There's been mild fanfare over the last few days about the 10th anniversary of D'Angelo's masterful album Voodoo, and of course around these parts we haven't forgotten. One of the best albums of the '00s, Voodoo was more like a manifesto for a different soul, a new funk, than just another album in the "neo-soul" marketing strand of its time. D'Angelo, unlike many soul singers that peppered the music of this past decade, didn't treat the genre as a limitation.
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After the bounce
In the video below he speaks about the interest he has in what he describes to be the moment when early soul music was making the change to funk, and how it also reflected a larger change in culture. It's like he bottled all the energy of similar interstitial moments--social, musical, personal--and slowly released it throughout Voodoo. He found that anticipatory element in soul, in funk, in R&B and exploited it without attempting to liberate it from itself, or something. He challenged it and us to stay with him on the brink.
While it ultimately influenced his retreat from releasing and performing new music, it does make sense that the public-at-large clamored for the unrelentingly sexual music video for "Untitled (How Does It Feel)." His image in that video became a repository for the feverish tension he created on Voodoo that was hard to place otherwise.
Then he was shirtless. Then he vanished.
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The legacy of Voodoo isn't really all of that, though. It's that the album is not a legacy but a gauntlet that has yet to be taken up by anyone, including him.
Regardless, D'Angelo's alchemy still entrances like it did ten years ago.
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