Source: http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jan/23/entertainment/ca-56605

Old School’s New Soul
L.A. Times – January 23, 2000

D’Angelo has been leading a return to smoother sounds since his 1995 debut. After a nearly five-year absence, the singer returns with his ‘Voodoo’ album.

SOREN BAKER

D’Angelo knew that he wasn’t in the right frame of mind when he started working on his second album three years ago. The singer was burned out from touring. He felt immense pressure from his record company to make a commercially potent follow-up to his hit debut album, 1995′s “Brown Sugar.”

The mix of exhaustion and pressure produced a severe case of writer’s block, and starting in 1997 he had an additional distraction–Michael D’Angelo Archer II, the son born to him and his then-girlfriend, singer Angie Stone.

His options were to rush an album that would capitalize on his success but might ultimately tarnish his reputation, or take longer and risk losing his momentum, a precious asset in the fast-changing music business.

D’Angelo’s decision? Well, when “Voodoo” comes out Tuesday, it will be nearly five years after his debut.

“I was just trying to create, taking my time to make the best music possible,” D’Angelo says. “I kind of just shut out all of the extracurricular activities that were going on around me that [I didn't have] before I got a record deal.

“Before I did ‘Brown Sugar,’ I was at home in Richmond [Va.], just writing songs and doing whatever I wanted to do. I tried to keep it there. All of the record company [dealings] and all of the expectations, I just tried to shut that out.”

Indeed, the expectations for “Voodoo” are extremely high.

Besides selling 1.4 million copies in the U.S., “Brown Sugar” was a groundbreaking album that reintroduced old-school soul values to a field that was bogged down in themes of mindless sexual pursuit and locked into a hip-hop style of production.

He arrived out of nowhere with a classic sound, an old-fashioned gallantry and a soothing voice that evoked Prince and Curtis Mayfield. Among the current class of artists indebted to his impact: Macy Gray, Maxwell and Lauryn Hill.

“I think the anticipation [for "Voodoo"] really stepped up when the second video hit,” says Violet Brown, director of urban music for the Wherehouse retail chain, alluding to the steamy video for the new single “Untitled.” In the clip, the singer appears to be naked as he stands and sings the sensuous song.

“I’m not really going after the sex symbol thing,” D’Angelo says with a wry smile. “I’m going for a music thing. That’s what I’m here for and that’s what I do. I’m not here to be no sexy man or no model.”

But Brown says that calls to Wherehouse stores asking about the album have increased significantly since that video debuted. It just might be the marketing tool needed to jump-start the campaign, which started slowly when the first single, “Left & Right” wasn’t an instant smash. Early reviews of the album have also been mixed.

But the music on “Voodoo” shows that D’Angelo made the right decision when he stepped back and slowed down.

Songs such as the spare “Left & Right,” with rappers Method Man and Redman, and the pulsating “Spanish Joint” add a new musical direction to D’Angelo’s sound, but like “Brown Sugar,” “Voodoo” sounds as if it were lifted from another era, with its moody organs, thick bass lines and heavenly background choruses. And D’Angelo’s gentle falsetto is back to calm any troubled spirit.

“This brother is what we needed to rotate into from years ago, what Marvin Gaye was doing, what Parliament was doing,” singer Mary J. Blige says of her friend. “He is soul right now. This is not something he rehearsed. It was born in him. He’s a natural-born soul child.”

*

It can’t be easy to be cast as the savior of soul music, but D’Angelo, 25, seems relaxed as he sits in a Wiltern Theatre dressing room before his headlining performance at a benefit concert last month. He’s slouched in his stiff chair, casually smoking a cigarette and speaking in a hushed tone about the pressures and complications surrounding his new album.

He claims to be unconcerned about the reaction fans and critics will have to “Voodoo.” That’s one of the reasons he took a different direction when he recorded it.

Many artists stick to a formula once they achieve success, but D’Angelo took a different approach to the new album, emphasizing live instruments and improvisational studio sessions. The result is a much rawer record.

“I always thought ‘Brown Sugar’ was a little overproduced,” he says. “It was a little too slick. I used to love the ‘Brown Sugar’ demos we recorded in Virginia. I wanted this album to feel like that. I wasn’t too concerned with things sounding too perfect or neat or clean. A lot of [the sound] is dirty, and it’s intentionally like that.

“I shut all of the record company people out,” he adds with a smile. “They didn’t know what I was doing. They just knew I was spending money working on this music. They didn’t hear nothing. When I turned it in to them, they didn’t know what to expect, and I guess it wasn’t what they expected. They were expecting to hear a lot of radio-type singles, but the album is a lot of live instrumentation and a lot of groove.”

“It’s not that we weren’t pleased with what was going on,” says Ray Cooper, president of Virgin Records America, which releases D’Angelo’s music. “But what we were hoping to happen was that we would have a song with Lauryn Hill, which obviously didn’t happen for various reasons. I don’t think we were ever under any concern that it wouldn’t be a good album. We just wanted that Lauryn Hill song.”

“I just surround myself with the type of things that I want to project,” D’Angelo says. “I don’t listen to the radio that much. Most of the stuff that I listen to is old-school music. Especially on this album, I totally shut myself off to what was going on so that I could get into what I was going to do.”

Like most soul singers, Michael D’Angelo Archer attended church regularly in his youth, but after his parents divorced when he was 5, it became more than a place of worship–it was the place where he grew as a person. He absorbed traditional values there, and he also encountered his first musical inspiration–a pianist named Randolph who could “play anything and make it sound perfect.”

By the time he was 15, D’Angelo was coordinating his Pentecostal church’s music. He was also working on hip-hop music with friends in Richmond. Recording as the rap group I.D.U., they sent tapes to record companies in New York, and a senior executive at the Universal Music Group was impressed–especially with the production, which D’Angelo had done.

D’Angelo, by now proficient on piano, guitar, bass and other instruments, signed a publishing deal in 1991. That led to his recording contract with now-defunct EMI Records, which released “Brown Sugar.”

But life in the limelight wasn’t something he was used to. After all, he was raised country. Richmond contains elements of a bustling metropolis, but it still has a small-town feel. When D’Angelo’s album exploded, he wasn’t ready.

“I had to come to terms with what had happened and I had to accept what had happened,” he says. “That took a second. I was in a state of rejecting it almost. I believed in what I was doing and I loved it. I wasn’t prepared for the repercussions [of stardom]. I didn’t know and I had no idea of what to expect, really.

“When it all came, it kind of took me aback. I enjoyed just chilling for a second, just breathing and not worrying about anything.”

This period of reflection allowed him to reconnect with his early self. “I was just living,” D’Angelo says of his time between albums. “After the ‘Brown Sugar’ tour, I kind of went into a writer’s block. I went back to Virginia and just chilled out. I just kind of put in my head what I wanted to do.

“I was basically putting together what I was going to do for this album. I needed to reiterate why in the first place I was doing this. It was because of the love of the music.”
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Buffed — and often shirtless — 26-year-old D’Angelo sings harder-edged love songs to a tougher generation.

BY Jeffrey Zaslow

D’ANGELO HAS heard his music described many ways. Sensual hip-hop. Steamy funk. Smoldering R&B. Smooth neo-soul. What does he call it? “Intense expression.”

His new CD, Voodoo, debuted at No. 1, and critics have praised it as a ground-breaking, love-drenched link to the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Marvin Gaye. In his own way, D’Angelo, 26, is singing harder-edged love songs to a tougher generation. “You can sing angrily — with yearning, longing, pain — and still it’s a love song,” he says.

At the same time, he uses well-established R&B imagery — he’s often buffed and shirtless — to make the roughness of his lyrics more appealing to the masses more used to R. Kelly than N.W.A.

In the suggestive, carefully shot video for his hit single, Untitled (How Does It Feel), the camera moves from his face to below his belly button, creating the distinct feeling he’s completely nude. But he insists it’s not exactly sensuality he’s offering. It’s intensity. Pain. Honesty. “The album is raw. It’s back to basics. Not having clothes on is a representation of that.”

“D’Angelo has this rugged edge that bridges the gap between romance and sex,” says Aliya King, associate editor of the hip-hop magazine The Source. “And he’ll say things other artists are afraid to say.”

He grew up as Michael D’Angelo Archer, the son of a preacher in a strict Pentecostal church in Richmond, Va. “Women had to wear dresses — no pants, no makeup, no earrings,” he says. “People in the church couldn’t see movies. All they could do was go bowling.” Is he a good bowler? He laughs. “Oh, yeah. I could bowl.” Understandably, his mother didn’t like his explicit lyrics. “I told her, ‘Look, Mom, you don’t understand what I’m trying to do.’ She said, ‘I don’t understand, but I’ll trust you.’ ”

The roots of D’Angelo’s music go back to Richmond, a city determined to remember its Civil War heroes. Its boulevards are guarded by giant, imposing statues of Confederate generals majestically poised on horseback. To retain his dignity as a black kid in the shadow of these monuments, D’Angelo developed blind spots. “When I see statues of those old white cats,” he says, “I look through them. Maybe one of these days, we can go knock them down.”

He recalls being angry in school, where he was taught “that Anglo-Saxons invented civilization.” He’d argue with history teachers, who’d sputter out explanations that only made him madder. Such memories “show up in my music.”

He’s still not afraid to stir things up. A lengthy essay in Voodoo’sCD booklet rails against hip-hop “peers” who are “more inspired by artists’ business tactics than their artistry … [who] idolize Donald Trump more than Sly Stone … who don’t realize that Jimi Hendrix was a sonic Bill Gates.” D’Angelo snaps: “It needs to be said.”

He says he admires the legendary love songs of Sam Cooke, and when he’s with a woman, that’s what he might play. As for his own sensual music, “I listen to it a lot, but not when I’m with a woman. I want to give a woman my full attention, and if my music is on, I can’t do that. I’m in a different frame of mind. For me, my music is very deep stuff.”

Contributing Editor Jeffrey Zaslow is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.

D’Angelo: Voodoo Child
By Joseph Patel
Dec. 1, 1999

D PLAYS IT COOL

Sitting at a sidewalk table outside a soul-food eatery on West 34th Street in Manhattan, D’Angelo, this decade’s sultriest soul child, is a most gracious recipient of his props. The admirers are many. The first is a young black bohemian who notices the mesmerizing musician and coolly gives him a pound in between bites of blackened salmon cakes and rice. Next is an older gentleman with his little girl, surprised to see such a prominent face in one of his neighborhood haunts.

D’Angelo takes all the starstruck compliments in stride, nodding his head in quiet acceptance with a familiar, comforting look. Most remarkable is the diversity of the procession of votaries — different ages, races, sexes, all so affected by this man. And why shouldn’t they be? At the scant age of 21, D’Angelo made R&B music stylish again with his 1995 debut album, Brown Sugar, and its love-jones anthems like the title track and “Lady.” D’Angelo made soul music like when Stevie, Sly and Aretha were rocking it, at the same time redefining it in the hip-hop context he was reared in. Lauryn Hill? Maxwell? Erykah Badu? Neither would be swimming in success if it weren’t for the delicious, sexed-up sounds D’Angelo resurrected.

But Michael D’Angelo Archer, now 25, is not quick to accept such lavish praise. “I knew there weren’t too many cats singing like me,” he reluctantly admits of the time when Brown Sugar was released. He speaks in deep, blunted tones — like Snoop Dogg but older and from the South — articulating his sentences in phrases that seem to mimic the warm, beguiling riffs he plays on the vintage keyboards of Voodoo, his new album. “Most of the cats I knew at the time were singing soft, you know? It was — it was…” He pauses to find the right words, then laughs. “Too R&B-ish.”

Meanwhile, in this cozy spot where the sounds of Curtis Mayfield mix intoxicatingly with the aroma of collard greens and ribs, the love parade continues. A lanky man nearly suffocates D with requests to check out his demo tape. Two young women on their way home from work do double takes as they pass by, reduced to girlish giggles as they realize D’Angelo is as sexy in person as he is in magazines and on television.

“It’s all very flattering,” the singer offers, revealing a bashful look more suited to a high school boy than one of the most desired singers in music today. “It just lets me know I did the right thing, that I made the right decisions, that I can connect with people.”

More than just a musical innovator, D’Angelo represents the rebirth of the soul icon. His physical presence alone is commanding; he’s a strikingly beautiful human being, heroically chiseled. His deep black eyes always appear half-closed, and his Cheshire cat grin is instantly disarming. Combine his presence, his sexuality and his undeniable masculinity with his effortless classic grooves, and D’Angelo invokes the spirit of those musical figures that have transcended their instruments. He is Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Prince — men who conjured an irresistible identity that was larger than life.

MIDNIGHT LOVE

The public adoration of D’Angelo exhibited at the soul food spot repeats itself a few days later, this time at the late-night video shoot for “Left and Right,” Voodoo’s first single. It’s only D’s second album, but it’s one of the most highly anticipated releases in some time. A building near Wall Street has been transformed into a red-lighted nightclub-brothel where D’Angelo fronts a band of musicians, singers and dancers painted up and styled as descendants of the Funkadelic mothership crew. How appropriate that George Clinton himself is here, though even he defers to D’Angelo as the center of attention.

For his part, D’Angelo is shirtless, oiled up and sporting a Hendrix-like Afro wig and leopard-skin pants. Dancers, strippers and other ladies on the set coo, crowding the stage. Music enthusiasts enraptured by D’Angelo’s throwback album marvel at the hypnotic sounds coming from the band, which, contrary to music-video convention, is actually plugged in. (The previous week’s shoot — with guests Method Man, Redman and Cherokee — turned into a mini-concert.) Record execs in attendance, who have sunk more than enough money into the four-year production of Voodoo, have dollar signs in their eyes.

That the shoot pleases everyone isn’t lost on ?uestlove, drummer for the Roots and a member of D’Angelo’s backing band (affectionately nicknamed the Aquarians). Ever since he and D met in 1996, they’ve had a close, brotherly relationship, and ?uestlove agrees that there’s something magnetic about him. “The girl thing is very obvious,” he says, laughing. “I’ve been around George [Clinton] in other situations, and there’s definitely a regal distance [he keeps]. I was very shocked with how George gravitated to him. All of us are there getting our fantasies and dreams fulfilled just by this association. Me, I always wanted to be in Prince and the Revolution, and now I have my opportunity” — a reference to the sound and presence D’Angelo shares with the Purple One. “Now I get to be Bobby Z.”

FIRST RAYS OF THE NEW RISING SON

D’Angelo grew up away from the spotlight of New York City in Richmond, Virginia, raised by his father in a single-parent household. He began playing music, like most kids from the backwater, as part of the church where his father preached. “Whenever they had anniversaries or concerts, there would be this massive choir from all the churches in the area,” D’Angelo remembers, his face electric with fondness. “The musical director would bring all these drums and keyboards, and they’d just play. I was fascinated by all this shit.” At the age of 5, D’Angelo was playing piano in the church band every week.

He found musical kinship with his cousin, and in their teens the two alternated between hip-hop production and playing in a band that covered pop and R&B tunes. “Our song was ‘In the Air Tonight’ by Phil Collins. We used to rip that shit up,” he says, laughing. Eventually, D’Angelo was asked to perform at Amateur Night at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, and he did — three times, winning once and placing twice. That led to a recording contract with EMI, and D’Angelo quickly became a musical savior by diverging from the pillowy formulas that crippled R&B during the 80′s and 90′s.

With Brown Sugar, D’Angelo became one of those rare musical figures who articulate a sound that people feel or think but can’t quite put their finger on. “I try not to get too analytical about all of this,” he says, shrugging coyly when asked about his impact. Indeed, for D’Angelo it’s all about the music; the iconic status, being defined as the leader of the neo-soul revolution and all the nonsense in between — he could do without it. “It was a very natural thing, and it still is to me,” he says. “I just made the shit I wanted to hear. I love music. I love listening to music. I love vibing. That’s what it’s all about, making shit in my room just so I can go out and play it for my dudes, you know?”

If only it were that easy. People at his new label, Virgin Records, look at D’Angelo and see a potential cash windfall, particularly after the massive success of Lauryn Hill (who mysteriously toyed with pulling her contribution to Voodoo, a sexy version of Roberta Flack’s “Feel Like Making Love”). The suits have indulged D’Angelo for the nearly four years it has taken him to write and record Voodoo, two of which were spent bingeing on Hendrix albums and videos while recording at the legend’s famed Electric Lady Studios in New York.

Anticipation certainly built to a peak, as many wondered how it could take so long for someone with an obvious natural gift to record a follow-up. D’Angelo deflects the criticism. “The writing comes when it comes,” he says. “Sometimes you gotta chip and chip away at something until it does.” He’s philosophical when asked whether this album took too long to record: “I don’t look at it as being a long time, I look at it as being the right time. This is the time for it to come out, this is the time it was intended for.”

How much did people miss D’Angelo in between albums, and how high were expectations? In September, over a thousand showed up at Manhattan’s tiny Key Club for a word-of-mouth after-party for D’Angelo’s christening of the new season of The Chris Rock Show. Also playing host to a Calvin Klein party that night, the Key Club became a galling version of Studio 54, with CK handlers selectively admitting their people and leaving the rest — including most of D’Angelo’s personal guest list — out in the cold. A sampling of those left twisting in the autumn wind: Savion Glover, collaborator DJ Premier (who eventually snuck in around back) and D’s mentor, the Artist — Prince himself. “Awww…don’t tell me that,” D bellows dejectedly. “Motherfuckers told me Denzel was outside. Denzel Washington! Prince was outside! That’s bullshit. That pisses me off, you know?”

The Prince part hits especially hard for D’Angelo, who doesn’t shy away from open admiration for the master. The two played together for the first time last year, at the Artist’s request. “For him to even acknowledge me is something,” he says, “but for him to respect what I do is something else. I don’t know what could top that.” As a sort of tribute, Voodoo features “Untitled,” a song that sounds like the music Prince should have been making after Sign o’ the Times. “I would argue with my older brothers about who was better, Prince or Michael Jackson,” D’Angelo enthuses. “I was, like, 5 years old and his biggest fan.”

WHO’S AFRAID OF MARVIN GAYE?

While D’Angelo invokes the sound of Prince, the strength of Jimi Hendrix and the larger-than-life status of other musical greats like Curtis Mayfield and Sly Stone, it’s the spirit of Marvin Gaye, with whom D’Angelo is most compared, that looms largest over him. “I never used to listen to Marvin Gaye records,” he admits. “My father would have his Marvin Gaye in the front of his crates and I would put them in the back. I didn’t want to look at them. I had a fear to even look at some of his pictures.”

D’Angelo can’t explain exactly what he feared, only that it had to do with Gaye’s raw power and the way he was more of a spiritual presence than just a singer. “There was something about hearing his voice that fucked with me,” D continues. “Whenever his songs would come on or somebody would start talking about Marvin Gaye, I would look at the older people around me, my mother or uncles or whatever, and check out their reaction. He had this enormous effect on everyone.”

D’Angelo’s unspoken fear is that in some cosmic way he has inherited the legacy of Gaye. It certainly manifests itself in his music, but it’s also present in the way D’Angelo, like Gaye, seems to channel a message through his body and voice. “Marvin didn’t quite know how to master everything that was going on with him as far as his career, being an artist, the type of artist he wanted to be — just the pressures of him being a man,” he finally concedes.

That D’Angelo even acknowledges Gaye in an interview impresses ?uestlove. “If he talked to you about Marvin, it’s a miracle,” he says, adding that, silently, D sees the parallels between the two of them. “Creatively, socially, personally, even sonically, many of the conflicts Marvin was wrestling with in his life — I think D sees himself as the natural successor to all of that.”

Like Gaye, D’Angelo prefers solitude and a quiet life away from the spotlight. He lives by himself near midtown Manhattan and has two children — a two-and-a-half-year-old boy and a newborn baby girl. On why he hasn’t settled down, D’Angelo admits that there are certain living situations that just aren’t conducive to his lifestyle. He refers to Denzel Washington’s character in Mo’ Better Blues, a trumpeter whose lady is his music. “I’m married to my music, first and foremost,” he says. “I live alone right now. I don’t have to, but I choose to. Sometimes when you’re alone, you make your best shit. You need the space to create. But when I say alone, I’m talking about that longing, that longing for a woman. That’s when you’re writing your best shit.”

THAT VOODOO YOU DO

Sexy, grinding grooves and D’Angelo’s honey-dripping voice belie the mantra of suffering for art that’s on display on Voodoo. Ironically, the album is named for those early days D’Angelo spent at church with his family (it also alludes to Hendrix, the original Voodoo child). “You had black churches where the pastor wanted to modernize the whole thing, make it intellectual,” he explains. “Then you had the other churches that were strictly old-school: raw, speaking-in-tongues, ‘we got the Holy Ghost’ churches. That’s the church I went to.”

D’Angelo agrees that Voodoo has its dark tones, likening it to the “second” phases of many great Motown artists. “You know what it is? When you’re first getting into this, you’re so fucking innocent, really,” he says. “All you care about is the music — that’s still all I really care about. This is your dream, you’ve been working all your life for that moment. But then, I guess you really start to learn what it’s all about. I put my heart and soul and everything I got into this music. This is what I live and love. It’s very personal and close to me. And [the industry] don’t look at it like that. That right there will wipe away the innocence.”

The love D’Angelo gets, though, is the validating light that shines through it all. He’s as satisfied as he can be with his latest effort, but it won’t be complete until he sees the response it gets from the people. “It’s important to connect,” he says, although of course he needn’t worry. It’s obvious he’s already built that bridge to people’s souls, just as Marvin Gaye and Jimi Hendrix did. “I don’t fear death,” he says staunchly when asked if he’s afraid of leaving before his time, as Gaye and Hendrix did. “I fear dying before I’ve done what I’m supposed to do. I definitely have a purpose here. All I gotta do is do my thing.” The people will be left to follow.

D’Angelo wears a bathing suit by John Bartlett and vest by Dolce & Gabbana. Fragrance: DKNY Men

This story was published on Dec. 1, 1999

Special thanks to Casee Maxfield

HEADNOTE

is holding your hand. His thick, muscular fingers are interlocked with yours. You can feel the baby oil that he rubs on his skin before each show. You can feel the pressure of his vise squeeze.

You can feel his rings cutting into your skin.

It hurts. It hurts good, though.
IMAGE PHOTOGRAPH
“Dear heavenly Father,” someone is saying to the silent room, “please give us the ability to touch this crowd.” All thirty-six members of D’Angelo’s touring band and crew are stuffed into his dressing room, hands linked, heads bowed in a large prayer circle. “And when our ability fails, Lord. Please. Take over.” The room answers with a loud “mm-hmm.”

Prayer ends, and the entire group collapses into a giant moving hug, all yelling at once in a joyous din – “Soultrottic force! My re-deeeeem-er!” It seems they’re gearing up for some high-energy smash-mouth football. Or a musical mission.

As the scrum disperses, D Angelo turns to you and slaps you five. And nearly breaks your hand. D, as they call him, gives pounds with injurious intent – stiff-handed smacks that make a firecracker pop and then meld into a tight clamp, a finger snap, two fist bumps and another clamp, or some such combination. The more he likes you, the more he uses the strength in his bulky shoulders and arms for some hand-cracking friendly force, an immediate, tactile, visceral way of saying, “You’re family.” “It’s just a camaraderie between the family, between all the soldiers,” he says of the pound thing later. “I’m lookin’ at this like an army of musicians and free spirits and music. It’s very much like a war.”

D turns from you and gives a pound to every soldier in the room, some of them quick, hard slap-grip-snaps, many of them long, choreographed affairs with fourteen or fifteen stages. Backstage, or in the hotel, or just about anywhere, you can hear him coming because of the firecracker slaps and loud-ass finger snaps as he moves down the hall dapping up everyone he loves.

The band members leave to find their places onstage, the room clears, and D is left alone, his

Shaft-like black leather coat stretching past his knees, his cornrows tight and clean, every last wisp whipped into place, his skin brown like chocolate HaagenDazs. He is shortish, maybe five feet six, but his shoulders and biceps are thick and glistening from the baby oil and defined to a hair’s breadth of perfection, the protruding veins of a weight lifter evident in his forearms. His lips are big pillows, the top one a bit larger with a thick line running down its middle. They stay moist. His lashes are long, the eyes deep-set, large and intense, staring piercingly into you.

With three bodyguards around him, he smooths from the dressing room down the stairs, not rushing, moving with the muscular grace and power of a panther, strutting his macho-pimp stride, shoulders swaggering, exuding the masculinity and bravado of a champion prizefighter ready for combat. He reaches the curtain shielding the stage and stands still as a soldier, feet spread wide, head bent, his hard breathing betraying a touch of nerves. He is motionless for a full four minutes until the lights go dim and the standing-room-only crowd at L.A.’s House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard begins to scream, a mostly female scream, and the drums, bass and keys slide into the groove of “Playa, Playa.” At seven after ten, the curtain opens and D Angelo cools his way out to the place he was born to be: center stage.

TWO days later, on an afternoon in NeW Orleans, in the ultrahip W hotel, room number 1725: This is the room of ?uestlove, drummer for the Philadelphia hip-hop band the Roots and D’s co-pilot for Voodoo, D’Angelo’s five-years-in-the-making second album. Large and cuddly, charismatic and exuberantly Afro’d, ?uest is a real-life version of South Park’s Chef. He slouches on one edge of the bed, his best pal D on the other edge in a black Tonight Show T-shirt, black sweats and black Nike Air Flightposites, with a black do-rag tight over his head. They are watching a black-andwhite videotape of James Brown performing in ig64. This is what they call a treat – something that gives knowledge of the Yoda figures. Mostly videotapes of shows, but also albums and books. A Yoda figure is one of the masters they revere: James, Prince, Stevie Wonder, George Clinton, Marvin Gaye, Fela Kuti, Al Green, Joni Mitchell, Sly, Jimi. One day, ?uestlove asked D, “What would your life be like if you hadn’t seen that George Clinton tape?” Dreplied, “Totally different.”

In their pursuit of knowledge about the Yodas, the two have acquired hundreds of treats. “We got bootleg-concert connects like fiends

got drug-dealer connects,” ?uest says. “During Voodoo, there was at least thirteen people providing us with stuff.” “They’re the ultimate collectors,” says D’s manager, Dominique Trenier. “Anytime I see them, they got at least thirty tapes on them. I could say, `I’m bored. You got some old Soul Trains I haven’t seen?’ They’ll be like, `Yeah. You see the one where Michael Jackson fell?’ ” They study the treats the way Mike Tyson studied tapes of legendary fighters, enraptured by genius, hungry to learn.

The knowledge is inspiration and ammunition for the war that D considers modem music. The war is over the future of music. Voodoo is an ambitious record that seeks nothing less than to unstick black music from commercial considerations and leave it free to seek its muse. It is an album of loose, long, dirty grooves, finger snaps, falsetto serenades, gruff mumbles and bottom-dwelling bass. It is soul music for the age of hip-hop, which is to say it swaggers even when it is tender. In the video for the single “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” D appears to be naked, the camera licking him down. The video would be equally at home in a museum piece on black males and on the triple-X rack, and it provides a striking visual analogy for the music itself raw, intimate, naked, intensely black. Like Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On or Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear, Voodoo is purposefully difficult music. It does not bother often with melodies, and some of those it does bother with seem to come directly from old Prince records. But it is also the complex and rewarding work of a multi-instrumentalist struggling, by his own admission, to find his own voice through intensive study of Prince, Hendrix, P-Funk and, this afternoon, James Brown. The James Brown treat we’re

watching is from The T A.M.I. Show, a concert film featuring Marvin, the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones. James had been slated to go on last, but, ?uestlove explains, “the Stones management wanted them to go on after James. So he decided to make them pay by killing it, so they couldn’t go on after him. This is his moment of Zen.”

?uestlove and D watch silently as James dances hard and fast, his ankles on the verge of breaking, his feet a blur, his singing wafting up from the bottom of his soul – “Are you ready for the Night Train?!” James dances toward the mike, stops sharp, and somehow, at the exact same second, the band stops. ?uestlove rewinds over and over, amazed at the band’s tightness.

“Even the light guy is on point!” ?uestlove says. “It’s luck.”

“It’s not,” D says, sucking on a Newport. “They’re lookin’ at him, they know his every move.” His speaking voice is a deep, lazy sound syruping from the back of his throat, a bass-y, Virginia-accented near-mumble.

While making Voodoo, the two pored over one treat or another every day – “If I wasn’t bringin’ treats every week,” ?uest says, “you’d probably have had Voodoo in ’98:’ What started as the follow-up to D’Angelo’s 1995 platinum debut, Brown Sugar (written and recorded entirely by D’Angelo in his mother’s house in Richmond, Virginia), became five years of study at Soul University, complete with classes, pranks, gossip and equal amounts of discipline and laziness. “You know how some students are afraid to leave school?” ?uestlove says. “There was a comfort in knowing you go to the studio and walk into a whole new world. The engineers come in and talk about what Foxy did this week or how someone wrote graffiti on the bathroom. Or me and Rahzel would call D pretending to be Chico DeBarge talkin’ shit – it was like school. That’s why it took four years. There was no loose women – I wish. No orgies, no drug madness, no trouble with the law. I mean, he got into a scuffle with somebody, but that didn’t hold things up.”

“It was definitely school, man,” D says. “I ain’t never went to college, so this was my equivalent. It was a return to what we love about music. After Brown Sugar, I lost my enthusiasm to do all this. I coulda done without goin’ to 7-Eleven at three o’clock to get a pack of cigarettes and find yourself swarmed, signin’ autographs. I had to reiterate why I was doin’ that in the first place, and the reason was the love for the music. I was gettin’ jaded, lookin’ at what go on in the business. But, I had to say, even if I didn’t do this, I’d still be fuckin’ with the music. So I’m cursed, and I’m gon’ be cursed till the day I die. So this is what I’m gon’ do.”

Each day at Electric Lady, the studio on Eighth Street in lower Manhattan built by Jimi Hendrix, began around four in the afternoon, when D’Angelo, ?uestlove and all those who worked for years to develop the album would gather. A crucial influence was Jay Dee, from the group Slum Village. “He’s the zenith of hip-hop to us,” ?uestlove says. Jay Dee helped to bring out the album’s dirty sound and encouraged the false starts and the nonquantized sound of the record. (“Quantized” is D-bonics for being in perfect rhythm, while “to slum,” ?uest explains, “is the art of totally dragging the feel while being totally quantized. So, musically drunk and sober at the same time. Also called `to Jay that shit.’”)

From four until seven in the evening, the crew would watch the treat of the day and eat. Then they’d turn on the recorder and begin playing an album or an entire catalog by one of the Yodas – the dominant influence of ’96 was Prince, in ’97Jimi and Rev. Al, ’98 Gaye and George Clinton, ’99 James and Nigerian star Fela Kuti. They’d jam and wait to see what the groove inspired. One night they played Prince’s Parade until they flowed into a new groove that became “Africa.”

At 1 A.M. they’d break for dinner at the extremely untrendy, very dive-y Waverly diner on Sixth Avenue. “One of the marvels of life,” says ?uestlove, “was how this mafucker could eat all these eggs and twelve pounds of turkey bacon and be fit for `Untitled.’ Money was def finitely overweight by ’96, so they got him a drill sergeant physical trainer Mark Jenkins]. This guy didn’t take no shit. I cannot see D running in Central Park, but he did. If it was rainin’, extra parka, your ass was tannin’. Push-ups, weight room, sparring every day for three hours. He wouldn’t take no shit.” (Jenkins, who’s trained Mary J. Blige and Johnnie Cochran, hits the road with D to help him through three to four workouts a week.)

The gang would return from the Waverly around 2 A.M., watch the treat of the day one more time and work on the new song until around 4:30 or 5. Then D would drive people home in his black Range Rover 4.6. At this pace, they created 120 hours of original music that the public has yet to hear.

“But the biggest influence on the record,” ?uestlove says, “was someone who never came to the studio: Prince. Way after Voodoo was finished, D and I sat down and listened to it, and we both admitted that this was our audition tape for Prince. I think this album was made to show him that we’re capable of collaborating with him. And I don’t know if it’s some bold-ass shit to say we know what he needs, but we wanna work with him.”

“I really, seriously wanna coproduce his next joint,” D says. “Like, me and Ahmir [?uestlove* wouldn’t even have to use our names. We’d just be on some pseudonym shit. That’s what he meant by audition. Just, like, we wanna do his next shit.”

Back in L.A., two hours into the show; and the roof is on fire. W’ve done from smooth soul to rock funk to Pentecostal church, the grooves shifting without a moment’s pause in a breathtaking musical assault. Five years ago, during the Brown Sugar tour, D was a shy twenty-one-year-old Virginia country boy who hid behind his keyboard onstage. Now he’s confident and worldly, a father of two – a three-year-old son, Michael D’Angelo Archer II, and a five-month-old daughter, Imam Michael Michelle – as well as a soul-music historian. No wonder he’s alive onstage now, dancing, touching the audience, slamming his microphone down, lying on the ground at the lip of the stage to sing “One Mo’ Gin” while girls grab his legs, his stomach, his crotch. He’s the musical counterpart to Vince Carter and Randy Moss: a young icon, abundantly gifted, eye-poppingly spectacular, embarking on a Hall of Fame career.

He returns for the first encore in a tight black tank top, yelling, “I got the baddest band in the world! The Soultronics!” And he’s right. The thirteen-piece Soultronics, a group he pieced together from the worlds of jazz, soul and the church, are light-years ahead of your average backup band. On keyboards is the renowned producer James Poyser, who co-piloted The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Bassist Pino Palladino left B.B. King’s side to be here (he’s also played with the Staple Singers, Phil Collins, Elton John and Eric Clapton) and is, ?uestlove says, “one of three bassists left that can begin to emulate James Jamerson, bass god from the legendary Motown house band.” Trumpeters Roy Hargrove and Russell Gunn are young jazz stars who’ve played with Wynton Marsalis. Trombonist Ku-umba Frank “Roots” Lacy played with Art Blakey and holds a degree in physics. ?uestlove himself is a recent Grammy winner with the Roots. Even the backup singers have impressive resumes: Anthony Hamilton has a record deal with indie label Soulife Recordings, and Shelby Johnson was on her fourth callback for Rent when she opted to travel with D.

“A lot of my fellow vocalists were scared of this gig,” Johnson says, “because singing his stuff is so complex. But he brings you up to another level and makes you better as a musician if you’re willing to work. Bein’ down with D has made me a better me.”

The Soultronics begin each show in all black, but beyond that one requirement, each looks completely distinct. One man is in a deacon’s robe, another in a long cape with a knit ski cap that says FBI. There’s a feather boa, a few badass leather coats, and ?uestlove’s mighty Afro. There’s a P-Funkish freaky flair to the Soultronics’ look.

“In the beginning we kept asking,’What should we wear?’ ” Johnson says. “And D kept saying, ‘Just be you.’ It’s rare you have an artist who’s secure enough to let you be the rare motherfucker you can be. And if I’m up there feelin’ like I wanna feel, wearin’ my shit and my shoes, then he’s gonna get the best out of me.”

One day in Richmond, Virginia, ten-year-old Luther Archer came home to find his little brother playing the piano. “Mike was three – and it was not banging,” Luther says with awe. “It was a full-fledged song, with melody and bass line. Shortly thereafter, he started playing for my father’s church. My father had a Hammond organ, and he had to slide down to reach the pedals, but he did that very well.”

“This is really the only thing I i ever could see myself doin’,” Mi- chael D’Angelo Archer says. “I knew when I was three. My broth- knew when I was three. My brothers knew. They geared me for that. I always knew this is what I was supposed to be, what I was gonna do.”

There are family stories of his early promise: of the kindergarten talent show he won so convincingly that they wouldn’t let him participate in school talent shows after that, and the time seven-year-old Mike taught ninth-grader Luther how to play Prince’s “Do Me, Baby,” and the time Luther and middle brother Rodney took the little one to the mall, stopped in an organ store and let him sit down at the keys. Within minutes he’d stopped traffic in the place.

“My mother had a little room set off for him where he had all his equipment, and he was in there every day for hours,” says Luther, who co-wrote “Africa,” “The Root” and “Send It On.” “There wasn’t a day for sixteen or seventeen years that he didn’t touch the music.”

“I played everywhere I could,” D says of his childhood. His father is a Baptist preacher, and he began playing music in his father’s church, then went to live with his mother and played in his grandfather’s church in Powhatan, in the Virginia countryside. “That’s the real stomp-down, Pentecostal, holiness church,” he says. “Shoutin’, speakin’ in tongues and just fire. That’s where I really grew. That’s where I really was playin’:’
IMAGE PHOTOGRAPH
D’Angelo vests his funkadelic Voodoo spell in Los Angeles on March 3rd.

D and two cousins started a group and began tearing up local talent shows as Three of a Kind. Talent show after show they played covers off the radio and won or placed high. Luther and Rodney were local high school football heroes, on TV and in the newspaper every week, and Mike played a little, too, but no one in the family would come to his games: “‘Cause they knew it was about music for me.”

Luther did support his little brother’s love of Prince. Their father is a preacher, as are an uncle and a grandfather, so they couldn’t just bop into the house with Lovesexy in hand, but the boys found ways to sneak the music in. “My love for Prince was definitely influenced by my older brother,” D says. “We always had every new album the first day, and we would dissect that shit and study it, and after we listened to it, we’d have a discussion about it. We always did that.”

“We used to get in my car,” Luther says, “and we’d ride around the city with nothing to do and listen to Prince tapes. It was a red Ford Probe with a nice system in it. We’d hang out and listen to the music real loud.”

Mike was sixteen when he got a slot on Amateur Night at the Apollo. He sang “Feel the Fire” by Peabo Bryson, but the audience could see his fear before the song started: “They booed before I even came onstage.” He placed fourth.

The next year he went back to the Apollo. “I did `Rub You the Right Way’ by Johnny Gill, and I came out dancin’, doin’ splits and shit. I had mad energy. I wasn’t intimidated.

“When they said I won, I went off,” he continues. “I’d been Join’ talent shows forever, and that was, like, the talent show I went off, my family went off, my brother was rennin’ down the aisle, my cousins were jumpin’ up and down. We got back on the bus and went right back to Richmond. Everybody went to sleep; I stayed up the whole time. I was smoking cigarettes. That’s when I started. I was sneakin’ cigarettes, and I had the window

cracked, and I was lookin’ out the window just thinkin’ about everything. I got a check for $500, bought a four-track and started writing. I wanted to make an album.” He went into his little music room, and wrote and recorded most of the songs that would make up Brown Sugar. Two years later he had a record deal.

AT FIVE PAST MIDNIGHT IN L.A., the crowd begins screaming in unison: “Take! It! Off! Take! It! Off!” D resists, I but around quarter past, the tight black tank top comes off and he’s onstage in nothing but his very low-slung black leather pants and his boots. No drawers, no boxers, no briefs, no belt. He’s singing “Untitled” on the lip of delicious obscen- ity, giving you more than a sliver of his ass crack, his bare hips, his waist, his pubic bush, and the deep grooves separating his torso from his thighs, grooves that have come to be known as the DAngelo Knuckles. A solid wall of soprano screams rises up. It’s the most electric moment of the show, but D is not happy.

“It feels good, actually, when I do it,” D says later. “But I don’t want it to turn into a thing where that’s what it’s all about. I don’t want it to turn things away from the music and what we doin’ up there.” He says that once or twice women had thrown dollar bills and embarrassed him. He says that he was a chubby kid in middle school who lost thirty-five pounds in ninth grade, a kid who got chubby again during the Brown Sugar tour. He’s worked hard over the past four years to transform his body and has made a video that incited audiences to demand nudity, but the artist in him takes little joy in showing off his body, and he struggles with the meanings of being a musician and an entertainer.

“He does it ’cause women want it,” ?uestlove says, “but he really doesn’t wanna do it. We do all this preparation to give a balanced show, and he goes out and gets treated like women get treated every day – like a piece of meat.”D concurs. “Sometimes, you know, I feel uncomfortable. To be onstage and tryin’ to do your music and people goin’, `Take it off! Take it off!’ ‘Cause I’m not no stripper. I’m up there Join’ somethin’ I strongly believe in.”

It’s almost 12:30. The band keeps on carving out the rock-tight groove, and at center stage the struggle between artist and entertainer – for D, it is like good and evil – reaches an apex: It is almost impossible to look at him, nearly naked, and not somehow think about that. The band keeps on carving. And D keeps on dancing, a single silver button the only thing keeping him from nudity. The most nahstay tease since Prince stripped to his Dirty Mind bikini.

Copyright Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. May 11, 2000