding to anyone, even staggering. But what’s scarier—knowing that you have an existence that most twentysomething Black men only fantasize about? Or that all of those perks can be lost when the hits stop coming, and don’t mean shit when a cop pulls you over in your luxury ride? How do you square that circle? If Voodoo has an anchor song that represents the main artery of emotions, energy, and creative conflict of D’Angelo and his contributors, my vote is cast for “Devil’s Pie.” The album is D’Angelo’s attempt to have his cake and eat it too. “Devil’s Pie” reveals an artist’s internal struggle of making 49

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radio-friendly music that sells versus pushing the envelope with brazen creativity. Voodoo was that challenge to the industry, a record Questlove said was “too extreme to play the middle of the fence.”10 It was a call to his fans to catch up and to many of his African American peers to refrain from being the devil’s playthings to score a dollar. The gauntlet was thrown directly in the original Voodoo liner notes. Rap and hip-hop were once creative outlets for Black artists to make pointed commentary against legal and economic structures that oppressed African Americans. Written by spoken word poet and recording artist Saul Williams, the liner notes take aim at rappers for caring more about making money than curating originality. In one especially prescient sentence, Williams chastised his and D’Angelo’s peers who “seem to idolize Donald Trump more than Sly Stone.”11 That line made me laugh, and even in 2000, the sarcasm was keen. Williams spoke the truth about the numerous MCs who name-checked Trump in an aspirational hat tip to his wealth,12 and in Kanye West’s case, continues to associate with him. They chose to ignore, among other actions, Trump’s open call to execute the “Central Park Five”—five teenage boys: four African American and one Latino—who were convicted of the 1989 rape and brutal assault of a woman jogging in New York City’s Central Park, despite the lack of concrete physical evidence tying the boys to the scene of the crime. The men were exonerated in 2002, after spending periods between six and thirteen years in prison. We all know what happened in 2016. A rancid devil’s pie was baked, with ingredients like racism, Islamophobia, 50

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misogyny, and voter suppression. What popped out of the oven was Donald Trump, President of the United States. The temptations we face in our lives test our ethics and well-being. Our choices may be convenient or pleasurable in the moment we make them, but could wreak havoc down the line. The devil’s pie is not a dessert. It is the main course, and we have all taken a bite. Pride is a universal feeling: of self, family, community, country, and accomplishments. But it is something that ebbs and flows like the tide. We all have our moments of doubt. While “Playa Playa” shouts out confidence (even arrogance), and “Devil’s Pie” demonstrates anger, “The Line” channels the masculine energy into an extension of friendship and protection, of self, and of those closest to him, fusing a patina of blues to a hip-hop drumbeat. When D’Angelo sings about holding on to his pride in “The Line,” it is hard not to read this as a carryover of the concern in “Devil’s Pie” about losing one’s integrity. D’Angelo said he wrote “The Line” as a response to the pressure he felt in making Voodoo. “It was important to me to hold on to what I was believing in … I was just trying to make some good music, some good songs.”13 Like “Devil’s Pie,” “The Line” can be interpreted with a dual meaning: D’Angelo staying true to himself as an artist, as well as exalting solidarity toward those he cares about. The guitar arpeggio that runs up the octaves is a metaphor for hope, swimming upwards and breaking through the surface, instead of drowning or at best treading water. The song, and by extension the entire album, is D putting 51

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himself on the line, something that Black men do every day, regardless of wealth or accomplishments. Whatever comes: bad reviews, weak sales, personal turbulence, only God will be his rightful judge. In juxtaposition to the arguably aggressive energy of “The Line,” “Devil’s Pie,” and “Playa Playa,” “Greatdayindamornin’” is less boasting and more resignation of pressing on as a complicated man in Black skin. D’Angelo sings of how the daily crawl of survival wears him down, but that he can’t stop striving. Given the suggestions of death and the need to find winning angles to play, we could interpret the speaker of this song as someone who works in an illegal but likely lucrative trade (no judgment is passed), but it could also speak to the many working Black men who may feel they take two steps at a time only to continue to lose ground on the social and economic ladder. “Greatdayindamornin’” is about making it day after day, not knowing what the future brings and that could be no future at all. A coiled rhythm line once again trailing the beat (Questlove on drums, Hunter on bass and guitar) evokes the sensation of someone stumbling through life. Listening to that song has given me a feeling of being unsteady while attempting to walk a straight line. The layered vocals over the lightness of the organ convey the rejuvenating shine of the morning sun as the reward for hanging in there yet another day and starting the hustle all over again. When D’Angelo sings about how he continues to yearn for his great morning, it is clear that it has eluded him thus far, but the search continues. As money emerges as the end game and the singular measure of masculinity 52

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among peers, Black men may feel they have no choice but to play a high-stakes game of life. Within struggling Black neighborhoods, hustling, lying, and cheating are forgiven as long as Black men come home with money in their pockets.14 Of course, “Greatdayindamornin’” is also an empathetic wish that rings universally, as well as a narrowly focused rumination on Black male life. I listen to the song and I can’t help but heed its message to stare down your foes and roadblocks and keep on keepin’ on. No matter who you are, living in the light or working in the shadows, looking for that great day in the morning can sometimes be a Sisyphean effort. In theme, I consider “Greatdayindamornin’” a companion piece to Erykah Badu’s “Otherside of the Game,” from her 1997 album, Baduizm. Badu calls out the woman’s perspective in the survival game, singing about her character’s own conflicted feelings about her significant other who she explicitly tags as a broker in the illegal underground. She loves him because he provides for her and, as described in the song, her unborn child, even though she doesn’t necessarily love how he earns his money. “Otherside of the Game” shares two cowriters with the Voodoo cadre, Questlove and James Poyser, but there are differences in the musical tableaux of the two songs. “Otherside” is a more robust, jazz-oriented song, while “Greatday” is funky, more streamlined, and has an accessible, sing-along chorus with a staggered vocal arrangement similar to “The Root.” Both songs paint multifaceted pictures of what the hustle feels like, taking the listener a step beyond media stereotypes. 53

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“Playa Playa,” “Greatday,” “The Line,” and “Devil’s Pie” all express the emotional dynamics of Black male life in its harsh realities, triumphs, and contradictions. “Devil’s Pie,” in particular, ponders the cost of monetary (as well as corporeal) pursuits to the Black man’s psyche—a self-conscious theme that runs through Voodoo and D’Angelo’s career as a whole. Together, these songs articulate with care the fraught space in which many Black men are forced to live—between bravado and mortal fear—and highlights the cognitive split between survivalist self-protection on the one side and embracing their most sensitive and closely held feelings on the other. The idea of masculinity is constructed to convey strength. The ideal of making music is to convey the truth. That truth can contradict the façade and create a more comprehensive and realistic study of what it means to be Black and male in the United States. Vulnerability and fortitude are not mutually exclusive. African American men can and should embrace their yin and yang. Voodoo is a musical example of how it can be done in equal force; no masks are worn in this space.

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5 The Feminine Mystique

Love has always been an important subject in popular music. Relationships, when people come together and when couples drift apart, are a major source of inspiration for songwriters. The tightrope that can be love played a part in D’Angelo creating Voodoo. Loving women, making love to women, the power that women have over him were all referenced on the album. He welcomes the feminine within him, not afraid to express emotions typically not associated with straight men. D’Angelo actively rejects what sociologist Michael Eric Dyson refers to as “femiphobia.” This embrace of the feminine and pushback against oppressive masculinity are also addressed in the Voodoo album notes: If we are to exist as men in this new world many of us must learn to embrace and nurture that which is feminine with all of our hearts (he-art). But is there any room for artistry in hip-hop’s decadent man-sion?1 As hip-hop (and its Caribbean and Southern U.S.-influenced offspring of trap music) grew in popularity, soul music followed

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its lead and cleaved farther and farther away from the tender emotions expressed in ballads and slow jams. The apparent default in hip-hop became a juncture of hypermasculinity and its counterpart, misogyny: calling women “bitches,” “hos,” “chickenheads,” and “thots” (an acronym for “that ho over there”). Disrespect toward women is baked into the cake of this genre and bled into R&B as male vocalists became more boastful about conquests and ribald sexual technique than real love and intimacy. In the 1990s and early aughts, Marvin Gaye’s I Want You became quaint, replaced by songs like the one about a woman reminding R. Kelly of a Jeep. “Have some class,” D’Angelo said in 1999. “I don’t know how many motherfuckers gonna tell me, ‘I’m going to lick you up and down.’ If I hear that in one more song …”2 The righteous proclamation in the album notes and D’Angelo’s complaints to the press apparently skipped over track three on Voodoo. “Left & Right” featured brash raps bookending the song delivered by Method Man and Redman. A blunt and bellicose Redman brags near the end of the song about having his way with “brown sugar” in the recording studio. This was an intentional musical marriage of trying to seduce a woman while objectifying said woman, which may not have been too off the mark by the songwriters considering that the song was written about an exotic dancer.3 “Left & Right” was D’Angelo’s (a former MC himself) most blatant attempt to bridge his love for hip-hop and soul. It is a sexy dance track for the club intended to double as a banger for the hip-hop heads. Questlove outlined the process of making “Left & Right” in a prerelease essay for Okayplayer, writing that the song 56

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provided a space on the album for D’Angelo to explore a “rebel danger thing,” inspired in part by The Notorious B.I.G.’s posthumous classic, Life After Death. Who would be tapped to perform the rap was up for grabs at first: Common and the Roots’ Black Thought were considered not famous enough for Virgin Records at the time. Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest recorded a verse no one liked (he is credited as a cowriter of the song). Manager Dominique Trenier lobbied for a spitter with a more potent sound and tougher image. That equation resulted in the explicit verses from Method Man and Redman winning out. (A “clean” version of the song was released to radio and used in the music video.)4 It’s hard to listen to “Left & Right” and not move your body while entertaining hedonistic fantasies as D’Angelo suggests foreplay that includes a round of cunnilingus on the honey of his dreams, a sex act for which he’s totally down.5 The raps, however, made me—a self-described Black feminist—a tad uncomfortable. I continue to have a pang of guilt for loving the song so much; when Voodoo first came out, “Left & Right” was my favorite track on the album. Many female hip-hop fans recognize the conundrum of enjoying the music while routinely stepping around the land mines of sexist lyrics and imagery. Questlove himself admitted that the objectification expressed by Redman and Method Man “cut like a knife. [D’Angelo] felt it too.”6 The rest of the sex and romance portfolio on Voodoo champions both, abundantly and intrepidly. D’Angelo approaches Black women as sustenance to his everyday existence. Two photos in the CD booklet feature D’Angelo posed with a gaggle of young Black women of all hues. 57

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What were strikingly absent in the stills were women with a larger body type similar to his ex-partner, Angie Stone, contradicting D’Angelo’s expressed love of the “thickness” of Southern women in particular.7 Women of the diaspora who work their voodoo on him are essential ingredients to his homebrew of musical ecstasy and emotional tumult. If songs like “Devil’s Pie” and “Greatdayindamornin’” are D’Angelo making an endof-the-century commentary in the vein of Native Son, the following songs are his equivalent to the love poems of Pablo Neruda. It all starts with what sounds like a kiss. A sigh. Soft voices. A creaking bed? Underneath the organ intro of “One Mo’ Gin,” at a volume so low you have to squint to hear it, a woman responds to a man’s sweet nothings. We listen to this glimpse of D’Angelo catching up with a woman from his past. “It’s good seeing you.” The bass, seeping out like molasses, grows louder with the organ. The tempo, set at about 64 bpm, slows the song down to a seductive crawl. “I missed you.” “I missed you too.” “You seeing anyone?” Are we eavesdropping through paper-thin walls? Or were we invited into this amatory place? Fragments of words are heard, but the totality of what is said and what they’re doing is left to the imagination. The mystery is part of the enticement to the women who hear this and wish they were the recipients of this heart-to-heart. 58

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Or was that just me? We hear “One Mo’ Gin” transitioning into the instrumental chorus, and D’Angelo’s staccato organ playing brings us out of the haze. Near the one-minute mark, he says softly, “Sho’ is glad to see you here baby.” As “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)” remains the album’s bellwether of D’Angelo’s carnal intensity, this brief snapshot of sultriness is rarely discussed in the media. The interlude’s limited audibility makes it no less vivid than “Untitled.” He goes on to sing about their time together, her physical features, and how no woman he has met since measures up to her. With the chorus splitting into two- and three-part harmonies, “One Mo’ Gin” is a showcase for D’Angelo’s singing chops and his deftness at vocal arrangements. The song is also buoyed by the fat, twenty-thousand-leaguesunder-the-sea prowess of Pino Palladino, the physicality of his bass licks adding subtext to the song’s palpable sensuality. The vocals end with a triad of dramatic harmonies flipping from left to right speaker as the last round fades out. The song’s ending is a hint to how this woman upends his emotionally, floating back to what they were and to the present and what he lost. The memory of this woman may have always been in the back of D’Angelo’s mind, shaken loose by the sight of her. It’s a feeling understood by romantics for centuries; this mystery woman is the one that got away, the one who will haunt him to his grave. The perfect song to follow “One Mo’ Gin,” titled “The Root,” takes the concept of being haunted by a person one step further. D’Angelo sings about how his attraction to a woman has shaken him to his core—the root—to the point 59

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where he has no will or ability to fight back. Gina Figueroa said she’s the woman in question. D’Angelo’s lyrics to “The Root” manifested his second attempt to cast Figueroa out of his head and his bed. Unlike the spontaneous jams at Electric Lady or D’Angelo’s meticulous ideas that he wanted to create in the studio (like those on “Spanish Joint”), “The Root” originated from the mind and hands of Charlie Hunter. He said he introduced the main parts of the song to D’Angelo: the progression, the chord changes, the bass line, and the guitar solo. The flourishes and vocal arrangements grew from there; Hunter again played guitar and bass with his custom eight-string, D’Angelo played drums and keyboards. The arrangements on “The Root” reflect the chaos and emotional intimacy of the song. Hunter’s solo during the song’s middle interlude is engineered to play backwards, the brainchild of Russell Elevado. Hunter, with no vanity about his solo rendered unrecognizable, said he “loved it.” This reverse-solo played under D’Angelo’s vocals creates a fun house, his love/lust/need for this woman confusing him further. More than forty tracks of D’Angelo singing live were recorded for “The Root”—sixteen tracks per part, each part laid over and mixed with other sixteen-track vocal strands,8 building a wall of sound with D’Angelo’s voice. Elevado called D’Angelo’s vocal performance on this song “angelic.”9 More than any other song on Voodoo, “The Root” exists squarely in the sphere of African mystical traditions and D’Angelo’s Pentecostal upbringing. Both vodun (a more Afrocentrically proper term that has various spellings) and Pentecostalism share their embrace of the “spirit” as a 60

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center for divine belief and worship. Followers of vodun— an intertwinement of indigenous West African practices and Roman Catholic symbolism imposed onto slaves by their masters—believe that a soul can leave the body during dreams and while possessed, also known as being “mounted by the spirit.” Pentecostalism believes in the Holy Spirit, but in vodun where possession (as defined by Eurocentric religions) is welcomed and valued, Christianity considers possession an act of evil, a demonic spirit that needs to be cast out of its host. The Holiness church, a strand of Pentecostalism in which D’Angelo was raised, takes on aspects of both: speaking in tongues and other supernatural acts are embraced as part of baptism in the Holy Spirit. The title itself alludes to deeply indigenous mystical beliefs. A turn of phrase for a person who suffers from bad luck or feels out of sorts physically or otherwise is that someone “put roots” on you. When D’Angelo claims a woman stripped him of his mortal powers while leaving a dirty mark on his heart, the first part hints at vodun (the “soul leaving his body”) and the latter at the burden of this woman’s omnipresent power (if not evil, definitely an onerous spirit) that needs to be exorcised from his frame. That sounds about right. “He actually thought I put a curse on him, which was so far from the truth,” said Figueroa. “I was into Santeria … Yoruba. He was leery of it. All I did was break up with him and all hell broke loose.” As the “The Root” implies, Figueroa is literally the “Spanish girl who made him crazy.”10 “The Root,” says ethnomusicologist Loren Kajikawa, “enacts a trajectory of spirit possession that simulates a powerful experience of sensual, religious ecstasy.”11 The 61

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minimalist instrumentation engulfs the listener, thanks to the production skills of D’Angelo and Elevado. This iteration of spiritual zenith, however, is despair. Love that is arduous tends to hurt and exhaust. The vulnerability and relinquishing of control depicted in “The Root” is reminiscent of another Black man’s ode to a submissive (but unabashedly euphoric) relationship, Bill Withers’s 1972 hit, “Use Me.” “The Root” ends with D’Angelo singing every part of a spellbinding sequence as he repeats the chorus and adlibs his turmoil in the catches. Continuing in the tradition of worship, he is his own call and response, as the listener falls down the rabbit hole with him. Kajikawa expounds on D’Angelo’s vocal climax as a “decenter[ing of] his musical presence, modeling a form of desire consistent with what we might imagine possession to feel like.”12 Succinctly, his braided, merry-go-round vocals conjure the maelstrom that was the coupling of D’Angelo and Figueroa. I was listening to the “The Root” one afternoon in my car during the time I was writing this book. It was during the final interpolation of vocals when I ran a red light. I hadn’t even noticed the light was red. For sure, I was a bad driver at that moment and lucky that no collision or injuries occurred, but was I temporarily possessed? This would be an ideal place in the book to point out that for all of the kudos D’Angelo gets for his musicianship and songwriting ability, in my opinion, he doesn’t get enough as a singer. His church choir training shows; his passion and ability to switch from pillow softness to full-on gospel wailing makes the songs on Voodoo that much richer and multidimensional, on record and live in concert. 62

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“One Mo’ Gin,” “Spanish Joint,” and “The Root” are probably the best showcases of D’Angelo as a vocalist: his adroit command of harmonies, pitch, and back phrasing. The vocal layering throughout Voodoo verges on immaculate. It ranks head-to-head with the imaginings Brian Wilson achieved with Pet Sounds. At the time of this recording, D’Angelo also had an enviable range: a tenor with a vocal span of three-and-a-half octaves. On Voodoo, his voice dipped down to bass (A#2) and his falsetto reached as high as F5 in “Spanish Joint” and G#5 in “Untitled”—on the cusp of mezzo-soprano and soprano.13 Tavis Smiley: What does your upper register convey to the audience? D’Angelo: Sensitivity. Affection. It’s something to be said about a man who can be very masculine but still display that sensitive side. And that falsetto does it perfectly.14 That spotless falsetto is D’Angelo’s moneymaker and his after-hour invitation: the portal to his heart, and yours. Two songs on the album are more direct in expressing his love for women and his means of seduction. D’Angelo remakes “Feel Like Makin’ Love” as a faithful cover of the 1970s radio staple made famous by Roberta Flack. “FLML” was supposed to be a duet with Lauryn Hill, to return the favor of D’Angelo singing with her on “Nothing Even Matters,” from her monster hit album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Hill, according to many reports, never made the time to record it, but her representatives apparently told a Time magazine reporter that she was waiting for D’Angelo

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to contact her to arrange a studio visit.15 Questlove suggested the duet was locked down right before the album dropped, claiming, “the Lauryn song isn’t quite done yet,” adding that J Dilla was working on its production.16 [Questlove declined requests to be interviewed for the book.] Questlove may have been referring to another planned Hill–D’Angelo duet, “Geto Heaven (a quasi-cover of the Family Stand’s ‘Ghetto Heaven,’ released in 1990),” that ended up, with D’Angelo on background vocals and produced by Dilla, on Common’s Like Water for Chocolate. The song was a “trade” for D taking “Chicken Grease.” In a strange twist, a few music critics mentioned the duet with Hill in their reviews of Voodoo, which suggests that Hill’s vocals on “Feel Like Makin’ Love” made it onto early review copies of the album. In any event, the album in its final press had D’Angelo going solo on the song. If D’Angelo has a weakness, an Achilles’ heel, I believe it’s when he covers the songs of others. He can be a ferocious musician and vocalist, but I don’t experience that level of intensity with the studio recordings of “Cruisin’” on Brown Sugar and “Feel Like Makin’ Love” on Voodoo. One factor is that both tracks are more traditional R&B love songs, and I believe he felt obliged to stick to their formulas and not stray too far from what makes them so beloved to audiences. I prefer the Flack version of “FLML” and Smokey Robinson’s original “Cruisin’” to D’Angelo’s relatively basic remakes. Performing covers in front of a live audience is another matter. D’Angelo and the musicians around him bring new life and electricity to both songs when reinterpreted on stage. I was much more impressed with “Cruisin’” after hearing him sing it in person during the Voodoo tour. But the true 64

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barn burners are his “off-book” cover song choices—Prince’s “She’s Always in My Hair,” Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Can’t Hide Love,” Sly and the Family Stone’s “Thankful N’ Thoughtful:” when D’Angelo hits these jams on the set list, that’s when he kicks over the gas lamp and set everything ablaze. His more mainstream fans who love the love songs may not want to accept this analysis, but D’Angelo at his core is more baller than balladeer. He owns a stage with the same passion that his teenage self displayed on the stages of the Mosque and the hallowed Apollo Theater. Live concerts grant him the freedom to indulge the “gives-no-fucks” side of his nature. For the lovers in the house, the pièce de résistance continues to be the song without a name. “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)” was actually an eleventh hour addition to Voodoo. After three years in the studio, “Untitled” was the very last song recorded for the album. There was no guarantee it would make the final cut. The song begins with a 6/8 time step on drums, moves at a snail’s pace, and stops suddenly on Raphael Saadiq’s bass. The abrupt silence sounds like it was a mistake, possibly a missed cue. It could have been; D’Angelo chose to keep the mistakes and callouts to his players on the recordings. That kind of exposed rawness initially worried his man behind the soundboard, possibly a bridge too far in honoring the dirt. “I was afraid that people would mistake that as bad engineering,” Russell Elevado said. “Everything [then] was so polished and clean and nonorganic.”17 From there, all the instruments pick up and carry through. There is no rush in this groove; moving slowly is more pleasurable. When D’Angelo commences with vocals, 65

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they sound like a sleepy murmur. As the song progresses, the emotional and sexual tension grows; D’Angelo sings about wanting to elicit a response from the woman of an aqueous, bodily nature. The chorus repeats. The song’s distortion grows in slight measures in concert with the music’s dramatic effect. D’Angelo is screaming in ecstasy, implying a physical climax at a moment when in truth he finds the Holy Ghost. He said as much: I wasn’t really thinking about sex at all. I was really thinking about a spiritual experience. I was thinking about the Holy Ghost, and at the end, when I had to bring that emotion through, that’s where I went to get it.18 “Untitled” earned its position as the album’s penultimate track with its concluding minute and 20 seconds. D’Angelo’s final turn on the chorus, that raise-the-roof falsetto, clips to silence in the middle of the word “feel,” a finger snap of editing to break the cacophonous fever. The song’s abrupt ending is our coital release. “Untitled” was written as an homage to Prince in the earlier, nastier phase of his career. Along with D’Angelo, “Untitled” cowriter Raphael Saadiq was and is a devoted fan of Prince, and through “Untitled” they channeled their respect for a master. Saadiq said “Untitled” was an “attitudechanging song” for the music industry, its sexy-in-slowmotion pacing copied by other musicians.19 But it was the music video for “Untitled” that made an indelible mark on D’Angelo fans and D’Angelo himself (see Chapter 6). “Untitled” cut through much of the testosterone and paint-by-numbers love songs dominating Black music at the 66

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time, nonpareil for what was being played on commercial radio during that time. Women were swooning, but men were challenged by this emotional transparency. In early 2000, as I shopped for groceries in a supermarket in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Clinton Hill, the store played a local radio station on its overhead speakers as “Untitled” comes on. A male voice near me started screaming, “Turn that shit off! I hate that fucking song!” Seconds later, “He’s a fag!” I was stunned. The song triggered this man into an angry, homophobic tirade. Did he have that kind of reaction toward all love songs by Black men? Would he lose it this hard upon hearing the wah-wah guitar intro of “Let’s Get It On?” Would listening to Maxwell sing while picking out fresh produce enrage him this much? I don’t know and didn’t ask him, but it’s a safe bet that his virulent reaction was directed at the video, as opposed to the sentiment of the song overheard as I waited in the checkout lane. Sensuality, soul bearing, and D’Angelo’s spirituality are all front and center in these compositions. Voodoo is the vessel of his Song of Songs; he is both the groom declaring his devotion and the dark-skinned maiden aching to demonstrate her love: “I delight to sit in [her] shade, and [her] fruit is sweet to my taste.”20 “You are altogether beautiful, my darling; there is no flaw in you.”21 Black men can and do love, but it can be a hard flower to find when it’s hidden in rough terrain. When it comes to 67

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expressions of romantic love, unabashedly, D’Angelo directs his love toward Black women, who are faced routinely with complications in finding love and intimacy among Black men. In the tradition of singer/songwriters including Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, and his hero, Prince, D’Angelo is unafraid to be the “maiden.” Sadly, not all Black men can deal with that level of revelation. The apex of this type of resistance as it relates to Voodoo is reached when the video for “Untitled” is released in late 1999. The ripped torso of a Black man, usually a signifier of unabashed masculinity, instead signifies vulnerability and is quickly dismissed by fellow straight, Black men as “queer.” As the concept of “traditional masculine ideology” has been deemed harmful by leading psychologists in the United States,22 this kind of expression is important in music and other creative modes. Songs like these can hopefully chip away at the fortress of toxic masculinity, making it okay for other heterosexual Black men to wear their hearts on their sleeves.

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6 Video (Almost) Killed the R&B Star

We should look to the mind, and not to the outward appearance. —Aesop It is better to be looked over than overlooked. —Mae West My phone rings at 7:30 a.m. A Tuesday morning in December 1999. I pick it up. “Girl, turn on MTV!” My friend, Laura, is a fraction of a decibel down from screaming over the receiver. I’m putting on my coat about to depart for work, having entered week two of my new job in Manhattan. “Can this wait? I need to get to work. I don’t want to be late. I …” I pick up my remote and as I click onto MTV, I see a man and his bare torso, telling me he can provide everything I would desire. I am caught without a response, a rare occurrence. A couple of seconds pass in silence.

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“OK. I gotta go,” I said. I hang up the phone and continue staring at the TV. I see his eyelids open sleepily, eyelashes aflutter like butterfly wings. The camera slowly pulls out to the torso that rendered me speechless. I watch with wonder this coffee-colored male physique, adorned with sweat and oozing intensity. I don’t realize it at the time, but my mouth is agape. I’m trying to breathe in this moment and then exhale in the way that sold millions of Terry McMillan novels. The abdomen as a body part is not sexy. Pay no mind to what workout videos tell you, but the abdomen isn’t really what you think it is. An abdomen is an assembly of organs including the kidneys, diaphragm, stomach, small and large intestines, pancreas, liver, and gallbladder. But it is the muscles covering the abdomen that with stringent exercise and assisted by great metabolism and a strict diet can become the “six-pack” desired far and wide. Defining those muscles became the goal for D’Angelo while he was recording Voodoo. He frequently arrived (usually late) to recording sessions after working out with personal trainer Mark Jenkins. It was part of a grand overhaul for this musical artist, to elevate him from slightly pudgy neophyte positioned behind the keys to bona fide sex symbol commanding your attention. How his new look was unveiled became arguably the most talked about sensation in music videos since Nirvana debuted the anarchist high school pep rally of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” eight years earlier. Four minutes of glistening brown skin, metaphorical longing, and ocular bliss. The video was the zeitgeist that dominated popular culture during the last month of 1999 and much of 2000. 70

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Sex sells, and there are few venues where it sells more than in the entertainment industry. D’Angelo’s manager, Dominique Trenier, knew that. He wanted his young client to make a splash and not just with his music. The video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)” was Trenier’s ace in the hole, a bold attempt to sell records and up the ante in making a critically acclaimed singer/songwriter known primarily in African American communities a worldwide household name. In the era of music video channels and short attention spans, being a celebrated musical prodigy wasn’t enough to move a blockbuster level of units off the shelves. In the 1980s, Michael Jackson’s dazzling videos established MTV as a cultural behemoth (despite the channel’s own initial, racist instincts—I’ll call it “Fear of a Black Artist”). In turn, Thriller shattered sales records throughout the world. Even Prince’s megastardom was ushered in by a semiautobiographical feature-length film. The potential trip-up to Trenier’s grand scheme was D’Angelo shyness. He was not initially receptive to his handler’s idea. “[D’Angelo] didn’t quite get what I was saying,” Trenier said. “What do you mean, ‘naked’?”1 The video, directed by music video and commercial veteran Paul Hunter (Trenier is credited as codirector), would film D’Angelo’s muscular upper body, adorned with tattoos, sprayed-on “sweat,” and a large gold cross hanging from his neck, advancing into a slow 360-degree turn that shows all dimensions of his body. The close-up of D’Angelo’s lower torso, which lingers for about 10 seconds, made his belly button possibly the most ogled in pop culture history. He became the African American rendering of his 71

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quasi-namesake’s David: a thoughtful yet virile, brownhued sculpture come to life on your television screen. An hour after my surprise lustration, I got to work that morning, and a group of women in the back of the elongated office were laughing about something. As I got closer, I could make out their chatter. One especially vocal Black woman rang out: “Have you seen the new D’Angelo video?!” That scenario repeated over days, even weeks, anywhere and what seemed like everywhere Black women congregated. “How does it feel?” This is the question that so many people—Black women in particular—asked themselves for several months. The video was on the minds and the lips of women and quite a few queer men throughout the United States, to the point where the airing of the video evoked quiet rapture among its audience. During a long-distance phone call with my sister, silence. During another phone call with my hair stylist, every customer in her otherwise busy and noisy salon is brought to a hush, from which I heard only D’Angelo’s muffled falsetto in my receiver. Danyel Smith, a prominent hip-hop and soul music journalist during that time, told of a similar tale during a hair appointment: BET and MTV are on all day long with no one paying attention, but when that video came on, you could’ve heard a bobby pin drop. All the women just watched in silence, and when the video was over, there was a collective sigh of “Oh my God! He is beautiful!”2 Princeton professor Imani Perry echoed that emotion at first viewing of the “Untitled” video. To Perry, D’Angelo is 72

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the designate for the beauty of African American men. “[The Video] was like, so stripped down and you see part of the core of this … incredible beauty, that the society hasn’t ever quite figured out how to deal with,” said Perry. “Every woman remembers when they heard [‘Untitled’] and saw the video,” said Dion Summers, vice president of urban programming at Sirius XM. When Voodoo came out, Summers was the program director for WERQ-FM (92Q Jams), a popular R&B station in Baltimore, Maryland. “‘Untitled’ was his ‘Thriller’ moment. You can’t separate the song from the video,” said Summers. “That moment was so blinding to everyone. We [at the radio station] thought, he’s back.” The “Untitled” video was so potent that even industry veterans at D’Angelo’s label were blown back at first sight. Prior to its release, “Untitled” was screened during a highlevel staff meeting at Virgin Records’ corporate office. These jaded, seen-it-all music executives were stunned into silence at first blush. A casual friend who was a New York-based label intern at the time told me the refrain that became something close to convention, that “you could hear a pin drop” in the room after the video cut to black. “Untitled” did exactly what Trenier wanted it to do. As 2000 kicked off, what came to be known as simply “The Video” was in heavy rotation on MTV and BET. If “Untitled” had been released today, there is no question that the “come hither” sight of D’Angelo slowly opening his eyes, staring dead into the camera, licking his lips, yearning for sexual intimacy as his glistening Adonis-like body pleads his case would have broken the internet. D’Angelo showing off his 73

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rock-hard physique on the Voodoo album cover shot by French fashion photographer Thierry Le Goues would have been memed into oblivion as well. Nudity in music or music videos wasn’t a novel idea at the time. Plasmatics frontwoman Wendy O. Williams was tagged the “queen of shock rock” in the 1970s and 1980s when she performed on stage partially or sometimes completely naked (but covered in shaving cream). The Red Hot Chili Peppers were known for performing live while dressed only in strategically placed socks. In the late 1990s, Alanis Morissette figuratively traversed Los Angeles in the buff singing “Thank U”, as Blink-182 actually streaked around the city of angels asking “What’s My Age Again?” But it was the “Untitled” video’s unabashed sexual power that captured the attention of a nation. That made it both a target and an inspiration. A satirical take on The Video aired on BET soon after its premiere, featuring a young Black man with far less muscle tone and singing talent than D’Angelo. The 2002 video for R&B vocalist Jaguar Wright’s “The What Ifs” copied the “Untitled” video in cinematography and concept, but with a twist. The denouement of Wright’s video has the camera pulling out to a wide shot revealing her pregnant belly. Eleven years after Wright’s rendition, Brendon Urie, lead singer of the rock-pop group Panic! At the Disco, is exposed in a nearly frame-by-frame replica of the video while lipsynching the band’s single, “Girls/Girls/Boys.” Urie called the original “one of the sexiest videos of all time, which also happens to be one of my favorites.”3 Another white guy, singer Asher Roth, did his own goofy remake mouthing D’Angelo’s voice, while the lead vocalist for Pattern Is Movement, a duo 74

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out of Philadelphia, unveiled his “Untitled” body with a heatmapping visual effect distorting his form. “Untitled,” the original song and video, was the most paramount demonstration of Black masculinity, sensitivity, and sensuality in recent memory. While the “Untitled” recording frames D’Angelo as the pursuer, the video positions him as the offering; he surrenders his body and love to his woman (ostensibly, the viewer). Even the partial nudity, as my friend Michelle put it during a conversation not long after the video premiered, was a “metaphor for vulnerability.” As beautiful and sensational as the “Untitled” video was, it may have served its purpose too well. The song, in my opinion, stands as a sincere display of emotion and desire. The video, in contrast and by design, was a shrewd feat of promotional self-objectification. Visual media scholar Keith M. Harris describes D’Angelo as a “self-satisfying erotic object,” the video “perform[ing] as an apparatus of entertainment and visual pleasure across D’Angelo’s body.”4 This video turns “the male gaze” inside out. The history of brutality and enslavement of African Americans can further muck up how the video is read and seen. In short, in an American society that commoditizes the naked body for its sexual currency, and commoditized Black bodies throughout centuries for actual currency, D’Angelo, Hunter, and Trenier all lost control of the video’s seemingly romantic and innocuous narrative. Perry was initially “overwhelmed by the beauty” in the “Untitled” video, but she said she later became worried for D’Angelo: 75

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It started to disturb me, because I was like, “Oh. This is not just us [Black people] watching this …” I think there was a discomfort about him being consumed in a way that when, especially for me as a student of history, you’re reading the descriptions of what kind of bodies of Black men were seen as most appealing and worth the most money, could be most effectively exploited. The poking and prodding and all of that stuff brought to mind that history. And then of course, in context of post-slavery, of lynching, of men being stripped down, and that nudity was a part of racial terror. For me, that was a tension; in some ways, that’s a tension that’s all through hip-hop, certainly. What does it mean to … be these glorious outlaws in a society that deems you an outlaw in order to destroy you? No inflection of these arguments, as credible as they are analytically, crossed my mind when The Video was in heavy rotation on music channels. My response was a primal and emotional one. D’Angelo was the fantasy of a sexy, emotionally mature man whose flesh-and-bone beauty was matched by his gorgeous singing voice. If race as a social construct renders Black bodies as “surfaces of racial representation,”5 then what does D’Angelo’s body represent in the “Untitled” video? He is not strange fruit, swinging from a poplar tree, although in a not-so-distant era, he could have been. He is not the nigger in the alley that his soul forefather Curtis Mayfield sings about in “Pusher Man.” With songs like “Devil’s Pie” and “Greatdayindamornin’,” D’Angelo sheds light on his own insecurities and dark temptations, and shows empathy and solidarity with those

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who hustle to survive. In the “Untitled” video, D’Angelo is the sensitive and talented, world-weary and street smart heterosexual Black man who is sadly underrepresented … then and now. Trenier played his hunch correctly that women, Black women in particular, were aching for that kind of lightning to strike us. That likely influenced his and Hunter’s decision not to hire a model or actress to be D’Angelo’s love interest in the video. Says codirector Hunter [no relation to guitarist Charlie], “We made this video for women. The idea was, it would feel like he was one-on-one with whoever the woman was.”6 Years after it first premiered, the intoxicating power that the “Untitled” video had over women has not waned. In 2009, a filmmaking colleague I worked with mentioned that she had never seen The Video. Later that day, I obliged her with a YouTube link. Part of her email response was as follows: “How did life let me miss this before???? Thank you Faith … thank you, Jesus. I’ve been liberated” [emphasis mine].7 I, for one, will own up to participating in the commodification of D’Angelo. I loved the video, and every woman I knew who saw it, regardless of race, loved it too. I own a copy of it that resides on the laptop on which I write this book. (Thanks, iTunes!) The video was the match; the parched, easily flammable terrain was the “thirst” among (Black) women who craved to see an attractive Black man who wanted and loved them unconditionally, and all-hours-of-the-day programming of music video channels were the fierce winds that helped “Untitled” scorch the turn-of-the-millennium cultural 77

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consciousness. As D’Angelo became a fantasy for female fans, some men turned into straight-up haters. In the spring of 2000, when I tried to exalt the merits of Voodoo to my straight Black friend Jonathan, he said to me dismissively during a phone conversation that I loved the album only because “I wanted to fuck D’Angelo.” It was apparent to me that the “Untitled” video corrupted his reception to the album as a whole. His flippant response made me angry, and I proceeded to yell at Jonathan, replete with expletives, for about 10 minutes. A 2000 New York Times piece about the “Untitled” video relays the instance of an unnamed woman who was at home watching the video with her boyfriend. He “snapped” and yelled, “Turn the channel—I don’t want to see that gay stuff.”8 Straight men like the one aforementioned let their homophobia run wild. “Narcissistic” and “preening” are other words that have been used to describe the video. But whether or not the “Untitled” video is an exercise in narcissism, it hit a nerve among African Americans. The response to the video reflected a dividing line between African American men and women, topped off with a perceived threat to sexual identity. Plenty of videos, promotional art, and album covers have been cranked out featuring African American male singers or MCs with their shirts off in hypermasculine poses and expressions. There was Tupac’s iconic frontal shot brandishing his “Thug Life” tattoo. DMX covered in blood. On 50 Cent’s first two album covers, Get Rich or Die Tryin’ and The Massacre, his six-pack and chain are in full effect. And haven’t we all lost track of how many times we’ve seen LL Cool J with his shirt off back in the day? 78

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So why this Black man with his exposed chest? In part, because the video creates the illusion that D’Angelo is fully nude, in part because of the “take me, please” longing of the song, a scenario is created in which another man is not invited. Throw in how heterosexual men are socialized to reject a man’s attractiveness or run the risk of being labeled gay, some straight Black men likely felt painted into a corner when it comes to “Untitled.” Unlike the hood nihilism of a Lil Wayne video, they know that D’Angelo’s body is for a higher calling: a woman. For an insecure, immature straight man, if that theoretical woman is his wife, girlfriend, or female relative glued to the TV, Jack Nicholson couldn’t have said it better: he can’t handle the truth. “I think there’s a dimension of being threatened by this dude,” said Perry, “and he’s all sensitive and the image is all these qualities that women want, and men [feel] like they fall short. I don’t know how you look at that video and not say ‘Wow!’ His skin is glistening and the camera angle is slow. It’s a visual feast and it’s shot that way.” But don’t women find 50 Cent attractive, too? “Oh yeah. I think the difference is that it’s so vulnerable,” Perry continued. “It’s both [D’Angelo’s] attractiveness, but also, there’s an invitation to the gaze. When you look at 50 [Cent], someone could say that he’s fine, but it’s clear … the expression he makes, that he’s looking to ravage some woman.” Or kick somebody’s ass. “Or kick somebody’s ass,” said Perry. “Or both!” If a patriarchal society constructs the gaze as “masculine” and the object of the gaze, the passive receiver of the gazer’s 79

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fantasy, “feminine,”9 the “Untitled” video upends that paradigm. The Video took D’Angelo’s body—the cornrows, tattoos, ripped muscles, the gold chain, and all of the “thug” stereotypes and the sexual assumptions attached to them— and made it an exemplar to communicate sensitivity and his need for intimacy. “It changed life,” said Trenier of his concept, “because no one had seen heterosexual black male sexuality like that.”10 The straight Black men challenged and angered by this subliminal abstraction weren’t alone in “not getting it.” This inversion of binary gender positions, “female” emotions expressed via the writhing of an uber-masculine body, went over the heads of many viewers and the press. The Video put D’Angelo in a new category: sex symbol. Entertainment Weekly featured D’Angelo with the title “‘It’ Sex Machine,” accompanied by a biblically inspired image of him eating an apple. He graced cover after cover: Essence, Paper, Vibe, even Body and Soul, a coffee table photography book featuring some of the world’s most attractive Black men. The buzz from the “Untitled” video raised D’Angelo’s profile, but there was a downside to the video’s popularity. It inadvertently took the focus away from the musical experimentation D’Angelo and his collaborators had conjured up at Electric Lady Studios. Questlove lamented that the music started being overlooked while “the conversation shifted to D’Angelo and his body, from the sensuality of the music to the straightforward sex-symbol pose of the video.”11 At concerts during the 2000 Voodoo tour, women in the front rows threw intimate apparel on stage and even more yelled for D’Angelo to show more of what his momma (and 80

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his trainer) gave him. “It wasn’t about the music,” said Roy Hargrove, who was part of D’Angelo’s touring band. “All [the audience] wanted him to do was take off his clothes.”12 Even the idea’s Svengali expressed regret. Trenier said the video wasn’t created to be the defining “mission statement” for the album. “I’m glad the video did what it did, but [D’Angelo] and I were both disappointed because, to this day, in the general populace’s memory, he’s the naked dude” [emphasis mine].13 “It was a blessing and a curse,” Alan Leeds told me. Leeds was D’Angelo’s tour manager in 2000 and witnessed his distress firsthand. Leeds said that, in hindsight, he didn’t think the “Untitled” video was a negative concept businesswise: Obviously, it was a successful venture. It helped promote the record. It certainly helped sell tickets on the tour. And ultimately, that’s what we’re charged to do as management, devise ways to increase your audience and your sales. [And] women still talk about that video. Leeds admitted that he and Trenier failed D’Angelo by not preparing him for the onslaught of scrutiny and dismissing any concerns of fan reactions that would be labeled sexist if the artist was a woman. “I probably would have said [at the time], ‘He’s a dude. He’s going to love that attention.’ “In retrospect, I don’t think the idea was wrong,” Leeds continued. “I think the fault was in not somehow preparing him for what was going to happen, and having a plan for how to digest it and deal with it, instead of just submitting to it. We should have owned it and taken control of it.” 81

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It was the popularity of the “Untitled” video, and the brazen objectification that came with it, that contributed to D’Angelo’s post-Voodoo downward spiral. His self-confidence was so crippled that he would have flashes of violent temperament, breaking things after shows, lashing out at those who cheered louder to see his naked physique than a killer show that D’Angelo meticulously pieced together. He was involved with every detail from selecting the musicians to the set design. Leeds elaborated about how the intensity of the fans contributed to D’Angelo “feeling trapped that if he doesn’t look like [he does in] the video then he’s somehow inadequate or can’t go on stage. And that’s something he wrestles with to this day. And I have to ask if it hadn’t been for that video would he care as much about those things? “If I was D’s psychiatrist,” Leeds conceded, “I would say [the video] was a bad idea.” After the Voodoo tour was completed, D’Angelo abandoned plans to record new music and returned to Richmond, but he soon realized that his heightened fame meant that life couldn’t go back to the way things were, and he degenerated into alcohol and drug abuse. In a 2012 interview with GQ, D’Angelo said, “When I got back home, yeah, it wasn’t that easy to just be. I think that’s the thing that got me in a lot of trouble: me trying to just be Michael, the regular old me from back in the day, and me fighting that whole sex-symbol thing.”14 Former mentor Bill McGee agreed. “I think the sexsymbol thing is what pulled him down [into] the cesspool,” he said. 82

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The Book of Revelation in the Bible describes the archangel Michael defeating “the serpent known as Satan” during the war in heaven. The serpent and its angels were propelled down to earth, where they would continue their evil ways. You don’t have to believe in God to see the parabolic irony. A son and grandson of ministers, blessed with talents that those not of faith would label “otherworldly,” but in the tradition of his birth were gifts from God. That man is not an angel, despite sharing a name with one. Michael Archer is a mortal who feels pain, grief, anger, and loneliness just like the rest of us, and he tried to mask and suppress those intense emotions chemically. The decade after Voodoo featured his chosen moniker plastered in crime blotters instead of marquees and award shows. Michael fought his own battle with demons and lost—descending, like the serpent, in full free fall. In 2002, two years after Voodoo dropped, D’Angelo was taken into police custody in Chesterfield, Virginia, charged with assault, aggressive driving, disorderly conduct, and other misdemeanors. He had allegedly cursed at and then spat on a woman at a gas station after cutting her off in his SUV. D’Angelo resisted arrest initially and had to be subdued with pepper spray. January 2005 saw D’Angelo arrested again in Richmond on charges including driving under the influence, possession of marijuana, and carrying a concealed weapon. A mug shot of a bloated, unshaven, and disheveled D’Angelo circulated throughout the media, no trace of the beautiful creature that adorned our TV sets only a few years prior. From a psychological lens, D’Angelo’s weight gain and substance 83

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abuse could be read as a response to emotional trauma. In addition to the fallout from The Video, a close friend of his, MTV executive Fred Jordan, died by suicide in 2001. The following year, D’Angelo’s beloved grandmother, Miss Alberta, passed away. Another take is that his inimical behavior was D’Angelo giving all of the women who took his creativity for granted, the people who ignored more than three years of work based on a few minutes of film, the middle finger. In September 2005, D’Angelo returned to a Virginia courtroom, pled no contest to cocaine possession, and received a three-year suspended sentence. A week after his plea agreement, a loaded D’Angelo drove his car off a road in Powhatan County outside of Richmond, hit a fence, and was thrown from the car as it flipped over. He sustained serious injuries from the accident. A passenger was also injured. “[D’Angelo] called me from the hospital and I felt bad for him,” said ex-girlfriend Gina Figueroa. “I was scared and annoyed. I didn’t know what was going on.” Two years after the accident, D’Angelo pled guilty to driving with a suspended license and driving under the influence. He was fined and received suspended sentences for the 2005 car crash. He has been in drug rehab three times, and in 2011, pled guilty to a 2010 disorderly conduct charge, when he solicited a New York City undercover police officer posing as a prostitute. D’Angelo became our Icarus, his flaw not being hubris, but rather naiveté about fame and the power of sexual imagery. Maybe he thought women would behave better than men typically do, although he claims he didn’t mind that either.15 84

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His decline was swift and painful to witness. The worry that Imani Perry spoke of, the instinct she had only weeks after seeing the “Untitled” video, proved prescient. When I learned about the car accident in 2005, I knew D’Angelo had reached rock bottom. I was reminded of another young, exceptional storyteller who felt scarred and overwhelmed by the music industry and his success within it. Drugs didn’t satiate his demons either. I still mourned Kurt Cobain more than a decade after he took his own life. I couldn’t bear that D’Angelo might soon join him. If he never recorded another note, I wanted him to be healthy and happy, for himself and for his children. I wanted D’Angelo to stay alive. An honest assessment of those dark days illuminates one clear truth. The fact that D’Angelo was spared long-term prison incarceration and granted chance after chance to redeem himself demonstrates the power of celebrity, money, and a reverence many have for someone that preternaturally talented, even when the person is Black. Paraphrasing an old Chris Rock joke about O.J. Simpson, if these charges had been levied against “Michael, the bus driving addict from Richmond’s South Side,” he would be under a jail right now. Or worse. D’Angelo has given conflicting answers regarding how he feels about the “Untitled” video. In one instance, he says he would do it all over again.16 During a 2015 interview with talk show host Tavis Smiley, D’Angelo said “too big a deal” was made about his perceived resentment toward the video, but added he felt “objectified” during the Voodoo tour; that the women screaming to see him undress on stage reduced him to feeling like a “male stripper.”17 85

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So how did he rationalize granting permission to the producers of the film Magic Mike XXL to use the song? D’Angelo proclaimed his disdain of being thought of as a stripper two months after the film’s release, in which actor Matt Bomer sings “Untitled” to screaming, ogling women while … stripping. It’s hypocrisy sealed in an envelope next to a check. Michael Archer, a virtuoso by all measurable standards, is also a shy nerd who loves Star Wars and video games. “Sex symbol” became a label that weighed him down, and in his mind threatened to obfuscate his music and his integrity. All he wanted to do was make great, compelling, and in Voodoo’s case, difficult music. But to the masses, a music video of one song made them deaf to the rest. It was a turn of events that pained D’Angelo for years, one that only recently (if his comments to Smiley are sincere) has he been able to reconcile. D’Angelo is no longer the owner of the precision-crafted physique from that period. But if having the music industry version of a dad bod allows others to hear D’Angelo’s music more clearly, that’s more than fine by him and those who care about him the most.

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Virgin Records was ready. Been ready. Its executives had waited long enough for D’Angelo’s magnum opus to descend from the heavens. “From a label’s perspective, they wanted an album and wanted an album immediately,” said Jason Jackson, former head of Virgin’s urban music department.1 They had grown frustrated and started leaning on Russell Elevado to get D’Angelo to wrap things up. “Nobody [at Virgin] could pressure D’Angelo,” Elevado said. “So the record label came to me and put pressure on me to try to put pressure on D’Angelo.”2 A trove of fifty songs was whittled down to thirteen. After three years of recording, jamming, and basically fucking around with friends who became partners-in-crime, numerous missed deadlines, and more than $1.5  million spent,3 Voodoo was released January 25, 2000, with much fanfare. It debuted on the Billboard 200 album chart at number one and emerged as the year’s critical darling. Four stars from USA TODAY’s Steve Jones. Robert Hilburn at the Los Angeles Times appreciated D’Angelo’s “complex and

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satisfying work” and dubbed him “the new king of soul.”4 Jim DeRogatis of the Chicago Sun-Times praised Voodoo as “one of the most complex, multilayered and ethereal soul albums ever recorded, a disc that will stand alongside classics like There’s a Riot Goin’ On and What’s Going On.”5 The Chicago Reader’s Peter Margasak and the Chicago Tribune’s Greg Kot named Voodoo the best album of 2000. So did Jon Pareles, chief pop music critic of the New York Times, who along with three other Times music writers lauded Voodoo in the paper’s year-end roundup. (Even NYT jazz critic Ben Ratliff named Voodoo as his second-best album of the year.) By contrast, the critical praise didn’t help the individual singles. “Devil’s Pie” flopped, despite its inclusion in the film, Belly. Single number two, “Left & Right,” did well on the R&B/ hip-hop chart, hitting number nine, but suffered a similar fate as “Devil’s Pie” on the pop side. Even its music video, far more salacious and male gaze-leaning than the video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel?),” did little to move the sales needle. The video’s scarce airplay was another culprit in the song’s anemic sales. The fourth single from the album, “Send It On,” sold modestly, but didn’t break through. Single number five, the remake of “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” also died on the vine. Only number three, “Untitled (How Does It Feel?),” absorbed heat on the singles charts, reaching number 2 in the United States on the Billboard R&B/hip-hop chart and number 25 on Billboard’s Hot 100. Voodoo proved to be too dense and complex for radio programmers in search of easily accessible hits to put in heavy rotation. “I didn’t think there were a lot of radio 88

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singles on Voodoo,” said Sirius XM’s Dion Summers. “I didn’t think it had that sort of staying power to it.” He described the album as “left of center” from Brown Sugar, and that it was obvious to him that it “wasn’t as important [to D’Angelo] to capture that mainstream success.” Summers was right. D’Angelo spoke openly about not really giving a damn about sales and industry benchmarks. “My intention is to make art,” D’Angelo proclaimed to Tavis Smiley. “I just want to be a conduit [of the spirit].”6 With Voodoo, D’Angelo and company had put in the work and demanded the listener to reciprocate. He had veered away from the paths that most of his R&B peers were taking and as a result sped past them. The songs on Voodoo are not as languid and soothingly ethereal as Maxwell, not as catchy and simple as Donell Jones. The harmonies of Boyz II Men, Dru Hill, and Jodeci flooded 1990s radio, but it was more musical starch than nutrients for the collective soul. R. Kelly was of the standard bearer of airplay-friendly raunchiness and spirituality, despite his then-growing accusations of sexual predation and abuse of young girls. Other male contemporaries who were compared to D’Angelo stylistically—Bilal, Rashaan Patterson—had limited commercial staying power and were less influential culturally. Another “neo soul” peer, Musiq Soulchild, had more success with sales and radio airplay, but his critical acclaim was not on par with D’Angelo. What may have been perceived by some as scattershot and undisciplined was an intentional embrace of the moment and the spirit of the R&B, jazz, and hip-hop pioneers that inspired D’Angelo and his crew. Those D’Angelo fans who wanted to 89

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look back were out of luck because he was determined to move forward. “I don’t want to be molded or kept in some category,” D’Angelo said. “I want to be able to go wherever I want to go. And that’s what this album is all about.”7 For many younger recording artists (and older ones who feel pressure to keep up), moving forward often means utilizing state-of-the-art technology. Modern music is dominated by it: ProTools, Autotune, high-end synthesizers, sequencers, and an even more pervasive use of sampling. Songs can be “written” by creators who can’t read music or play an instrument. For DJs and musicians in the electronic music sphere, more technological tools to play with can be a godsend. D’Angelo embraces technology in music making, but only as long as a balance is struck so that authenticity is retained: If you’re using technology to get the same point across that you would get doing analog shit, then it’s cool. I don’t have a problem with it at all … as long as you’re doing something new with it [emphasis mine].8 Voodoo was made with a group of world-class artists, with the financial support (and begrudging patience) of a major label. For independent, self-funding musical artists, modern technology grants them affordable tools to create—even in solitude. A drawback is that this type of hands-on access may also lower the bar on musical literacy and hollow out the substance of what’s created, resulting in mimicry instead of originality. Quoting Pittsburgh-based DJ and EDM artist Shawn Rudiman: There seems to be a sophomoric idea that machines can somehow replace creativity, desire, drive, or talent … I

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think all we can do at this point is own up and become better musicians. We need to be the virtuosos of the new instruments. We can’t be human jukeboxes or breathing playback machines.9 High-end audio engineering or no, the music created by the artisans who worked on Voodoo is a hard thing to realize without that innate vision, curiosity, and performance ability of D’Angelo, Questlove, Stone, Elevado, and others. The existence of Voodoo was itself a salvo against what Questlove described as R&B music too reliant on smoother production value and “too bloated and static for its own good.”10 Voodoo spent thirty-three weeks on the Billboard 200 album chart and sold more than 1.7 million units in the United States. In 2001, Voodoo won the Grammy Award for Best R&B Album, awarded to D’Angelo and Russell Elevado. D’Angelo won a second Grammy that cycle for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance for “Untitled (How Does It Feel?).” Throwing in my personal (read: bitter) commentary on that subject: Voodoo should have been nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy, and it should have won. I love the hell out of Steely Dan (R.I.P. Walter Becker). But seriously, Two Against Nature?!! Grammy snub aside, Voodoo made its mark, including with some late-in-the-game fans. People who didn’t “get” the album when it was first released in 2000 finally caught up with its sound. Looking back, Questlove said Voodoo was too abstract for the masses. The album was, in his words, “a hard pill to swallow … When it came out, a lot of people were like, ‘Whoa! This sounds like an acid trip or something. What are

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you guys doing?’”11 Now that Voodoo has evolved into that cool album you name drop when you talk about your music tastes at parties, some revisionist history has come into play. One prominent music magazine changed its tune about Voodoo in a glaring way. In February 2000, Rolling Stone gave the album a less-than-enthusiastic three out of five stars. The reviewer, James Hunter, wrote: “The problem is, Voodoo sounds so loose and unfinished, it floats right off into the clouds.” He goes on to say that “long stretches of [Voodoo] are unfocused and unabsorbing.”12 In an about-face of that tepid review, Rolling Stone ranked Voodoo number four in its year-end best albums list and years later concluded: “The decade’s most magnificent R&B record was also its most inventive—so far ahead of its time that it still sounds radical.”13 Even my friend, Jonathan, who chastised me in 2000 for loving Voodoo finally saw the light. Several years later, Jonathan apologized for telling me condescendingly that my intense appreciation for Voodoo was driven by lust for D’Angelo and the “Untitled” video. When I asked Jonathan for a comment for this book, he responded: “I just listened to [Voodoo] again a few weeks ago and was like, ‘Faith was right. Like on-point right. Way ahead of its time’.”14 Voodoo is no longer a “cult” masterpiece among musicians, critics, and folks like me who appreciated it from the starting gate. But time failed to change the mind of Michelle, the friend who turned me on to Voodoo with her gift of a copied cassette tape. Responding to an email I sent in 2016, she told me that she remained #TeamBrownSugar.

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Epilogue

No artist is ahead of his time. He is the time. It is just that others are behind the time. —Martha Graham Since Voodoo’s release, the music industry has changed radically, as Silicon Valley forces its hand. YouTube, for now, is the modern-day MTV; the latter has all but eliminated music videos from its scheduling. Radio listenership still reigns supreme in the United States, but streaming services like Spotify and internet radio outlets like Pandora are how musicians reach a mass audience of younger people. Record labels have been absorbed by larger conglomerates or have shut down altogether. The need for “horizontal integration”1 to foster greater earnings for companies and their shareholders, combined with lax antitrust laws in the United States, resulted in what is now referred to as the “big three” record companies: Sony Music, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group.

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These three conglomerates control 80 percent of the music you and I listen to. The “business” side of the music business now demands a bigger return on investment, no different from other media like film and newspapers. Digital music has diminished the compact disc to a “niche” level, selling slightly above vinyl records, resulting in many brick-and-mortar record stores closing their doors. The revenue generated from the sales of CDs, once the cash cows for record companies, is now all but obliterated. Revenue earned by digital streaming entities such as Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Music exceeded physical music sales (that include CDs) worldwide in 2017.2 The year prior, streaming—from which labels and artists earn much less revenue, pennies on the dollar—overtook digital music sales in the United States for the first time in history.3 The domino effect is record companies slashing their production and marketing budgets for artists, except the superstars who make it rain for their labels. For the seeable future, Beyoncé, Adele, and Taylor Swift will have checkbooks open for them by their respective distributors. But up-andcoming and even some mid-level artists will have to make do with less money, fewer institutional resources, and more competition to lend them your ears, thanks to a lower barrier to entry on the production side. “This is the easiest and the hardest time to be as artist now,” said Dion Summers. “It’s easier to expose your content, but now everyone is exposing their content.” Could Voodoo, with its three-year-plus production schedule and an estimated cost of at least $1.5 million ($2.3 94

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million by 2019 inflation calculations), be a viable second album today from a non-superstar artist? Would a young singer in his or her early twenties, around the same age as D’Angelo when he made Voodoo, have the tools and support to pull off such an accomplishment? Said Imani Perry: I don’t think any of the record companies are interested in—maybe I’m being hyperbolic. It seems to me that there’s a lot of interest in sort of catchy, two-bit anthems; things that people will remember with really easy refrains, as opposed to real compositions. It’s hard to imagine the investment into a project like [Voodoo]. How would an independent artist figure out how to put that together? That would be hard. Voodoo wasn’t the only thing that emanated from Electric Lady Studios in the late 1990s and early aughts. Artisans who wanted something more from the music they loved christened an unofficial collective. The studios on West 8th Street in the Village became part summer music camp, part house party, and 100 percent an incubator for soul and hip-hop artists committed to thinking outside of the box. Many of the Voodoo players floated from one studio to the next: to play, write songs, or just see what folks were working on across the way. The bounty was plentiful: Erykah Badu recorded Mama’s Gun; Common made Like Water for Chocolate and Electric Circus; Philly-born singer Bilal debuted with 1st Born Second; The Roots created Things Fall Apart. As fate would have it, five of the main players found out they had the same zodiac sign. D’Angelo, Questlove, James Poyser, J Dilla, and future Soultronics guitarist Jef Lee 95

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Johnson tagged themselves the Soulquarians, making Badu and Common “honorary” members as they just missed the Aquarius cutoff date. Other adopted “Soulquarians” include Roy Hargrove, Pino Palladino, Q-Tip, and Black Star rappers Mos Def (now known as Yasiin Bey) and Talib Kweli. “It was a magical time,” said Elevado,4 a sentiment expressed by everyone who was there. Elevado mixed songs for every release listed except Things Fall Apart. Soulquarians became something of a Good Housekeeping seal around that time for Black artists who didn’t make music for mass consumption but for themselves first. They were also the torchbearers for “neo soul,” a label for their music that nearly all of them reject present day. D’Angelo addressed the diminished utility of the marketing phrase coined by his former manager, Kedar Massenburg: Respect it for what it is. But I will say this, any time you put a name on something, you put it in a box … You want to be in a position where you can grow as an artist. You never want to be told, “Hey, you’re not doing what you did on Brown Sugar” … I never claimed I do neo soul. I make Black music.5 Reaching such a high bar of creativity increases in difficulty as the industry transforms, tastes change, and budgets contract. The group bond of the Soulquarians fizzled, likely unavoidable as its members grew older. It was also a result of the bruised egos of some in the group who felt minimized compared to the bigger stars, riled up by a 2000 foldout inside cover of the Soulquarians in Vibe. The name is now less of a collective and more a reminiscence of its heyday. 96

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Trap music has taken over as the influential force shaping both R&B and hip-hop. Samples have become the norm in songwriting, with more singers performing to tracks and loops. This, rightly or wrongly, further heightens the expectations from an artist like D’Angelo, even from close friends like Questlove. “I’ve told him: He is literally holding the oxygen supply that music lovers breathe … When D starts singing, all is right with the world.”6 After the release of Voodoo, and the 2000 Voodoo tour, D’Angelo took himself out of the limelight, returning home to Richmond. With each passing year, D’Angelo’s mystique grew among his fans in tandem with his absence (interrupted by reports of his run-ins with police) and their yearning for a new album—to the point that articles were written casting him as a new millennium’s “Where’s Waldo?” Singer/ guitarist John Mayer went as far as penning an open letter in 2005—the same year as D’Angelo’s drug arrests and singlecar accident in Virginia—imploring him to end his selfimposed sabbatical, now that Voodoo emerged as “one of the few records to change [his] life forever.”7 (Me too, John.) For more than a decade, there were whispers and rumors about original studio recordings from D’Angelo’s friends and colleagues, as he made guest appearances on some of his peers’ songs. Questlove tried to temper the hungry masses, with a crumb of a leaked song from D in 2007 to an Australian radio station. But in the classic “no good deed goes unpunished” scenario, the leak angered D’Angelo so much that it reportedly soured their close friendship (they have since reconciled). Turning the pages of arrests, the car accident, and drug rehab—in addition to the birth of a third child in 2010 and a 97

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new record label—D’Angelo returned to performing in front of grateful and welcoming fans. His European mini tour in 2012 garnered media attention as he played songs by P-Funk, the Beatles, Ohio Players, Prince (naturally), and another transformative artist Elevado had turned him on to, David Bowie, and his classic, “Space Oddity.” The 2012 Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee was also graced with D’Angelo’s presence. Straightaway after Bonnaroo, D’Angelo did a coheadlining tour with Mary J. Blige in the United States and Europe. In 2013, D’Angelo embarked on a very well received “Brothers in Arms” tour with Questlove, performing stripped down covers and older songs in smaller, intimate venues in front of rapturous audiences. D’Angelo further fanned the flames of an impending comeback the following year with an appearance at the Afropunk music festival in Brooklyn. Finally, at the midnight hour on December 15, 2014, the next piece of D’Angelo’s musical legacy was revealed—his third studio album, Black Messiah. After nearly fifteen years of waiting, rejoicing came far and wide from fans and critics alike, making the album’s title less tongue-in-cheek and more prophetic. If the liner notes were any indication, D’Angelo and writer Nelson George expected some fans to miss the point: Some will jump to the conclusion that I’m calling myself a Black Messiah. For me, the title is about all of us … It’s not about praising one charismatic leader but celebrating thousands of them.8 Cultural writer Sasha Frere-Jones dismissed that concept outright, all but demanding D’Angelo to wear the crown of 98

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soul savior. “That self-deprecation is the only false note on the record … Arrogance suits pop stars, as their swagger encourages our own, especially in a moment of social fracture. D’Angelo is entitled to brag.”9 There is no doubt in Frere-Jones’s mind that Michael Eugene Archer is player number one. Black Messiah reunited much of the Voodoo crew— Questlove, Hargrove, Palladino, Alford, and Elevado behind the boards (with help from assistant engineer Ben Kane)—and picked up in musical texture where Voodoo left off. Raw and messy, just the way D and Elevado likes it, recorded once again on analog tape, with some songs influenced more by guitar than organ, consistent with D’Angelo playing guitar more frequently in live appearances. And the song Questlove leaked that threatened to tank his friendship with D’Angelo was the first single released from the album—track five: the flamenco-inflected, Grammywinning, “Really Love.” Coming full circle, the murmured, sultry prelude to “Really Love” was written and performed by the woman who inspired “Spanish Joint” and the lyrics to “The Root”: D’Angelo’s ex-lover, Gina Figueroa. D’Angelo played an early draft for Figueroa in the mid-aughts, likely similar to the version Questlove leaked, and invited her years later to contribute a spoken word intro. Figueroa performed it in Spanish at D’Angelo’s request and in his presence, communicating the volatility and passion of their failed romance, similar to the songs she engendered on Voodoo. Her segment alludes to D’Angelo being very controlling and Figueroa breaking free from his jealous temperament. She 99

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didn’t know whether her contribution would make it onto the final mix until she heard it for herself when the album came out. Figueroa told me that she is no longer in touch with her former flame, but when asked if she still loved D’Angelo, her answer was unequivocal. “Always. He is like family.” Black Messiah displayed outward signs of his musical and personal growth. Then-forty-year-old D’Angelo dipped his toe into more political expressions—from the CD’s cover of darker skinned hands and fists in the air—an undated crowd shot taken during an Afropunk concert—to songs like “The Charade,” inspired by his anger toward the killings of young Black men by police officers including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and pretend police officers like George Zimmerman, acquitted for shooting dead seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. He even directed snark at his past life as a sex symbol (and addict) in “Back to the Future, Part I.” Consistent with his start two decades before, D’Angelo wants the music to matter most. When Black Messiah dropped, I was the first person my Voodoo-repentant friend Jonathan called to talk about the album, again expressing his regret about his comment in 2000. By then, he had crossed the bridge D’Angelo constructed with Voodoo, connecting directly to the new record. In the post-Voodoo years, D’Angelo’s drumming “copilot” became a star himself. “Questlove” has evolved from a nickname to a brand. Ahmir Thompson is now a book author, entrepreneur, and trendsetter—his unofficial uniform of a hoodie and a pick-adorned Afro recognized 100

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internationally. The same year Questlove’s friend returned to center stage with Black Messiah, the notoriety of his longtoiling band grew exponentially. “The Roots Crew,” the critical darlings from Philly who spent a couple of decades on the periphery of fame and fortune, had both handed to them on a platter when a young Saturday Night Live alumnus named Jimmy Fallon took over hosting duties of NBC’s venerable The Tonight Show. Fallon chose the Roots to be his house band, on the recommendation of a mutual friend, comedian and Chappelle’s Show co-creator, Neal Brennan. The not-as-famous-but-just-as-skilled Charlie Hunter returned to gigging and recording his own albums after Voodoo dropped. He even declined D’Angelo’s invitation to join his touring band, the Soultronics, but said he was flattered by the offer. Presently, Hunter lives in North Carolina with his wife and two children. Hunter said he learned a lot from playing on Voodoo and loved his time with the “music nerds” at Electric Lady. Still, as important as artistic growth and critical acclaim are to a serious musician, they don’t pay the mortgage or car note. Although Hunter said he was paid for his session work, he claimed he has yet to receive any royalties from the two songs he coauthored for the album: “The Root” and “Greatdayindamornin.’” Hunter was put in touch with Alan Leeds and a representative from Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG), the company in charge of music publishing for D’Angelo. At the time of publication, Hunter told me that progress had been made: 101

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It looks like after a ton of detailed detective/lawyer work I may finally see some of the money. I won’t know how much until later in [2019]. The hard part of all of this is trying to figure out where it all went in the first place … I have no idea how this happened.10 A UMPG rep explained that Hunter is not one of its artists and that “the publisher who represents him would be the entity that would facilitate and pay out his royalty statements.” When Leeds was asked if he had any insight or updates on Hunter’s situation, he declined to comment.11 Despite the past due invoice on his publishing money, Hunter did not hesitate when asked if he would work with D’Angelo again. “Hell yeah. That would be a blast,” Hunter told me. “I love that guy!” Probably the biggest changes since the releases of both Voodoo and Black Messiah are the influences and peers of D’Angelo who have left us. J Dilla lost his life to complications from lupus in 2006, at the too young age of thirty-two. Hiphop artists continue to pay tribute to J Dilla’s mastery and uniqueness in sampling and production. Two years after J Dilla died, guitarist Spanky Alford passed away, another death that hit D’Angelo squarely in the gut. D’Angelo’s former manager and the idea man behind the “Untitled” video, Dominique Trenier, died in 2016. David Bowie, Earth, Wind and Fire cofounder and soul legend Maurice White, and A Tribe Called Quest’s Phife Dawg also passed away that year. (2016 turned out to be a “Who’s Who” of celebrity deaths, particularly among singers and musicians.)

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Roy Hargrove, the consummate horn player who cowrote “Spanish Joint” for Voodoo, died suddenly in November 2018 of cardiac arrest brought on by kidney disease. “[Hargrove] is literally the one-man horn section I hear in my head when I think about music,” Questlove eulogized on Instagram the day Hargrove’s death was announced.12 Aside from Bowie, the 2016 death that shocked the world and sent nearly every music fan into profound grief occurred the morning of April 21. The artist and genius that was D’Angelo’s biggest inspiration departed this earth. No one was prepared for the news that Prince Rogers Nelson had died. Not least Alan Leeds. About two decades before Leeds started managing D’Angelo, he was Prince’s tour manager and later ran his label, Paisley Park Records, for three years. On April 21, 2016, Leeds was in Canada for a springtime “bucket list” train excursion with his saxophonist brother, Eric. “We were literally on that train, somewhere in the Rockies in Canada when I got a text that something was going on at Paisley Park,” Leeds said. “Then I got a call from a friend in Minneapolis. ‘There’s been a bulletin that something happened at Paisley Park with no details. Have you heard anything? Is Prince okay?’ I had absolutely no idea.” Soon, Questlove called Leeds, crying over the phone. Questlove had spoken to a member of Prince’s entourage at Paisley Park and confirmed the news of his passing. Then Leeds, Questlove, and D’Angelo convened a disconsolate three-way call. “We were all on the phone sobbing,” Leeds said. 103

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He cut his trip short after arriving in Winnipeg and boarded the first available flight to Minneapolis. Five days after Prince’s death, D’Angelo, accompanied by Maya Rudolph and Gretchen Lieberum on backing vocals, performed a tearful tribute to Prince, covering “Sometimes It Snows in April” on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Wearing a white fur vest, he played a matching Yamaha grand piano, bathed in lavender light and raw emotion. He couldn’t imagine this scenario, performing on television a ballad written by the man he and his brother listened to in secret as children, who became the centerpiece of his musical existence, as a panegyric to his departed idol. During the last verse, D’Angelo replaced the name of “Tracy” with Prince, points to heaven, and it all becomes too much to bear. Overcome by grief, he went silent, trying not to break down. As Rudolph and Lieberum continued singing in the background, it took a beat before D’Angelo regained his composure and finished the song. He hadn’t just lost his musical hero. Over the years, D’Angelo and Prince had become casual friends. They jammed together on occasion, and Leeds said they would talk on the phone about two or three times a year. Prince even invited D’Angelo to hang with him during his tour after finishing rehab at the Crossroads Treatment Center in 2006. He didn’t go. Questlove exalted Voodoo as his and D’Angelo’s “audition tape” to produce an album for Prince.13 Sadly, for music fans everywhere, their fantasy never came to pass. But because of

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Prince’s need to be judge, jury, and executioner of his sound, that holy trinity was a pipe dream even when Prince was alive. “It wouldn’t have ever happened because Prince was never interested in what somebody else would bring to his music,” said Leeds. “He hated it when people covered his songs. Used to complain about it.” Alan Leeds is the rare person who has befriended and had such exhaustive experiences with both Prince and D’Angelo. He knows better than probably anyone on the planet that they are two sides of the same coin: gifted perfectionists with singular, unbending expectations of how their music should sound. D’Angelo wanted badly to produce a Prince record, but blind to the double standard identical to his paragon, D’Angelo would never want someone else to produce him. Leeds elaborated: Nobody in the world is going to produce D’Angelo. He ain’t gonna hear it. He’s like, “No. No. No. I got my own thing. I don’t want nobody telling me what to do. This is my music. It’s coming from deep within me. I don’t want someone else interpreting it and changing it.” And Prince was the same way. “Sometimes I think it’s sad,” Leeds continued. “Imagine if you take Prince’s gift and put it with Questlove’s production skills and D’Angelo’s gift. You can only imagine what might come out of it.” We can only imagine. Is Voodoo a blueprint for what musicians can accomplish today or in the future? Dion Summers says an album like

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Voodoo released in the current musical landscape would be a “mixed success” commercially, not the platinum-seller that it was in 2000. “Our attention span is smaller now,” he said, describing younger music fans as a “beat-influenced generation.” Nevertheless, the album’s impact resonated beyond both commerciality and age groups. Michael Millions, a rapper on the rise from Richmond, sampled “The Line,” initially without D’Angelo’s permission, for his 2018 cut, “Water.” After an interview Millions did showing his love for D’Angelo and Brown Sugar circulated online, D’Angelo got in touch with Millions and not only gave his blessing for the sample but said he could use it for free.14 Millions is one example of how D’Angelo has inspired the next generation of musical artists. Lines connecting the work of recording artists like Frank Ocean, H.E.R., James Blake, and Daniel Caesar can be drawn directly back to D’Angelo and the aural fluidity of Voodoo. Singer/songwriter Solange wrote about the album like a high priestess of his religion. “Voodoo is the church in which we all come to worship the religion of soul music. It is the word … the temple.”15 “Voodoo is as relevant today as when it first came out,” wrote Solange’s singer/songwriter big sister, Beyoncé. “D’Angelo’s harmonies, instrumentation, and arrangements are iconic and timeless.”16 Summers said passing the baton to new, younger singers is a role that D’Angelo should embrace while also maintaining a relationship with his original fan base, specifically Gen X Black women. “[His] audience has aged with [him],” Summers said. “Women now have discretionary income that

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they may not have had when they were in their 20s. They will continue to support him. They won’t be expecting a six-pack, but musically, that audience is there.” Once again, music lovers wait to see what D’Angelo will do next. At the time of this writing, he lives reclusively in New York City full time, and Leeds said D’Angelo continues to work on new music and expects an album to be released in 2020. It could be out by the time this book hits the shelves, but in light of D’Angelo’s track record for releasing new albums, a tentative date means nothing. For those yearning to see D’Angelo perform live, that’s on the back burner until a new record drops. According to Leeds, D’Angelo turned down $2 million worth of offers to headline summer music festivals in 2019. In short, D’Angelo will reemerge when he’s good and ready, and not a minute sooner. Back in Richmond, the faith that Bill McGee has in the hometown star he groomed and still refers to by his birth name has not waivered. He is grateful that his protégé did not succumb to the pressure and addictions that took Prince and Michael Jackson away from us, brilliant men, McGee said, who have “no business being dead.” McGee knows in his heart that D’Angelo/Michael continues to have “game-changer potential” and will contribute further to the culture. “He hasn’t finished,” opined McGee. “Can you imagine what Marvin Gaye would be doing now? Curtis Mayfield, now? The potential for him to do something phenomenal is still possible. As long as he is alive, he’s still relevant.”

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Concluding note to readers: Significant effort was made to confirm the dates, ages, activities, and chronological order of events elucidated in this book. At present, D’Angelo rarely grants interviews; he did not respond to requests by the author made to his record company and via a personal contact. During the process of researching this book, conflicting and/or incomplete information was discovered related to several points in D’Angelo’s biography and during the years Voodoo was in production. Certain dates were extrapolated by cross-checking secondary sources and/or direct interviews. If there are any inaccuracies in the book, they appear despite the author conducting her work in good faith (no pun intended).

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Notes

Chapter 1 1

Peisner, David. “D’Angelo: What the Hell Happened?” Spin. August 5, 2008. http://www.spin.com/articles/dangelo-what-hellhappened?utm_source=share-email&utm_medium=button.

2

hampton, dream. “D’Angelo: Soul Man.” Vibe. April 2000. p. 106. https://www.dreamhampton.com/articles-archived/2019/2/3/ soul-man-dangelo.

Chapter 2 1

Ruggieri, Melissa. “How Things Have Changed for D’Angelo.” Richmond Times-Dispatch. September 1, 1996. No URL available.

2

McGee, Bill. Personal interview by author. August 10, 2018.

3

Touré. “D’Angelo Is Holding Your Hand.” Rolling Stone, No. 840, May 11, 2000. p. 145.

4

D’Angelo. Interview with Tavis Smiley (part 2). Tavis Smiley [TV Program]. PBS. Aired September 3, 2015.

NOTES

5

McGee, Bill. Personal interview by author.

6

“?uestlove interviews D’Angelo.” Okayplayer [No month available]. 1999. https://www.okayplayer.com/dangelo/ interview.html.

7

Unsung [TV program].“Angie Stone.” TVOne. First aired January 28, 2015.

8

Email from Jocelyn Cooper to author and fact-checker. June 27, 2019.

9

Jones, Alisha Lola. Phone interview by author. January 31, 2019.

10 Unsung, “Angie Stone.” 11 D’Angelo. Album notes. Brown Sugar. EMI Records. 1995. 12 Unsung, “Angie Stone.” 13 Wallace, Amy. “Amen! (D’Angelo’s Back).” GQ. June 2012. p. 163. 14 Lewis, Miles Marshall. “Prophecy Fulfilled.” The Village Voice. February 1, 2000. p. 105. 15 bandele, asha. “Been There, Done That.” Essence. Vol. 33, No. 11, March 2003. p. 130. 16 hampton, “D’Angelo.” 17 Thompson, Ahmir. “Questcorner Reviews: D’Angelo, Voodoo.” Okayplayer.com. [No month available] 1999. https://www. okayplayer.com/theroots/qreviewdangelo.htm 18 hampton, “D’Angelo.” 19 Ibid. 20 Unsung, “Angie Stone.” 21 Souleo. “Angie Stone: Soul on the Outside.” EBONY. August 16, 2012. https://www.ebony.com/entertainment/interviewangie-stone-soul-on-the-outside-488/. 22 Ibid.

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NOTES

Chapter 3 1

Worldwide FM. “Classic Album Sundays: Voodoo Part 2— An interview with Russell Elevado.” New York. January 1, 2017. https://www.mixcloud.com/worldwidefm/classicalbum-sundays-voodoo-part-2-an-interview-with-russellelevado-01-01-17/.

2

Ibid.

3

Ibid.

4

Ibid.

5

Bilger, Burkhard. “The Rhythm in Everything: A Hip-Hop Pioneer Reinvents Late-Night Music.” The New Yorker. November 12, 2012. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/11/12/ the-rhythm-in-everything.

6

Williams, Chris. “The Soulquarians at Electric Lady: An Oral History.” Red Bull Music Academy Daily. June 1, 2015. https:// daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2015/06/the-soulquarians-atelectric-lady.

7

D’Angelo and Questlove. Interview with Nelson George. Red Bull Music Academy. Brooklyn, NY. May 23, 2014. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD1oaBCmZWA&index=1&li st=PLPIyaVppbY1QkCwBHLvvL8zd_-ScuG-0_&t=0s.

8

Worldwide FM, “Classic Album Sundays.”

9

King, Jason. “The Time Is Out of Joint: Notes on D’Angelo’s Voodoo (new liner notes of the Light in the Attic vinyl rerelease of Voodoo.)” December 2012. http://passthecurve.com/ post/41942596825/the-time-is-out-of-joint-notes-on-dangelos.

10 Thompson, Ahmir and Ben Greenman. Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove. New York: Grand Central Publishing. 2013. p. 161. 111

NOTES

11 Ibid. 12 Bilger, “The Rhythm in Everything.” 13 Worldwide FM, “Classic Album Sundays.” 14 King, “The Time Is Out of Joint.” 15 D’Angelo and Questlove. Interview with Nelson George. 16 King, “The Time Is Out of Joint.” 17 Thompson. “Questcorner Reviews.” 18 Williams, “The Soulquarians at Electric Lady.” 19 King, “The Time Is Out of Joint.” 20 Thompson. “Questcorner Reviews.” 21 D’Angelo and Questlove. Interview with Nelson George. 22 D’Angelo. Smiley (part 2). 23 King, “The Time Is Out of Joint.” 24 Herrera, Isabelia. “Meet Gina Figueroa, the Boricua Woman Who Inspired and Co-Wrote D’Angelo’s Grammy-Nominated ‘Really Love’.” Remezcla. February 16, 2016. https://remezcla. com/features/music/gina-figueroa-d-angelo-really-loveinterview/.

Chapter 4 1

McLeod, Ken. “The Construction of Masculinity in African American Music and Sports.” American Music. University of Illinois. Summer 2009. p. 205.

2

Thompson, “Questcorner Reviews.”

3

Entry in Urban Dictionary. https://www.urbandictionary.com/ define.php?term=JAx. 112

NOTES

4

Wallace, “Amen! (D’Angelo’s Back).” p. 162.

5

Sakala, Leah. “Breaking Down Mass Incarceration in the 2010 Census: State-by-State Incarceration Rates by Race/ Ethnicity.” Prison Policy Initiative. May 28, 2014. https://www. prisonpolicy.org/reports/rates.html.

6

Nellis, Ashley. “The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons.” The Sentencing Project. June 14, 2016. https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/colorof-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons/.

7

D’Angelo and Questlove. Interview with Nelson George.

8

Perry, Imani. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham: Duke University Press. 2004. p. 135.

9

Bilger, “The Rhythm in Everything.”

10 Thompson, “Questcorner Reviews.” 11 Williams, Saul. Voodoo album liner notes. Virgin Records. 2000. 12 XXL Staff. “20 Times Rappers Big-Up Donald Trump in Their Lyrics.” XXL. November 10, 2016. http://www.xxlmag.com/ news/2016/11/rap-lyrics-with-donald-trump/. 13 Davis, Kimberly. “Why Sisters Are Excited about D’Angelo.” EBONY. April 2000. p. 80. 14 hooks, bell. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. p. 18.

Chapter 5 1

Williams, Voodoo album liner notes.

2

Edwards, Tamala. “The Soul of a Sex Symbol.” Essence. November 1999. p. 106.

113

NOTES

3

Ibid. p. 188.

4

Thompson, “Questcorner Reviews.”

5

See what I did there?! LOL.

6

Thompson, “Questcorner Reviews.”

7

Edwards, “The Soul of a Sex Symbol.” pp. 106, 186.

8

Elevado, Russell. Interview with Red Bull Music Academy. Toronto, Canada. [no month available] 2007. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=a3qg1-VZUik&list=PLPIyaVppbY1Qk CwBHLvvL8zd_-ScuG-0_&index=4&t=603s.

9

Ibid.

10 Edwards, “The Soul of a Sex Symbol.” p. 188. 11 Kajikawa, Loren. “D’Angelo’s Voodoo Technology: African Cultural Memory and the Ritual of Popular Music Consumption.” Black Music Research Journal. University of Illinois. Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring 2012. p. 148. 12 Ibid. p. 151. 13 The New Harvard Dictionary of Music. https://web.library.yale. edu/cataloging/music/vocal-ranges 14 D’Angelo. Smiley (part 1). 15 “?uestlove interviews D’Angelo.” 16 Thompson, “Questlove Reviews.” 17 Worldwide FM, “Classic Album Sundays.” 18 Jones, Steve. “D’Angelo’s Timeless Magic R&B Revivalist Conjures Spirit of Hendrix to Craft Voodoo.” USA TODAY. January 25, 2000. 01D. 19 Murphy, Keith. “6—Untitled.” Vibe. March 4, 2011. 20 Song of Songs (Solomon) 2:3. The Holy Bible [New International Version]. Zondervan. 2001. p. 673.

114

NOTES

21 Song of Songs 4:7. Ibid. p. 674. 22 American Psychological Association. “APA Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men.” August 2018. https://www.apa.org/about/policy/boys-men-practiceguidelines.pdf.

Chapter 6 1

Peisner, “D’Angelo: What the Hell Happened?”.

2

Century, Douglas. “Singing in the Buff: The Pure Beefcake Video.” New York Times. February 6, 2000. C1.

3

Coulehan, Erin. “Panic! At the Disco Get Racy, Recreate D’Angelo’s ‘Untitled’.” Rolling Stone. October 9, 2013. https:// www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/panic-at-the-discoget-racy-recreate-dangelos-untitled-66022/.

4

Harris, Keith M. “‘Untitled’: D’Angelo and the Visualization of the Black Male Body.” Wide Angle. Johns Hopkins University Press. Vol. 21, No. 4, October 1999. https://doi.org/10.1353/ wan.2004.0003. p. 74.

5

Jackson, Ronald. Scripting the Black Masculine Body: Discourse and Racial Politics in Popular Media. Albany: SUNY Press. 2006. p. 12.

6

Peisner, “D’Angelo: What the Hell Happened?”

7

Email from Kirsten (last name redacted for privacy) to author. May 6, 2009.

8

Century, “Singing in the Buff.”

9

Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1989. p.19.

115

NOTES

10 Herrera, “Meet Gina Figueroa, the Boricua Woman Who Inspired and Co-Wrote D’Angelo’s Grammy-Nominated ‘Really Love’. ” 11 Thompson and Greenman, Mo’ Meta Blues. p. 180. 12 Peisner, “D’Angelo: What the Hell Happened?” 13 Ibid. 14 Wallace, “Amen! (D’Angelo’s Back).” p. 192. 15 D’Angelo. Smiley (part 2). D’Angelo responds to Smiley’s comment that “women feel [objectified] every day” with “I wasn’t mad at that!” and laughs. 16 Wallace, “Amen! (D’Angelo’s Back).” 17 D’Angelo. Smiley (part 2).

Chapter 7 1

Peisner, “D’Angelo: What the Hell Happened?”

2

Elevado, Interview with Red Bull Music Academy.

3

The $1.5 million number is Russell Elevado’s estimate of what it cost to make Voodoo. Alan Leeds could not confirm that amount definitively but said during my interview with him that it “sounds accurate.”

4

Hilburn, Robert. “Year in Review in Pop Music: Robert Hilburn’s Top 10: Offensive? Sometimes Compelling? Always.” Los Angeles Times. December 24, 2000.

5

DeRogatis, Jim. “Best Rock Goes Beyond Bucks.” Chicago SunTimes. December 31, 2000.

6

D’Angelo. Smiley (part 1)

116

NOTES

7

Jones, “D’Angelo’s Timeless Magic: R&B Revivalist Conjures Spirit of Hendrix to Craft Voodoo.”

8

D’Angelo and Questlove, Interview with Nelson George.

9

Lacy, Anne. “Which Comes First in Contemporary Music Technology: The Musician or the Machine?” Vice. February 10, 2016. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ae8kvz/ which-comes-first-in-contemporary-music-technology-themusician-or-the-machine.

10 Thompson and Greenman. Mo’ Beta Blues. p. 178. 11 D’Angelo and Questlove, Interview with Nelson George. 12 Hunter, James. “Review: D’Angelo, Voodoo.” Rolling Stone. No. 833. February 3, 2000. pp. 55–56. 13 “100 Best Albums of the 2000s.” Rolling Stone. July 18, 2011. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/100-bestalbums-of-the-2000s-153375/fleet-foxes-fleet-foxes-2-186430/ 14 Email to author from Jonathan [last name redacted for privacy]. June 27, 2017.

Epilogue 1

The merger of companies at the same stage of production in the same or different industries (businessdictionary.com).

2

Sweney, Mark. “Slipping Discs: Music Streaming Revenues of $6.6bn Surpass CD Sales.” The Guardian. April 24, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/24/ music-streaming-revenues-overtake-cds-to-hit-66bn.

3

Serjeant, Jill. “Streaming Overtakes U.S. Digital Music Sales for First Time: Nielsen.” Reuters. January 5, 2017. https://www. reuters.com/article/us-music-streaming-idUSKBN14P1YH. 117

NOTES

4

Worldwide FM, “Classic Album Sundays.”

5

D’Angelo and Questlove. Interview with Nelson George.

6

Wallace, “Amen! (D’Angelo’s Back).” p. 162.

7

Mayer, John. “Open Letter to D’Angelo.” Esquire. Reprinted December 15, 2014. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/ music/a31473/dangelo-john-mayer/.

8

George, Nelson. Liner notes from Black Messiah. RCA Records. 2014.

9

Frere-Jones, Sasha. “Second Coming: D’Angelo’s Triumphant Return.” The New Yorker. January 12, 2015. https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/12/second-coming.

10 Hunter, Charlie. Follow-up email exchange with author. July 30, 2019. 11 In an October 7, 2019, email to the author, Charlie Hunter wrote, “I’m finally getting some money (not much) from royalties from 2013 to present.” Earlier earnings remain unaccounted for. 12 https://www.instagram.com/p/BpuNOP4DEIx/?utm_ source=ig_twitter_share&igshid=1ppx6z7x5tzzs 13 Touré, “D’Angelo Is Holding Your Hand.” 14 Phillips, Yoh. “How Richmond Rapper Michael Millions Miraculously Cleared Two D’Angelo Samples.” DJ Booth. March 4, 2019. https://djbooth.net/features/2019-03-04michael-millions-cleared-two-dangelo-samples. 15 Knowles, Solange. “Solange, Janelle Monae, Thundercat, Beyoncé and More Celebrate 15 Years of D’Angelo’s Voodoo Album.” Saint Heron. January 2015. https://saintheron.com/saint-heron-andfriends-celebrate-15-years-of-dangelos-voodoo/. 16 Knowles-Carter, Beyoncé, “Solange, Janelle Monae, Thundercat, Beyoncé and More Celebrate 15 Years of D’Angelo’s Voodoo Album.” 118

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