Voodoo is the second studio album by American musician D'Angelo, released on January 25, 2000, through Virgin Records. D'Angelo recorded the album during 1997 and 1999 at Electric Lady Studios in New York City, with an extensive line-up of musicians associated with the Soulquarians musical collective. Produced primarily by the singer, Voodoo features a loose, groove-based funk sound and serves as a departure from the more conventional song structure of his debut album, Brown Sugar (1995). Its lyrics explore themes of spirituality, love, sexuality, maturation, and fatherhood.
Following heavy promotion and public anticipation, the album was met with commercial and critical success. It debuted at number 1 on the US Billboard 200, selling 320,000 copies in its first week, and spent thirty-three weeks on the chart. It was promoted with five singles, including the hit single "Untitled (How Does It Feel)", whose music video garnered D'Angelo mainstream attention and controversy. Critically, Voodoo was acclaimed as a masterpiece and earned D'Angelo several accolades, including the Grammy Award for Best R&B Album and top rankings in album polls for the year.
D'Angelo promoted Voodoo with an international supporting tour in late 2000. While successful early on, the tour became plagued by concert cancellations and D'Angelo's personal frustrations surrounding his sexualized public image from the album's marketing. Voodoo has since been regarded by music writers as a creative milestone of the neo soul genre during its apex and has sold more than 1.7 million copies in the United States, being certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Voodoo was listed as 28th on Rolling Stones 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. His debut album presented a musical fusion of traditional soul and R&B influences with hip hop vocal and production elements, serving as fundamental elements for the neo soul sound. With its single-oriented success, Brown Sugar earned considerable sales success and defied the contemporary, producer-driven sound of the time, while earning popularity among mature R&B audiences and the growing hip hop generation. The album also earned D'Angelo recognition for producing a commercial breakthrough for the genre and giving notice to other neo soul artists, including Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, and Maxwell.
After spending two years on tour promoting Brown Sugar, D'Angelo found himself stuck with writer's block.
Inspiration
In 1998, he was inspired to write music again after the birth of his first child, Michael, with fellow R&B singer and then-girlfriend Angie Stone. He also traveled back to the South, spending time in South Carolina and in his hometown of Richmond, Virginia, while reconnecting himself with the African-American musical history that had originally inspired him. Shortly after his son's birth and the release of his first live album Live at the Jazz Cafe (1998) through EMI Records, he began preparation for the recording of songs for Voodoo. A dedication to his son Michael and daughter Imani was included in the album's liner notes, which were co-written by D'Angelo and writer/musician Saul Williams. In a press video accompanying the release of Voodoo, D'Angelo suggested that he was attempting to create a new sound for him that was in transition: "My inspiration was just to go farther. To get to that next level. To push it even further. To work against the floss and the grain and to get even deeper into the sound that I'm hearing ... and the thing is, I'm just looking at Voodoo as just the beginning. I'm still developing and growing and still listening to that sound I hear inside my head ... So this is the first step". He also found contemporary R&B to be "a joke", adding that "the funny thing about it is that the people making this shit are dead serious about the stuff they're making. It's sad—they've turned black music into a club thing." In an interview for Ebony, D'Angelo said of his role and influences for Voodoo:
Recording and production
right|thumb|[[Electric Lady Studios (entrance pictured), where the album was recorded]]
Beginning in 1996, Voodoo evolved from nearly four years of sessions and featured an extensive roster of R&B, hip hop, and jazz musicians and recording technicians. at Electric Lady Studios, the Manhattan-based recording studio built by Jimi Hendrix. The crew recorded numerous hours of unreleased, original material, as well as covers of their influencers' material.
Soulquarians and guests
Production for the album was conducted in a generally informal manner and took place at Electric Lady Studios simultaneously with recording for Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun (2000) and Common's Like Water for Chocolate (2000). Voodoos sessions also had visitors not associated with the project, including record producer Rick Rubin, comedian Chris Rock, and rock musician Eric Clapton. Q-Tip was originally intended to contribute a verse to the song "Left & Right", but was replaced by rappers Method Man & Redman during recording due to creative differences.
Questlove was the "musical powerhouse" behind several of the Soulquarians' projects during the late 1990s and early 2000s, including Voodoo and Things Fall Apart. In a 2002 interview, he told critic Jim DeRogatis about his role in recording Voodoo and being a part of the Soulquarians, stating "I tried to do all in my power that I could to bring people together – to bring Common to Electric Lady, have him record here whenever so that he could record with some of these other artists. You'd just come into [the studio's] A Room, you don't even know who has a session, but you call me: 'Who's down there?' 'Common's in there today'. So you come down, you order some food, sit down and bulls—, watch a movie, and then it's, 'Let's play something'. And I say, 'Who wants this [track]?' And it would be, 'I want it!' 'No, I want it!'". Notable from the production was that most of it, with the exception of "Untitled (How Does It Feel)", and a recording board originally used by Jimi Hendrix. On Voodoos recording atmosphere, D'Angelo stated "I believe Jimi was there. Jimi, Marvin Gaye, all the folks we were gravitating to. I believe they blessed the project". Questlove helped design the sparse funk, soul and hip hop beats on the generally groove-based record. Although album tracks such as "Left & Right" and "Devil's Pie" help to bring this claim to light, J Dilla himself was not officially credited for production. However, he contributed significantly to Voodoos overall sound, specifically the rhythm and percussion. In a later interview, Questlove discussed the intention and purpose of including imperfection in the album's sound, stating "we wanted to play as perfectly as we could, but then deliberately insert the little glitch that makes it sound messed up. The idea was to sound disciplined, but with a total human feel."
Music
Voodoo was met with rave reviews In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau called it a "deeply brave and pretentious record ... signifies like a cross between lesser Tricky and Sly's Riot Goin' On", and wrote of D'Angelo, "he leads from strength" rather than "tune-and-hook", "a feel for bass more disquieting than bootalicious."
Despite perceiving a "heavy-handed emphasis on groove over melody" and "self-indulgent" song durations, Miles Marshall Lewis of The Village Voice viewed the album as a progression for D'Angelo and compared it to Prince's acclaimed Sign o' the Times (1987), noting that the latter album was initially perceived by most critics as "uneven". Greg Tate of Vibe dubbed it "the most daring song-oriented album by a mainstream R&B artist of his generation." Steve Jones of USA Today wrote that "no other R&B artist today seems to have as acute an understanding of where he comes from as D'Angelo, and none seems as willing to take risks in exploring where he should be heading". Music journalist Peter Shapiro criticized its "loose playing and bohemian self-indulgence", stating "Voodoo drifted all over the map in a blunted haze". Rolling Stones James Hunter disapproved of the experimental and loose-sounding structure, and viewed that it does not attain its potential, stating "long stretches of it are unfocused and unabsorbing [...] Voodoo flatters the real at the expense of the thing. The result is superb smoke, but smoke nonetheless".
Accolades
In 2001, Voodoo won a Grammy Award for Best R&B Album at the 43rd Grammy Awards, The song "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" won for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance and was also nominated for Best R&B Song. The song was also ranked number 12 on The Village Voices Pazz & Jop critics' poll of 2000, as well as number 4 on Rolling Stone magazine's "End of Year Critics & Readers Poll" of the top singles of the year. Voodoo proved to be one of the most critically praised and awarded albums of the year, topping several critics' and publications' "end of year" lists; Bloomsbury Academic's 33⅓ series states that the album "emerged as the year's critical darling". The album earned the number 6 spot on The Village Voices 2000 Pazz & Jop critics' poll. Voodoo was named one of the ten best albums of 2000 by several New York Times staff writers, including Ben Ratliff (number 2), Neil Strauss (number 3), Ann Powers (number 2), and Jon Pareles (number 1).
In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked the album number 488 on its list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and at number 481 in a revised list in 2012. In the 2020, the album was re-ranked at 28, calling it "an album heavy on bass and drenched in a post-coital haze". In 2009, Pitchfork ranked Voodoo number 44 on its list of the Top 200 Albums of the 2000s decade, calling it "a triumph of hands-on, real-time, old-school soul minimalism" and citing D'Angelo's vocals as "maybe the most erotically tactile singing put to disc this decade". Rolling Stone placed the album at number 23 on its list of the 100 Best Albums of the Decade, stating "The decade's most magnificent R&B record was also its most inventive — so far ahead of its time that it still sounds radical". AllMusic editor Andy Kellman has cited Brown Sugar and Voodoo as "two of the most excellent and singular R&B albums of the past 15 years".
{|class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! Publication
! Country
! Accolade
! Year
! Rank
!Ref.
|-
| Pitchfork
| United States
| The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s
| 2009
| align="center" |44
|
|-
| Time
| United States
| Albums of the Year
| 2000
| align="center" |1
|
|-
| The Guardian
| United Kingdom
| The 100 Best Albums of the 21st Century
| 2019
| align="center" |13
|
|-
| Muzik
| United Kingdom
| Albums of the Year
| 2000
| align="center" |7
|
|-
| Uncut
| United Kingdom
| 150 Greatest Albums of the Decade
| 2009
| align="center" |68
|
|-
|Vanity Fair
|United States
|Elvis Costello's 500 Favorite Albums
|2000
| align="center" |*
|
|-
|The Village Voice
|United States
|Pazz & Jop
|2000
| align="center" |6
|
|-
|align="center" colspan="7" style="font-size: 8pt"| (*) designates lists that are unordered.
|-
|}
Tour and aftermath
Following Voodoos release, D'Angelo embarked on his second international tour in support of the album, The Voodoo World Tour. The tour was sponsored by the clothing company Levi Strauss & Co., and it featured D'Angelo promoting an end to gun violence. After signing an initiative on June 7, 2000, at Hamilton High School in West Los Angeles to collect a million signatures by November 7 in support of "common-sense solutions" to end gun violence, the anti-gun violence organization PAX agreed to sponsor the tour. J Dilla's group Slum Village opened on several dates, while R&B singer Anthony Hamilton sang backup within the Soultronics on occasion.
D'Angelo's wardrobe during the tour included tank tops, black leather pants, and boots.
With ticket prices ranging from $49 to $79, the tour became one of the most attended shows of 2000. The tour began on March 1, 2000, at the House of Blues in Los Angeles. The Voodoo Tour was taken internationally to venues including Paris Olympia, Trump Taj Mahal, Brixton Academy, the Montreux Jazz Festival, the North Sea Jazz Festival and the Free Jazz Festival in Brazil.
The music video for "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" portrayed D'Angelo as a sex symbol to mainstream music audiences, which had repercussions on The Voodoo Tour's second half. many shows were cancelled due to his personal and emotional problems. D'Angelo chose on several occasions to not perform on scheduled dates, and delayed others to do physical workouts like stomach crunches. He elaborated on the experience in a 2003 interview for The Believer, saying that: