Even though I bought D’Angelo’s 2000 sophomore album “Voodoo,” I was afraid to listen to it because I was still very much a church boy committed to Pentecostal doctrines. I was a choir director and still planning to be a preacher and, perhaps, a pastor. Preaching was the family business, and I wanted to be a good son.
Voodoo was a spiritual practice I knew nothing about except that “saints don’t do that,” and I knew it would cause a spiritual crisis if I enjoyed D’Angelo’s music. Something so explicitly antagonistic to my spiritual beliefs, I feared, could be a portal to hell.
I knew it would cause a spiritual crisis if I enjoyed D’Angelo’s music. Something so explicitly antagonistic to my spiritual beliefs, I feared, could be a portal to hell.
But it wasn’t a portal to hell, it was a portal to freedom. What Michael Eugene “D’Angelo” Archer, a former Pentecostal church boy like me, modeled on “Voodoo” helped me figure out how to live a more generous and loving and honest life. Even when living a more generous, loving and honest life is very hard to do.
D’Angelo, whose album “Voodoo” won that year’s Grammy for best R&B album and whose single “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” won the Grammy for best R&B male vocal performance, died Tuesday at 51 after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.
He won four Grammys in total. In addition to the two mentioned above, his 2014 album “Black Messiah” won a Grammy for best R&B album, and the single “Really Love” won a Grammy for best R&B song. But as one of the innovators of what was called neo-soul, D’Angelo’s influence was far greater than the number of awards he won and far greater than you might expect from someone who only released three studio albums over his career. He released his debut album, “Brown Sugar,” in 1995.
When I finally broke down and listened to “Voodoo,” I loved everything about it. The connections from song to song felt like a good Friday night church service feels when folks sing songs that flow from one to the next without pause. The movement from song to song — and within each song, too — pulsates and drives and grooves. “Voodoo” felt spiritual to me in ways I didn’t yet know how to name. But I felt it, and I feel it still.
My connection to the album made more sense when I found out that, because of his Pentecostal background, D’Angelo felt the intensity and fervor of the spirit the same way I did. And he wanted that intensity and fervor to be felt in sounds and songs he’d create with others. Pentecostalism, and he absolutely meant Black Pentecostalism, “totally informs everything I do,” D’Angelo said in a 2015 interview with television host Tavis Smiley. “When I’m on the stage, I bring that with me.”
What he’d bring with him is immersion.
Pentecostals not only believe in baptism by immersion — where the water covers the entire body — but they also believe in what they call the baptism of the Holy Spirit. You have to be submerged in the spirit, all up in and through it.
That is what listening to “Voodoo” is like, being immersed in the spirit. And apparently, it was what recording and performing it was like, too.
Russell Elevado, who was the recording engineer for “Voodoo” and was a close collaborator of D’Angelo, said as much: “A lot of times [D’Angelo] would sing something to get the right inflection and intonation, versus trying to articulate the word ... And also, we were mixing his vocal level lower than normal. He liked it where the track kind of had him enveloped — not really on top of the mix, but more inside of the mix.”
D’Angelo not only understood immersion; he wanted to perform immersion. He wanted to live life immersed in the power of Black love and joy and sound.
Obviously, D’Angelo, a son and grandson of pastors who learned to play multiple instruments in church, would have been made to fear hell for playing secular music.
He wanted to be inside the mix, his voice finding refuge and home in the surround of sound. Not more prominent, not less, but with, together, abiding, constantly unfolding voice in relation to instruments and rhythm. To live one’s life as an immersive reality is to always be in the middle of things, always held, always carried. And what a beautiful thing it is to be held and carried.
With its tambourines and hand claps and foot stomps and Hammond organ and guitars and the sounds of praise and worship and moaning and wailing, this is what the music of Pentecostalism achieves: an immersive caress.
Obviously, a church boy like D’Angelo, a son and grandson of pastors who learned to play multiple instruments in church, would have been made to fear hell for playing secular music the same way I initially feared hell for listening to it. But we can thank God for his grandmother, who, he told Tavis Smiley, gave him permission to play secular music even when others in his church forbid it.
She never reprimanded his desire, he intimated. It seems she accepted him in his fullness, in his softness, in his beauty and wonder and curiosity. And he showed what softness as Black musical genius could sound like. Taking the best of the tradition — the gospel and the soul and the blues, he was a bluesman more than anything. Earthy. Warm and vibrational.
We can only imagine the reactions to his move toward secular music, to say nothing of him naming his second album “Voodoo.” Church folks can be unkind and unforgiving when you take up other sacred practices and make connections between theirs and the ones they say are demonic — like Voodoo, like Santeria rituals. Or, for me, like queerness. I have understood and felt that unkindness. And it is heartbreaking.
There’s a part in James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” in which the narrator connects the intensity of Black Pentecostal worship and music to the sought-after high of substance use. “When she was singing before,” the title character says, “her voice reminded me for a minute of what heroin feels like sometimes — when it’s in your veins. It makes you feel sort of warm and cool at the same time. And distant. And — and sure.” This sense of being near and far, distant and close, warm and cool is the in-between of immersion. Baldwin writes that “[T]he man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for the same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.”
He was uncomfortable with being seen as a sex symbol and deliberately gained weight as he struggled with addictions to drugs and alcohol.
Though he was only shown from the waist up, D’Angelo appeared to be completely naked when he recorded the video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” But he was reportedly uncomfortable with being seen as a sex symbol and deliberately gained weight as he struggled with addictions to drugs and alcohol.
Some folks want drugs and sex and church to be very different kinds of things, but Baldwin in “Sonny’s Blues” tells us that no, they are of the same source. And D’Angelo sang to us to say that they are of the same source. I felt such a deep and abiding affinity for D’Angelo because, like him, I have attempted to find that immersive experience of intensity and fervor after leaving the church, the place where I learned and felt it most. You seek that intensity, you need that intensity, and sometimes you find it in love and joy, or sex and drugs. You want the immersive power but not the addictions that often come with it.
What he needed, what we all need, is space to be vulnerable, to allow it to flower and unfurl. And in his life, and with his music that will resound for generations to come, that will echo and hail us to its downbeat and groove, he showed how vulnerability and softness could be cultivated and tended to.
“Voodoo” and “Black Messiah,” and his debut album “Brown Sugar,” along with his features and live performances, offered a way to find balance in the immersive. Making music with others — musicians and audiences together — can allow for beauty to emerge because one is so very vulnerable and exposed to the world. In those performances, he allowed for vulnerability and softness to flourish.