Devil’s Pie: D’Angelo’s Voodoo Turns 25

Thirty years into Michael Eugene Archer’s career, d/b/a D’Angelo, he’s only made three albums, each saddled with a classic narrative trope whether the reclusive polymath likes it or not.

His 1995 debut Brown Sugar was the hit, smashing the top ten with “Lady” and establishing platinum-certified, quadruple-Grammy-nominated clout. His most recent album, 2014’s Black Messiah, was the comeback. It has been on earth for just shy of a decade and accomplished little more than it set out to do: win one of the very last Pazz & Jop critics’ polls with just a few weeks of gestation in an otherwise weak year for consensus and promptly disappear from the public consciousness just like its creator. Though from the Bonnaroo set I saw it spawned a hell of a tour. Closest thing I’ve ever experienced to witnessing Prince I imagine; If this was post-prime D’Angelo I can’t even fathom the 2000 experience Robert Christgau caught where the auteur reportedly snapped a mic stand in half.

That brings us to the middle child, the masterpiece — which we are here to tout again after a quarter-century. Voodoo is by far the most acclaimed R&B album of a time when R&B didn’t get respect from album-oriented folks. It didn’t have a ton to do with the revolution spawned by renaissance actors Frank Ocean or the Weeknd, nor the continued blurring between hip-hop and singing complicated by Drake and rendered fluent by, say, Tierra Whack among plenty of others. With Questlove and Dilla as the spine, Voodoo of course had hip-hop in its blood and bones. But other than Meth and Red contributing lively verses to “Left & Right,” that had more to do with the shared goals of the collaborators, these two genres’ fealty to the groove and for 79 minutes, giving themselves completely over to it.

How can D’Angelo have three great albums without what you might call great songs? Ask Miles Davis or James Brown. It’s possible to sing along with the man and his utterly butterscotch falsetto; he does it himself, layering multiple D’Angelos like a 3D movie in waves of gospel-informed harmony. But even though he’s usually pronouncing words, D’s singing a feel. Right behind him is Questlove’s austere kick and rimshot, profoundly influenced by J Dilla in its construction to quote-unquote “sit far behind time, directly on top of time, or pressing on the time.” One day I’ll crack my beefy copy of Dan Charnas’ Dilla Time tome, but anyone who’s absorbed the late, legendary James Yancey’s beats knows they reignited hip-hop’s man vs. machine tension by underscoring his clients’ flows with jazzy human accident.

As the genre’s premier drummer, Questlove could only take this to heart, and his role as bandleader on Voodoo tested the theory with runaway success. Time sways and bumps according to the Soulquarians’ collective shrug while D’s “songs” glide and morph from one delicately arranged vamp to another. Rough on paper, smooth in the ear. No seams showing. You get Al Green’s penchant for the off-beat. You get Prince’s one-man tour de force as a human switchblade of both virtuosic vocal abilities and multiple-instrument mastery. You get Sly Stone’s languid, smudged vocal affect circa There’s a Riot Goin’ On, to which Voodoo is often compared, even though only suicide mission “The Line” gets anywhere near the political like Black Messiah does. (Unless you count “Devil’s Pie,” a hypnotic rebuke of materialism that isn’t much deeper than its targets.)

For my slice of the devil’s pie, Voodoo’s best hooks are Questlove’s magisterial snare, sometimes doubled by crisp, punctuated claps just like Jay-Z’s “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” would be the following year, and Roy Hargrove’s floating bursts of trumpet, which announces itself at perfect intervals in “Feel Like Makin’ Love” (not a Bad Company cover) and establishes the low-slung funk of the opus itself like rising steam throughout “Playa Playa.” Filtered wah guitars, hazy ride cymbals, and bwurping bass all swirl and encompass in slow motion. It’s not that Brown Sugar was terribly different — with joints like “Jonz in My Bonz,” the bluesy “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker,” and an astonishing take on Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’,” I consider it to be near Voodoo’s equal — but its successor showed how much deeper there was to explore and expand.

It’s not lost on me that Erykah Badu and Jill Scott and D’s own ex Angie Stone were the prolific, hard-working faces of the neo-soul movement he helped put into practice and that their own efforts were overshadowed by that of a dude. It’s to the credit of Voodoo’s universally recognized artistic merit that no one really grumbles. And in a rare twist, the microscope on D’Angelo’s jacked physique, famously on full display in the video of the stark “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” led to not only widespread public interest in objectifying him but similar results to what women singers ordinarily end up with: struggles mental and physical to cast off the world’s (and industry’s) expectations.

 

VIDEO: D’Angelo “Untitled (How Does It Feel)”

Addiction, weight fluctuations and a DUI car wreck were widely publicized, and the question is still open whether a similarly embattled woman like Britney Spears could be permitted a latter-day open-arms embrace from the populace like Black Messiah was. It’s ironic that an album so associated with loosening up constrictions to find its own natural path towards perfection resulted in such estrangement. But it also underscores how hard and obsessive D’Angelo was working to create this mythical ease, this flawless groove. He monomaniacally worked out with a trainer, spent five years building his magnum opus’ spontaneous-sounding jams. Like plenty of legendary art, sometimes our heroes literally work themselves to death.

D’s idol did, with Prince’s excruciating hip pain not fully known until his fatal overdose of fentanyl. I’d like to think that D’Angelo’s absence from the spotlight over the last ten years has been a conscious effort to avoid going out like that, but it’s none of my business. Whenever he does pop up, as on Rapsody’s wondrous GZA homage “Ibtihaj,” it’s a blessing. “Devil’s Pie” might be a bit facile in regards to how not everyone can just recede from their job for five or 14 years, but anyone who’s able to declare they’ve had enough of anything should be able to stop doing it. If you don’t want D’Angelo to stop, 79 minutes of his masterwork can feel endless in the best way if you (and your bedmate) surrender to them.