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All Of It with Alison Stewart
D'Angelo's 'Voodoo' Turns 25 (Silver Liner Notes)
00:18:17
We reflect on the 25th anniversary of 'Voodoo.'
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart Silver Liner Notes is our series where we celebrate the 25th anniversary of game Changing albums and we take your calls. Now to a record that defined an era of R and B in the 2000s, Voice Voodoo by D'Angelo.
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D'Angelo
D'Angelo releases.
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Alison Stewart
Album Vudu, which was released 25 years ago this month. The album is considered a classic. It combines influence of jazz, R and B, gospel, hip hop, funk and rock. And it was created just a few blocks north of where we broadcast at Jimi Hendrix Electric Lady Studios. With me now to reflect on the anniversary is Naima Cochran. She's a music journalist, NYU assistant art professor and creator of MusicSermon. Nice to talk to you.
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Naima Cochran
Nice to be here, Alison.
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Alison Stewart
She's written about Voodoo and most recently the latest Vibe magazine cover story about Questlove, who is one of D'Angelo's closest Voodoo collaborators. From your perspective, why is Vudu considered to be such a classic?
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Naima Cochran
There's a few reasons, but I think one of the primary things that's significant about Vudu is that it was the anchor of this change in the sound of R and B music. At the time, what we now call the neo soul era had been building. It started with the first D'Angelo album and then the Maxwell album and then the Lauren album and the Love Jones album album and Erica and which is the album that gave it the name. And then you have Vudu come and kind of like declare, you know, it was number one top 200 on Billboard top 200 charts. It had hits spanning, you know, weeks and weeks at a time. Obviously Untitled, which you guys just played, broke the Internet when we didn't even have the Internet to break, you know. So I think that it just cemented this change in sound and chorus, a reclamation of soul. It cemented D'Angelo as a superstar for better or for worse. And it also was the kind of pinnacle of this collection of albums that were done during those Electric lady sessions that have kind of become lore in terms of black music in that era.
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Alison Stewart
Listeners, are you a fan of D'Angelo and Vudu? Give us a call, 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. Why do you think the album is such a classic? What memories do you associate with the album? How does it sound to you today versus when you first heard it in 2000? 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. Let's do a little bit of backstory. Where's D'Angelo from?
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Naima Cochran
Michael Archer, aka D'Angelo, is from Virginia, and I wanna say the Hampton Roads area, but I might be making that up, but he is from Virginia. Common story in R and B. Churchbread. No. Grow up with his grandma. Young prodigy in terms of producing, playing, multi instrumentalist, et cetera. And he had actually done some background work, some writing, some composing with his partner Angie Stone, who is another neo soul artist. And in some other space, finally, before he releases his 1996 debut, Brown Sugar. And what was unique about him? Then again, we didn't have the name neo soul. I think maybe we called it like an alternative soul or like a jazzy soul. But he looked like a rapper. He had cornrows. He wore a big Averex jacket, Timberlands, oversized jeans, would have a blunt, you know, clearly be high. But he had this beautiful sound, like, of someone from the 70s or the 60s. He sounded like a traditional soul crooner and clearly had this beautiful musicality. But, you know, his lead single was this love song to weed. So, you know, he crossed these generational lines. So I was in college, me and my friends loved it, but my parents could also jam to it because of the musicality of it. And little did we know, like, he was part of an emerging trend.
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Alison Stewart
Let's take a call. This is Andrew calling in from Brooklyn. Hey, Andrew, thank you so much for calling all of it. You're on the air.
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Andrew
Hey, I was so excited you guys are talking about this album today. I just. I just wanted to say, when Untitled came on, like, all I could think about was a music video. And as someone who grew up in, like, the rural south without an R and B station, without, like, a lot of people that were advocating for R and B music, like, that's a video that broke through, through MTV and was really eye opening to someone like me and I think to a lot of other people.
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Alison Stewart
Andrew, thank you for calling in. Let's talk about the music video.
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Naima Cochran
Let's talk about the music video.
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D'Angelo
Why?
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Alison Stewart
Why was it. Why was the music video such a hit?
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Naima Cochran
Cause he's gorgeous. So the music video obviously has become kind of a sore point for Deangelo, sadly, because his intention Was to grab attention. Was to grab. His intention was to grab attention, but it almost backfired. The D'Angelo that came out in 1996 was still kind of young, boyish, you know, baby face, ish, very baggy clothes. And then we have this visual of him. And I think even the still from Voodoo itself is from the album cover is from the same shoot. And it is a continuous pan shot of just him and these cut abs, torso and a cornrows and a chain and sweats. It just. And it was hypnotizing, you know. Cause he's just looking right at the camera. I think what I wrote was like he's looking into our souls from the video. And you couldn't look away. Straight queer, whatever. You could not look away. And it's all anybody talks about. People in my office made copies of the video on VHS and sent it out to people. Right. So you know, as you. Or maybe it was dv, I don't remember whatever it was at the time. But you could not look away. But it turned him into a reluctant sex symbol. That was not his intention at all, but that's what happened. And he was a little bit of a sex symbol with the first album. Like he had a kind of off the block lick lipping thing happening. But that took it in a whole other direction. But it overshadowed the music to an extent where he ended up cutting the tour early because he was just so self conscious. Because you know, women throwing drawers on stage and trying to rip clothes and screaming take his shirt off. You know. And it just. He's such an artist, you know, he is such a consummate artist and he's a perfectionist. That for somebody to be so distracted by something that really wasn't about the art really ended up kind of messing with him a little bit.
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Alison Stewart
My guest Naima Cochran, she's a journalist and NYU assistant arts professor. She's here to talk about D'Angelo's voodoo. It's this edition of our Silver liner notes. It's celebrating the 25th anniversary of the album. If you are a fan of D'Angelo or Voodoo, what do you remember from the album? 212-433-969-2212-4433 wnyc this text says the album really celebrated the African diaspora by including African Latin rhythms. The music felt very welcoming and expans definitely a masterpiece. Thanks for sending that text. One of your favorite songs is Send It On. Before we listen to it, what is.
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Naima Cochran
Special about Send It On It? First of all, the live instrumentation I love it. The horns, the everything. I love the pacing of it. It's very unhurried. It's very mellow and. And it is D'Angelo in that soul pocket. Vudu is a little bit experimental. You know, it feels a little unfinished on purpose, which was part of the whole Electric lady thing. It's very analog in a space that was increasingly digital. But this song is him right in that soul crooner pocket. And that kind of sensual soul crooner pocket at that.
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Alison Stewart
Let's listen. This is Send it on by.
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D'Angelo
Send it. Send it to. Send it back to you. Send it to. Send it to. To me. So I'm sin.
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Alison Stewart
D'Angelo said while he was making this record, he was really inspired, especially by Prince. Where do we hear Prince's influence on Voodoo?
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Naima Cochran
Well, definitely in Untitled. How does it feel? That was kind of the Prince tribute. You can actually hear where he and Amir and everybody else were trying to channel that feel. I think whenever D'Angelo goes into, you know, falsettos, you get that princess feel. The other thing, I think that. So D'Angelo and Amir have these questlove. They call their idols, their music idols, Yodas. So Prince is one of their Yodas.
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Alison Stewart
That's so good.
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Naima Cochran
But they all have something similar in that all of them are kind of rooted in funk and, you know, multi instrumentation and also kind of obsessive with live performance. And there was. There's an essence of really kind of staying in the music moment instead of trying to get to a specific end result, is that he used to talk.
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Alison Stewart
About the music being like a long jam session.
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Naima Cochran
Yeah. And that's what this album sounds like. And there actually, I think, were some songs that maybe weren't meant to be songs or some songs that started one way and turned into something else. But even if you listen to it, it doesn't sound like somebody was at a board punching things in. Right. They were in a room. Like, this album was made with everybody together, which doesn't happen almost at all anymore now in 2025, but. And you sense that. You sense that togetherness and kind of like a going where the music takes you, which I think is part of the Prince inspiration we're talking about.
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Alison Stewart
Silver liner notes. This edition, D'Angelo's Voodoo, it was released this month. Our guest is Naema Cochran. She's a journalist, NYU assistant arts professor. Let's listen to Chicken Grease and we can talk about it on the other side.
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Naima Cochran
Yep. The street.
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Alison Stewart
That'S called chicken grease by D'Angelo. We got an interesting Text here, it says, I always thought it was so telling that D'Angelo couldn't handle the sexualization that girls, women experience every day of our lives, let alone what female musical artists experience out in the world and in pop culture once they're sexualized. I thought that was a really interesting. You mentioned that, you mentioned, but you know, that he fell on hard times.
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Naima Cochran
What happened, I think. And you mentioned that I did a cover story on Questlove, which is about the Sly Stone documentary that premieres.
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Alison Stewart
Premiered at Sundance.
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Naima Cochran
Right? Yeah, yeah, it premiered at Sundance and it premieres on Hulu in a couple weeks. But the, the lens of that story is not just about Sly, but about these artists, these once in a lifetime artist and the pressure that they go through and how they go through kind of self destructive behavior because of that pressure. And D'Angelo's in it obviously because he can speak to this. Right? And you know, obviously I don't know deeply, you know, and personally about his mental health or anything like that. But what I imagine is you're a certain caliber of artist and there's all this expectation on you and you, you do so well and you, you know, you've broken these records and you've hit these heights and people think you're the savior of music or of culture. And it's a lot of pressure. It's a lot of pressure. And there is imposter syndrome and there is guilt for having to leave parts of yourself behind and there is uncertainty because what happens when they stop rocking with you? And I feel like that was. And also he was thrust into all of this at a relatively young age. Yes, he was. I feel like that combination of things, if you, you don't have, you know, a group around you that's actually saying, hey, let it go, it's okay, whatever. And I don't know that, you know, we, we as black people really were in that place. Yet in 2000, in that era, it can kind of try drive you to say like, you know, I, I actually subconsciously don't want all of this right now or you want to numb yourself to it or you want to self medicate or you need something to make things feel differently and you end up and, you know, spiraling. Yeah, yeah.
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Alison Stewart
J. Dilla. Where do we hear J. Dilla on the album?
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Naima Cochran
So Dilla is part of this Okarian production collective. All of these Aquarians, I used to say Aquariuses. All these Aquarians, including D'Angelo and Questlove and James Poyser of the Roots, who are producing so Dyla's on the back. And here's the thing about Dilla. You don't hear him unless you know Dilla, which is his magic. You don't. He just gets in there and like does his alchemy and changes things and. But for people who are students of Dilla, they can pick that up where it is, which I think is his magic. But he's on several tracks on the album on the, on the production side. But they are samples that have been flipped to an extent that you don't recognize them as samples, which is his magic.
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D'Angelo
Let's check out the Rooting Hair play. No rehearsal. Yeah. Said I love my left, my mo in my favorite suit. Yes.
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Alison Stewart
Naim. As we listen to Voodoo 25 years after its release, how do you take it in differently?
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Naima Cochran
H. That's a good question. I think that now I listen to it more from a point of view of what it inspired. But I also at, you know, I'm almost 50, so I still live with a lot of my music from high school and my 20s. And now I really listen to how it aged because as someone who is a music executive and I now teach about music and look at how music is evolving, I'm really interested in what stays timeless and what doesn't sound or what sounds like it needed to have been left somewhere, what aged well and what differently and what didn't and why. And I think now when I listen to an album, when it hits a 20 year mark, a 25 year mark, that's one of the things like how fresh does this still sound and could this come out today and how resonant is it still and how crisp is it still? And Vudu is one of those. Yeah, it aged really well. It aged really, really well. Which is just, I mean, a testament to all the people who worked on it and their intentionality.
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Alison Stewart
Silver liner notes Today's it was about D'Angelo's voodoo. My guest has been Naima Cochran. Thanks so much for joining us.
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Naima Cochran
We really appreciate it.
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