“Voodoo” by D’Angelo

D'Angelo's second album is peak neo-soul from the most elusive Soulquarian.

This album review examines D’Angelo’s creative peak, an LP that has stood up as one of the 21st century’s crowning R&B achievements.

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Genre: R&B, Neo-Soul, Hip-Hop

Label: Virgin

Release Date: January 25, 2000

Vibe: 💯

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👉 Click the GIF to stream the album on your favorite platform 👈

D’Angelo’s superpower isn’t his musicality, songwriting, or top-notch ability to wring emotion out of every breath in a vocal track. It’s how he makes you wait.

Unlike many of his late-90s R&B contemporaries, he didn’t rush out a carbon copy to a popular and commercially successful debut. In his case, Brown Sugar helped him score what is still his only Top 10 hit on the Hot 100, “Lady.” His label bosses wanted another hit. But, against enormous pressure, he rejoined the R&B assembly line and put out his version of what everyone thought would sell. Instead, all anyone heard in nascent online communities was whispers of a new album in the works. The only morsels D’Angelo fans could gobble up in the four-and-a-half years between records were covers for film soundtracks like Space Jam and Scream 2. He also hopped on the excellent “Nothing Else Matters” on Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation album. Behind the scenes, he suffered from severe writer’s block, paralyzed by the newfound pressure to perform. But, as Voodoo proves every time I hear it, sometimes waiting is the best policy.

This LP, released 25 days into the new millennium, is more than just a great record. It’s a sprawling collection of unforgettable tracks featuring impeccable songcraft, but that’s not what makes it a masterpiece. For me, it goes much deeper than that, transforming the act of listening to these songs into a spiritual experience. It helps that they’re about more than sex and weed, two themes that define the vast majority of Brown Sugar’s material. On Voodoo, D’Angelo explores how greed (”Devil’s Pie”), fatherhood (”Send It On,” which was issued as a single more than a year before the album came out), and heartbreak (”One Mo’ Gin”) had shaped and evolved his worldview. That’s not to say that this record is lacking in sex appeal—far from it, and I’ll circle back to that in a moment—but I want to call out that, like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder before him, this outing represents D’Angelo’s incredible artistic growth that stemmed from his rejection of all genre assumptions and expectations surrounding him.

No track exemplifies this refusal to acquiesce more than “Chicken Grease.” Originally intended to appear on Common’s Like Water for Chocolate, another fabulous album that was being recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York while D’Angelo was recording Voodoo, it’s joyously uninhibited. There’s a false start and indistinct studio chatter that purposely recalls Gaye’s “What’s Going On” or “Got to Give it Up.” The drum groove, one of several iconic beats laid down by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, intentionally drags its downbeats behind where the metronome would have you play those notes. The snare drum hits are also overlayed with hand claps, but those aren’t quantized together perfectly either, which results in this effect where the snare sounds like it’s changing tension or thickness in real time. D’Angelo then instructed bassist Pino Palladino to drag behind a drum groove that was already dragging. It’s difficult to overstate how much skill and, in a sense, unlearning years of honing skills that make you a regular studio musician it takes to execute an instrumental like “Chicken Grease.” It’s outrageously precise and loose at the same time.

It’s worth stopping for a second and acknowledging the eye-popping A-list talent in the Voodoo credits list. It’s first and foremost a who’s who of the Soulquarian movement, with contributions from Raphael Saadiq, Q-Tip, Roy Hargrove, and James Poyser, to name a few. There’s also no small amount of hip-hop influence on this record, with Method Man, Redman, and DJ Premier anchoring this LP in what was then widely acknowledged as a rap scene in transition. The shiny suit era of Bad Boy's glory days was ceding the spotlight to grittier, more left-field sounds from the South and Midwest, a change his album helped facilitate in many ways. But no man had more sonic influence over this tracklist than the late James Yancey, known to most as J Dilla. His unique production style took microchopped samples and transformed them into off-kilter grooves that Questlove called “life-changing” and “liberating.” He may not be officially named in the production credits, but as arguably the most influential Soulquarian member, Dilla’s shadow looms large over D’Angelo’s sonic palette.

The warm, analog textures that fill Voodoo’s every crack and crevice are an homage not just to D’Angelo’s nostalgic musical obsessions but to the emotional purity that classic managed to convey so effortlessly. It never feels like some creatively bankrupt retread, unlike most nostalgia bait that’s topped the pop charts in the years since. He takes the amalgam of 60s and 70s funk and soul influences and creates something fresh and vibrant, a calling card far removed from the Destiny’s Child and TLC hits of that era. There’s something far more centered, grounded, and deadly serious at work here. D’Angelo detailed as much about the process of making Voodoo at the time of its release:

"[The] main thing is that I really just wanted to make the best album that I could make. I basically wanted to be able to sit down and write some nice songs and it takes time to do something like that. You just can't throw stuff together. I know it has been a while but I need the time to get it together as to what I was going to do and how I was going to do it. I felt some of the pressure to follow up Brown Sugar and I tried not to think about that. I wanted to concentrate on what I was doing, and to get it back on the love of music and writing that I had even before I signed a contract. So if there's one reason why I took such a long time in between records is because I wanted to keep that purity, to keep my motivation for why I make music pure.”

The most enduring song off this LP is also one of the reasons the R&B prodigy’s career went off the rails shortly after its rapturous public reception: “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” It’s Prince fan service of the highest order despite not being one of the many Purple One songs he’s covered in his career. The lush instrumentation and lust-drenched vocals are a callback to early Prince slow jams like “Do Me, Baby,” and “When We’re Dancing Close and Slow.” D’Angelo’s throbbing falsetto finds plenty of space to work in between the sparse bass and keyboards, giving the listener the impression he’s delivering a personalized aphrodisiac to you directly and with the utmost care. Questlove later remarked that the track was “[done] quite tactfully, always finding the line between parody and honesty.” You could say the exact same thing about the “Untitled” music video, a cultural artifact that’s become iconic in its own right precisely because it borders on ridiculous while also stripping away any obfuscation about what pure, unfiltered sexual desire can sound like.

Voodoo went on to win multiple Grammys, including Best R&B Album, and seemingly put the music world at D’Angelo’s fingertips. But, confused and frustrated by his sudden public anointment as a sex symbol, his achievement, one that represents neo-soul’s creative apex, sent him into a tailspin. In my review of his follow-up, Black Messiah, I delve into why it took him so long to recover:

“That distinction, coupled with the sudden loss of close friend Fred Jordon in April 2001, sent him into an addiction-fueled tailspin. By the time he was involved in a serious car accident outside his Richmond, Virginia, hometown, he’d pled guilty to DUI and drug possession charges, alienated most of his close friends and family, and had funding for his next studio project cut off by Virgin executives. There was a moment when it looked like addiction and self-sabotage would permanently derail R&B’s heir apparent.”

That aftermath makes me appreciate how significant a sliding doors moment Voodoo is for modern R&B. Without it, countless artists and records wouldn’t have seen the light of day and been well-received by consumers now accustomed to retrofuturist music that doesn’t compromise in the soul department. It’s a perfect record because of its imperfections.