Album of the Week #25: D'Angelo - Voodoo
This is Album of the Week #25 ~ This week's album is D'Angelo - Voodoo
Year of Release: 2000
Genre(s): Neo-Soul
Country: United States
Length: 79 minutes
RYM | Listen!
Excerpt from Pitchfork:
Details also give Voodoo its timelessness. The album's gentle avoidance of common song structures adds spontaneity; even after hundreds of listens, it's still possible to be surprised. The barely-heard words spoken in intros and outros give things continuity and a voyeuristic quality, like you're hearing it all through a city wall; listen again for the the sweetly awkward conversation with an ex that starts "One Mo' Gin" or the way "Greatdayndamornin'" is introduced with D'Angelo praising ?uestlove to journalist dream hampton: "I was like, 'You gonna be my drummer one of these days,'" gushes D.
Discussion points:
Have you heard this artist/album before? Is this your first time hearing?
Do you enjoy this genre? Is this an album you would have chosen?
Does this album remind you of something you've heard before?
What were the album's strengths or weaknesses?
Was there a standout track for you?
How did you hear the album? Where were you? What was your setup?
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Apologies for the lack of brevity.
I consider myself a big Prince fan, but for some reason I have never really been able to hear Voodoo's alleged Prince influences. Apart from some background touches here and there, as on "Untitled", the album doesn't sound either rhythmically or melodically anything like Prince to me. (But maybe you guys can point me to the Prince bits!) I think this is largely why I dismissed the album when it came out, as I was so focused on trying to compare it to Prince, and I just ended up baffled and confused. It was only later, after I first got into Parliament-Funkadelic in the late 2000s, and through that into 1990s g-funk (yes, I was quite late to the party, having pretty much dismissed all rap music in the 90s), that I began to appreciate Voodoo. And I still feel that that those are the album's more natural musical connections, rather than the Minneapolis scene.
I wonder if I was also influenced by Prince's apparent dissing of D'Angelo at the time. I didn't remember any of this, but I now notice that while he name dropped D'Angelo and Questlove on his 1999 track "Undisputed" (on Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic), he pretty much turned that around in his 2001 version of the song (on Rave In2 the Joy Fantastic). I believe he wasn't too happy about some comments that D'Angelo made, practically saying that if given the chance, he could get Prince back on track. Or maybe it was the press saying that D'Angelo's songs were the best Prince songs in over a decade. And I probably wasn't wild about any of those comments either, because I for one really liked Prince's 90s output.
Anyway, I almost feel that the D'Angelo-Prince connection ended up working the other way around. Some of Prince's music from the mid-to-late-2000s reminds me a little of D'Angelo.
But even more than the Prince thing, it may have rubbed me the wrong way that D'Angelo was so praised for his unconventional approach to soul music, the organic quality of the album's songs and his masterful sonic tapestries, while I thought all of that would have described Maxwell's near-contemporary album Embrya equally well. Yet, that one had been widely and quite loudly criticised for being pretentious and lacking in direction. And while I don't typically mind what people say about my favourite albums, I to date lament the reception that Maxwell's album received, as he has never ventured into similarly experimental territory since.
And while I probably couldn't have known Maxwell's career trajectory at the time, I had already seen how unkind reviews had affected another of my musical heroes. A full decade before Maxwell and D'Angelo used their follow-ups to successful debut albums to release experimental takes on progressive soul, Terence Trent D'Arby did exactly the same with his own second album, 1989's Neither Fish Nor Flesh: A Soundtrack of Love, Faith, Hope & Destruction. While it may have stumbled in places, and TTD's public persona certainly made it a bit too easy for the press to ridicule his work, I feel it was a much better and certainly a much more interesting album than reviewers gave it credit for. But whatever I thought, the response was enough to make TTD practically disappear from the top of the charts, even if his 90s albums were, I think, some of the best music that anyone put out that decade. At least he didn't play it quite as safe as Maxwell ended up doing in his subsequent albums (I do love Maxwell's music, but I long for another Embrya), even if it also meant that TTD, in following his muse, also ultimately sort of gradually drifted into a musical dimension that I just haven't been able to follow him into.
But I digress. And then again, maybe I don't. All this illustrates that for various reasons, Voodoo came to me with lots of baggage, which I wasn't able to put aside at the time. And I feel that a part of that baggage, the Prince references in particular, was intentional, generated by marketing. It felt like a very strongly, very methodically, and in many ways very cleverly marketed album. It succeeded in building hype and creating that aura of "genius" around the release, but it felt a little much at times to me.
So, whenever I think about Voodoo, I tend to think about all these things, rather than the music. Which is a pity. Because these days, I can see the album's brilliance, even if I still can't claim that it's one of my favourites. In fact, it's not even my favourite D'Angelo album. But that's just because I really like his other two releases. They feel a little fuller, rounder, more melodic to me. Voodoo so easily fades into the background for me. Unless I put it on the headphones and really concentrate on it. It's one of those albums that requires you to work with it.
This is a really interesting perspective, especially since I got into Prince through D'Angelo, and a couple decades late at that. I wasn't aware they had 'beef', I admittedly know very little about D as a person, likely as he completely dropped from the public eye as I was growing up. I'm struggling to find the exact quote D said about Prince - fan forums seem to point to the Voodoo liner notes, but there's nothing about D'Angelo saying he'd put Prince back on track that I can find. The more I'm digging on it the more it comes across just how much D admired Prince. Apparently they jammed in private once, but there's different reports on how cordial that went.
Turns out 'Chicken Grease' is named after what Prince called his guitar.I'm thinking maybe you have the Prince influence the wrong way around - the background details and the timbre are very much what make Voodoo Voodoo. Almost every song here could be a Prince cover song to my ears, I can practically hear Prince singing the lead vocals - albeit with a looser rhythm. It's those ad libs and shifts in its rhythms that gives it that D'Angelo spin, but tighten up the sound and put a funk synth over the top and you've found the magic. Tell me 'Feel Like Makin' Love' doesn't sound right out of 'Sign O The Times'.
Then again, if my grandmother had wheels...
It's a shame they otherwise never had much to do with each other in Prince's lifetime. I found this cover of 'Pop Life' from a gig in 2013 which I think illustrates it pretty well. Dropping the speed down to 0.75x is a little too slow, but I think makes it sound to something very akin to a track you'd find on 'Brown Sugar'.
I think you are right that D'Angelo was just a massive Prince fan. I couldn't find the article where he talked about wanting to work with Prince and bring him back into fold (and perhaps I remember it wrong), but he did certainly say in an interview in 2000 that what Prince was doing at that point wasn't "pure Prince", insisting that Prince should go back to his earlier sound, "back to the ABCs", and even suggesting that Prince's earlier success may have been due to the talented people around him giving him a push. I can imagine Prince wouldn't have been too happy to read any of that. But that doesn't make D'Angelo any less of a Prince fan in my view. In fact, it was pretty much what most Prince fans were saying at the time.
That is, until Prince sort of shut everyone up by switching back to using his birth name, putting out The Rainbow Children, and especially with the One Nite Alone Tour that followed. But just before that, the late 90s and the turn of the millennium was certainly a little weird time for a Prince fan.
I don't know why, but no matter how much I try, I just can't hear "Feel Like Makin' Love" as a Sign O The Times track. It sounds to me more like mid-90s R&B, making me think of TLC's "Rainbows" or Fugees or something like that. Which I suppose is funny as I remember "Rainbows" also being talked about as a Prince-like track at the time, and... I just can't hear the connection there, either. Maybe I just lack some sort of musical imagination, or something.
But what I lack in imagination, I can perhaps substitute with useless pedantry. "Chicken Grease" was actually not a reference to Prince's guitar, but a call that Prince used in concerts to instruct his guitarists to play a certain kind of funky guitar strum pattern. I'm sure it has a technical name, but as we have already established, I lack musical imagination, so I don't know what it is.
Now, I may certainly have this wrong, but I think the phrase appears exactly twice on Prince's album tracks. You can hear it in It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night (this one's actually not the album version but close enough), and you can also hear the guitar pattern going on in the background. And the other time he mentions the phrase is, naturally, in the 2001 version of "Undisputed", i.e. the track that I mentioned earlier is dissing D'Angelo and Questlove. Here, Prince asks his guitarist to "show them the real chicken grease". Ouch.
I'm glad all this didn't seem to sour D'Angelo's enthusiasm for Prince. And we of course don't know what really went on between these people, or how playful all this was meant to be. What we do know however is that D'Angelo's "Pop Life" cover is absolutely lovely, and I remember how he performed "Sometimes It Snows In April" on Jimmy Fallon after Prince's passing. It made me cry when I saw it.
Thanks for the Chicken Grease correction! I actually listened to Sign O The Times earlier today and noticed him shouting it for the first time. Adore that recording of It’s Gonna Be A Beautiful Night.
Speaking of Adoring things, "Adore" is actually the one Prince track that I could perhaps be convinced might in some distant way sound a bit like something on Voodoo. That and maybe "Insatiable". But both are far cleaner, clearer, more playful and melodic to me than the dirtier, murkier sound that runs through Voodoo. Even on headphones, much of that album sounds like it's playing somewhere in a club on the other side of the street. Which is quite wonderful, but quite far from Prince.
The contrast between "Feel Like Makin' Love" on Voodoo and the original Roberta Flack recording is such a great example of this. D'Angelo sounds like he is in a tin box, wrapped in a blanket and not quite singing into the microphone. There is absolutely no space, no echo, no reverb, and no life present. Sonically, everything comes across as very dry and emotionless, which frames the lyrics in a very interesting manner. As a performance, it's a million miles away from the airiness, brightness and beauty of Roberta Flack's version. She's not in a tin box in some dark corner somewhere. No, she's clearly in that park in the spring, and the sun is very much shining, whatever the lyrics say about the time of the day.
Also, now that I played Voodoo through once again, I must admit that the drums on "Africa" sound like they were lifted from Prince's "I Wonder U". Maybe I'm starting to finally hear the connections.
'Adore' definitely stands out - I was thinking while hearing it earlier today that it might be the inspiration for the guitar sound for The Charade.
I think this is two-sides of the same coin to the Pitchfork description of the album sounding like its heard 'through a city wall'. For me there's something very intimate about D'Angelo's recording. It's not easy producing something and every part feel so 'close', but they pull it off here. I like the Roberta Flack recording, it has a very classic 70s soul sound, but I really think the Voodoo sound stands on its own.
Absolutely, the Voodoo sound very much stands on its own. It is such a meticulously crafted album. I suppose my difficulty of hearing the Prince influence on the album could be because of this. I get so drawn in by the D'Angelo sound that I don't catch the references. He may incorporate all sorts of influences, but as with "Feel Like Makin' Love", he totally makes them his own.
I love "The Charade". That guitar sound definitely sounds very much like Prince!
I've generally abandoned any effort to declare one album my all-time favourite, but there are often times when this is it.
I remember hearing it for the first time and completely dismissing it - directionless, tuneless, overlong. I heard it the second time a year later, and have never experienced more of a 'click' - I've found myself intoxicated by it ever since. No artist, even D'Angelo himself, has come close to replicating its sound, and lord knows I've spent the last decade trying to find more of it.
In my mind it sits right next to 'Astral Weeks' - these two albums that aren't afraid to improvise, that sound like musicians in a room all understanding one another completely. 'Groove' is a hard thing to quantify, and this album makes its groove tick along with the intricacies of a pocket watch.
I love that description from the Pitchfork write up - like hearing something through a city wall. This record is so understated, comfortable, and even optimistic, all underneath a thick shroud of 'cool'.
There's so much Prince influence on this, you can hear his presence on every song. Despite how loose each composition is here, there's a pop song in the DNA of each track, which makes them to easy to come back to, really in any order.
Although, those last two tracks work together to make one hell of a pay-off. The closer, 'Africa' has always been my favourite. Only D'Angelo could make a lullaby sound as sexy as it does. It has this tender, twinkling Rhode keyboard that just dances around your ears.
'Black Messiah' in 2015 was one hell of an accomplishment, after 15 years away from the public eye. I've spent a long time going back on forth on these two records, but even 'Black Messiah', a record oozing with soul, sounds a little stiff compared to 'Voodoo'. It's the king of soul, the crowning jewel, the king of cool.
Despite being raised in a pro-Prince and soul household, I was a little young, and my parents a little old, for this album to enter my awareness prior to Black Messiah, just as I was getting deeper into hip-hop at that time. My first impressions were quite like yours, @TooFewColours. The melodies and the flair the musicians demonstrate were obviously excellent, but it was just too muddy and busy, but somehow plodding and discursive?, to hold any attention it grabbed. Even still, the Devil's Pie hook, The Line, and Chicken Grease all made great impressions, and there wasn't a second of Untitled that I didn't love.
Regardless, for a while there I'd have comfortably rated Brown Sugar "higher". Say what you will, but it's an album of just-about perfect crossover tracks. Groovy, sultry, upbeat, and clean. That last one was really the bridge for my taste: once my ear connected to D'Angelo (and whichever Soulquarians he wrote with most), when coming back to Voodoo, my appreciation skyrocketed. I wouldn't be foolish enough to rank them now. I can't even pick out any specific songs as highlights, at this point.
On coming back to it for this thread, the range of emotional tones in just the first few songs is immense and arresting. The bits of overheard conversation are excellent at building mood, but beyond them, the layers of nearly-random noise that work to release the tension built with the abstract structure of each song are fascinating and dread-inducing. Every end of a track seems to bring the listener into some tunnel, taking them from one place, one point of view, to another. Like walking between rooms in a dingy bar with multiple performance stages, or station surfing on the radio, except as you start to tune in, really get into the sense of a performance, and close your eyes and bob your head, you realize a different song is on, and you're missing the last one only long enough to love the newest.
Questlove's drumming (so inventively restrained!) and D'Angelo's vocal tones are the only companions that thread through every track, and it's incredible how such a "self-indulgent" album that stays firmly rooted in a single genre can encapsulate so many different emotions while A. remaining coherent and consistent, and B. so damn sexy. The way that sexuality has been integrated into the spirit of soul (forgive me pls) is endlessly interesting, the way that the traditions of gospel were subsumed into some of the most positive images of sexuality in American culture. This album captures that perfectly. It's directionless, it seeps and comes off every groove like waves, it's nonjudgmental and loving, and that is remarkably beautiful as much as it is probably alienating.
R&B and soul are my go-to genres to throw on in the background of a social occasion, and this is one of the only albums in them that I've been asked to turn off. Whether that's just the frenetic soundscape, or the meandering structures, or the goodwill horniness, or what, I don't blame people for not loving it. As I said above, it was hardly love at first listen for myself, but it does feel like this album is overlooked outside of specific communities.
My buried advice for anyone coming to it for the first time: listen to it with a real speaker system, or headphones with an open soundstage, if you can. The mix is really subtle, the textures of nearly every sound feel very precise and intentional, and cheap headphones or even high-end IEMs might still restrict what details you can pick out, and this is an album of details. It is not an album that builds to climax that awes and surprises (though Untitled is absolutely insane), the track length isn't there to build and build. It's slow and wandersome, so if you're not listening to the little things, you'll be bored out of your gourd.
I love how it's all so spacey, how it feels effortless and distracted, yet obviously couldn't be anything but the result of an enormous labor of love by everybody involved in its conception. That's not a common thing in any field of art, let alone one as collaborative as popular music.
Thanks for choosing this album, by the way, but damn your making me stay up to listen to it at 3 AM after seeing this post!
Wonderful thoughts! Glad to have someone here who shares my love of Voodoo ~ 3 AM sounds like an ideal time of day to be spinning it.
I will say I've always had a harder time getting into Brown Sugar. It's arguably his most soulful record, but a little more structured and sharp on the production end. Although, after discovering 'Live At The Jazz Cafe, London', that's my favourite way to hear its songs. Being released between Brown Sugar and Voodoo, it's a really interesting middle ground between the two. That, and its live setting opens up more room for those improvised moments. And damn, that 10 minute rendition of Brown Sugar could just go on forever.
I don't think I have anything particularly substantial to share or go into, but some scattershot thoughts because I love this album:
Back in college I was getting into listening to full albums rather than assorted singles, and as a pasty white weeb I stumbled on a mashup of One Mo' Gin. It prompted me to listen to the rest of Voodoo, the album blew me away, and it was a huge springboard for my love of neo-soul and all the parent genres that it grew off of. Listening to this again I'm hearing so many roots for other acts; Hiatus Kaiyote totally cribbed Spanish Joint, forget which song. The drums really help.
Speaking of the drums, I had no idea ?uestlove drummed this entire album until this thread. (I just listened to Donuts too, probably need to check out more Soulquarians stuff in general.) The drums and bass are so important to this album, that pocket never lets up from start to finish. It lets D'Angelo's voice fly unrestrained by tempo without disrupting anything, if that makes sense.
Speaking of D'Angelo's voice, the other half of what's so important to this album to me is somewhere between D'Angelo's voice and his harmonies. I'm guessing he's not doing anything absolutely wild from a music theory perspective, but if he were doing some microtonal crazy bs I could never make it out because the album is produced so pristinely that the harmonies come across as "one" singer or instrument in the mix, unless he's really intending for a solo voice or to create a group. It's remarkable.
Speaking of remarkable vocals, that buildup in the final chorus of The Root is religiously good.
Speaking of, uh. Heavenly bodies? Is that an appropriate segue into the Untitled music video? It sounds like he didn't appreciate the sexual bend in the advertising for the album, and I can't imagine seeing MTV and VH1 spinning you naked around for four minutes on TV is great for anyone. But I also can't think of anything more appropriate for that song...
I really enjoyed reading everyone's thoughts. My first listen was just a few years ago so I really missed out on how Voodoo was received upon release. All I knew is that the first listen blew me away, no context required.
I'm eager to dive into a few of the albums mentioned here to learn more about where D'Angelo drew from and who he has inspired.
Also, I can't BELIEVE the drums are programmed rather than live on "untitled". It sounds so natural!