Michael Eugene Archer, aka D’Angelo, a native of Virginia whose parents and grandfather were pastors, released Voodoo in January 2000, though the album itself feels unmoored from calendars.
Its creation stretches back through the latter half of the 90s, a long, deliberate gestation marked by withdrawal rather than acceleration. After Brown Sugar in 1995 reintroduced classic soul language to a hip-hop fluent audience, D’Angelo was immediately cast as a torchbearer he never asked to be. Instead of capitalizing on momentum, he vanished.
Electric Lady Studios in Manhattan became less a workplace than a residence, a home base where the music could breathe and bend. Songs were played, reworked, stripped, rebuilt, then sometimes left alone long enough to forget themselves. Voodoo didn’t emerge because it was finished. It emerged because it was ready, carrying with it the gospel inflections and spiritual grounding D’Angelo absorbed in church, where rhythm, call-and-response, and devotion were never separate acts.
“Watch them all stand in line, for a slice of the devil’s pie.”
The influence map behind Voodoo is wide but precise. Marvin Gaye’s I Want You remains a north star, particularly in its faith that groove itself can carry emotional narrative. Prince is everywhere too, not just in the sexuality but in the way virtuosity is worn loosely, never announced. Stevie Wonder’s presence lives beyond melody, embedded in the album’s harmonic curiosity and rhythmic daring, while Al Green’s spirit hovers in D’Angelo’s vocal approach, intimate without pleading, spiritual without sermonizing. There’s Sly Stone’s communal funk in there as well, the idea that music can sound like people sharing oxygen. And yes, there’s Bob Dylan, an influence that might surprise you until you listen closely. Dylan’s gift was not polish but permission, the radical idea that songs could bend themselves around truth rather than obey inherited forms. Voodoo absorbs that lesson fully, choosing conviction over convention at every turn.
What makes D’Angelo’s story extraordinary is how decisively he carried those lessons forward. Three albums. Long silences. And then his passing in October of last year, which sealed the catalog without diminishing its reach. Few artists have reshaped modern music so thoroughly with so little material. D’Angelo didn’t simply help define neo-soul; he reset the values underneath it. His gravity is felt in Erykah Badu’s devotion to mood as meaning, in The Roots’ insistence that feel matters more than flash, and in the way artists like Frank Ocean, Solange, Kendrick Lamar, and Anderson .Paak center vulnerability as a form of authority. His influence isn’t about replication. It’s about conviction, patience, and the belief that sincerity carries its own momentum.
That ethos finds its clearest expression in the way Voodoo actually moves. These songs rarely follow traditional verse-chorus maps. They drift, circle, hesitate, and eventually settle where they need to be. Endings feel less like conclusions than like consciousness fading out of view. The album’s analog soul deepens that effect. Recorded largely on vintage equipment at Electric Lady, Voodoo treats tape hiss, bleed-through, and human imperfection as essential texture. The drums lag just behind the beat. The bass leans forward, then reclines. Everything breathes. This isn’t nostalgia or retro fetishism. It’s timelessness achieved by resisting digital rigidity, by allowing machines to behave like collaborators rather than overseers.
None of this happens in isolation. Voodoo is inseparable from the Soulquarians, the loose, brilliant collective orbiting Electric Lady with D’Angelo at the center. Questlove’s drumming is the album’s nervous system, redefining pocket for an entire generation by embracing drag, swing, and intentional imbalance. James Poyser’s keys supply harmonic warmth and patience. Pino Palladino’s bass work is melodic, muscular, and conversational. Common, Erykah Badu, Q-Tip, and others drifted in and out, contributing ideas, energy, and affirmation, with D’Angelo fresh off his uncredited but indelible contributions to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, a reminder of just how central he was to the era’s creative core. The album’s long gestation wasn’t indulgence. It was communal excavation.
The opening run of Voodoo establishes its worldview without ever stating it outright. “Playa Playa” stumbles into focus, drums slouched, groove half-asleep but fully aware, announcing that urgency will not be rewarded here. “Devil’s Pie” tightens the frame, its thick bassline and cool-eyed critique dismantling material obsession without raising its voice. Then comes “Spanish Joint,” a masterclass in rhythmic displacement. The song dances across Afro-Cuban accents, funk swagger, and jazz elasticity, sounding like a street parade viewed through a smoky club window. It’s restless, joyful, and technically astonishing without ever feeling busy.
As the album unfolds, intimacy takes precedence over momentum. “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” is often reduced to its erotic charge, but its power lies in exposure. The arrangement is skeletal, the vocal nearly trembling, as if confidence itself is being tested in real time. “Send It On” turns inward and upward simultaneously, its gospel undertones offering reflection rather than release, grace rather than climax. And “Chicken Grease” reminds us that funk can be playful without being disposable, its rubbery groove and conversational rhythm section embodying the album’s belief that joy and depth are not opposites.
The album artwork is as confrontational as it is misunderstood. The close-cropped photograph of D’Angelo’s torso removes distance, presenting the human body without armor or irony. It reframes masculinity as vulnerability, strength as openness. The image became iconic, sometimes to the detriment of the music’s reception, though still not to the degree of the “Untitled” video, which all but hijacked the conversation. But the artwork mirrors Voodoo’s core thesis. Intimacy is not weakness. It is risk, and risk is where connection lives.
Voodoo is best experienced on its own terms. Late night suits it best, when distractions thin and the room grows quiet. Mid-fall feels right, warmth lingering but tempered by reflection. Play it somewhere you can sit still, or drive without destination, perhaps pulling a Pascual Perez around 285 in the wee hours of a sleepless night. This is not background music. It’s companion music, designed to meet you where you are and stay awhile.
When Voodoo arrived, it countered an era obsessed with polish, speed, and spectacle. Its message was understated but firm. Slow down. Trust feel. Value humanity. Two and a half decades later, that message feels even more urgent. In a culture driven by algorithms and immediacy, Voodoo remains a reminder that depth cannot be rushed, that groove is a form of truth, and that the most enduring art often lives slightly behind the beat.
Megan’s favorite song on this album is “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” because with a hook so catchy, it is impossible to bring up D’Angelo in conversation without someone breaking into this iconic melody. In a waltz-like manner, D’Angelo takes gospel and conjures a hypnotic groove in three-four time, urging you to stay entranced. D’Angelo’s vocal layers arise with the goosebump-inducing power of a church choir, the sun peering through the stained glass as you start to believe in something bigger than yourself. This track feels as though Prince descended from heaven for a day just to deliver the idea to D’Angelo and co-writer Raphael Saadiq. The distorted guitar riffs, high-pitched vocal runs and sincere sensuality are so Prince coded, only D’Angelo could do them proper justice.
Where the industry placed D’Angelo as a sex symbol, he defied the narrative by proving his musical ingenuity and ability to bring talent together to make a project so important it’s upheld as a masterclass on neo soul to this day. Although D’Angelo is no longer with us, you can hear his influence in Daniel Caesar’s “Japanese Denim”, Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap, and throughout Mac Miller’s entire discography. At the very end of the song, the tape runs out, the music stops abruptly, and D’Angelo leaves us on a high note – imperfectly perfect, honest, and gone too soon.
Wendell’s favorite song on the album is “Spanish Joint,” where Voodoo stops behaving like an album and starts behaving like a room. It’s the loosest thing here, not in execution but in spirit, the sound of musicians trusting one another enough to let the groove wander without a map.
The rhythm keeps shifting its weight, Afro-Latin accents brushing up against funk and jazz phrasing, the band circling the beat instead of landing on it. You can feel the Soulquarians listening as much as they’re playing, reacting in real time, letting small ideas bloom and then drift away. D’Angelo’s vocal slides in and out, less lead singer than participant, another instrument nudging the conversation forward. That this track emerges from an album that took five years to make is part of its quiet magic. All that time, all that patience, and the result feels accidental in the best way, like something caught rather than constructed. It carries that Florry energy, too: communal, curious, unhurried, where the joy is in staying in the moment rather than racing toward a payoff. If Voodoo is about trusting groove as truth, “Spanish Joint” is its most joyful proof, music that doesn’t arrive so much as keep going, content to live in motion.
D’Angelo’s music can be found on all streaming platforms and wherever records are sold. You’re still likely to hear his songs drifting across SiriusXM stations like The Flow, Smokey’s Soul Town, and the Apollo Theater Channel. Sadly, the genius is gone, but the groove he left behind hasn’t moved an inch. It’s still waiting, just behind the beat, exactly where he taught us to listen.
The post Groove, grit and grace: The strange spell of D’Angelo’s Voodoo appeared first on SaportaReport.
