Voodoo – D’Angelo (2000)
By Rafi Mercer
By the time Voodoo arrived in January 2000, I’d been waiting five years. I still remember holding the advance vinyl — that dusky brown sleeve, the blurred photograph of D’Angelo half in shadow — and realising before even hearing it that this wasn’t going to be Brown Sugar, Part Two. Something about it felt heavier, slower, more deliberate.
I played it that first night on my home system — something I’d rescued from the Oxford Street stockroom — and from the opening bars of “Playa Playa,” the air in the room changed. The rhythm didn’t start; it formed. Like weather gathering.
Voodoo was recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York, and you can hear the building in the sound — its low ceilings, its wood, its ghosts. D’Angelo surrounded himself with the Soulquarians — Questlove, Pino Palladino, James Poyser, Q-Tip, Roy Hargrove — and built an album that felt more like a séance than a session. They weren’t chasing radio; they were chasing feel.
The first thing you notice is the time. Everything sits behind the beat — so far behind that it feels like it might collapse, yet somehow never does. Questlove once described it as “drunk funk,” and it’s the perfect phrase. The groove lurches, leans, sways, finds its balance again. It’s the sound of musicians listening to one another rather than playing for an audience.
“Playa Playa” unfolds like a ritual. The bassline is molten, Pino’s phrasing impossibly elastic. The horns drift in like incense. “Devil’s Pie,” produced by DJ Premier, moves the other way — brittle, skeletal, streetwise. Its message is gospel and grit: “Ain’t no room for innocent men.” Then comes “Left and Right,” with Method Man and Redman trading bars like bursts of static, the only real flirtation with the outside world on the record.
But Voodoo isn’t about guests; it’s about chemistry. “The Line,” “One Mo’Gin,” “The Root” — each feels like a slow descent into deeper frequencies. The mix is thick but clear, every instrument occupying a pocket rather than a position. Through proper speakers, you hear the warmth of tape, the slight tape drag, the ghosts between frequencies. It’s analog in spirit and in soul.
And then there’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” Even now, decades later, it’s hard to put into words. It’s not a song — it’s a slow possession. A single take, D’Angelo playing everything himself, Questlove on drums. No overdubs, no edits, no escape. It builds in waves — desire, tension, release — but never fully resolves. That suspended chord at the end, the one that just hangs, is one of the most perfectly unresolved moments in recorded music.
People remember the video, but the recording is the real revelation. It’s what happens when someone trusts silence as much as sound. You can hear the room. You can hear his heartbeat.
The album’s sequencing feels architectural — light to dark, devotion to defiance, groove to stillness. “Send It On” and “Spanish Joint” sit at the centre, radiant, almost sunny. Then “Africa” closes the record with grace — hymn-like, cyclical, ancestral.
When Voodoo came out, the world was moving fast — Y2K panic, Napster, the first wave of digital compression — and here was D’Angelo releasing an album that slowed time. It refused the click track, refused the grid. You couldn’t sample it neatly; you had to sit with it. And that’s why it still stands apart.
Listening now, it feels like an antidote to everything that came after. Every sound on Voodoo is imperfect by design. It breathes, it bends, it swells. It’s what happens when groove becomes philosophy — when the rhythm itself starts asking questions about faith, flesh, and time.
What astonishes me still is its patience. No one rushes, no one overplays. The band trusts space. It’s almost jazz in that sense — not in harmony, but in spirit. Voodoo is a conversation, not a composition.
When I think about the hours I spent with it that year — in the shop, on the move, through long nights and early mornings — it’s the texture that stays with me. The grain of his voice, the low hum of bass through a good system, the feel of the needle sinking into deep vinyl grooves. I’ve heard thousands of records in my life, but few have lived in my bloodstream like this one.
Over time, Voodoo has come to feel less like an album and more like an artefact — a document of a moment when sound still carried mystery. In listening bars from Tokyo to New York, you can still feel its weight in the room. DJs lower the lights, drop “The Root,” and watch conversations fade. People don’t dance; they lean in.
Twenty-five years later, its influence runs quietly through everything — from Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. Even the current wave of live-soul collectives owes a debt to this record’s refusal to conform.
But beyond influence, Voodoo remains something personal. For me, it marked the moment music stopped being product and became presence. It’s a record that asks you to listen with your body as much as your ears.
Every time I play it, I’m back in that moment — first needle drop, low light, that bassline forming out of air. And each time, it feels new again.
That’s what great music does. It doesn’t just hold time — it resets it.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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