On The Evils Of The Industry:
To D'Angelo, good and evil are not abstract concepts but tangible forces he reckons with every day. In his life and in his music, he has always felt the tension between the sacred and the profane, the darkness and the light.
"You know what they say about Lucifer, right, before he was cast out?" D'Angelo asks me now. "Every angel has their specialty, and his was praise. They say that he could play every instrument with one finger and that the music was just awesome. And he was exceptionally beautiful, Lucifer—as an angel, he was."
But after he descended into hell, Lucifer was fearsome, he tells me. "There's forces that are going on that I don't think a lot of motherfuckers that make music today are aware of," he says. "It's deep. I've felt it. I've felt other forces pulling at me." He stubs out his cigarette and leans toward me, taking my hand. "This is a very powerful medium that we are involved in," he says gravely. "I learned at an early age that what we were doing in the choir was just as important as the preacher. It was a ministry in itself. We could stir the pot, you know? The stage is our pulpit, and you can use all of that energy and that music and the lights and the colors and the sound. But you know, you've got to be careful."
He recalls a particular moment onstage at the North Sea Jazz festival in 2000. The band was in the middle of "Devil's Pie," his song about the spell fame casts upon the weak—Who am I to justify / All the evil in our eye / When I myself feel the high / From all that I despise—when he felt an ominous presence in the crowd. "That night I felt something that was like, whoa," he tells me. E-vil.
On The Struggles Of Being A Black Entertainer:
"Black stardom is rough, dude," Chris Rock tells me when I reach him to talk about D. "I always say Tom Hanks is an amazing actor and Denzel Washington is a god to his people. If you're a black ballerina, you represent the race, and you have responsibilities that go beyond your art. How dare you just be excellent?"
"D'Angelo. Chris Tucker. Dave Chappelle. Lauryn Hill. They all hang out on the same island. The island of What Do We Do with All This Talent? It frustrates me."
I tell Rock that Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, the drummer for the Roots and one of D's closest collaborators, has ticked off much the same list. Questlove has a theory about what happens to black genius—what he calls "a crazy psychological kind of stoppage that prevents them from following through. A sort of self-saboteur disorder." Rock says he understands.
For a black star, Rock says, "there's a lot of pressure just to be responsible for other people's lives—to be the E. F. Hutton of your crew. Everything you say is magnified. I mean, street smarts only help you on the streets. Or maybe occasionally they will help you in the boardroom, but boy, you wish you knew a little bit about accounting." There is pressure to be original but also pressure to be commercial, to make money, to succeed. Sometimes the two run at cross-purposes.
I ask Questlove what he thinks has held D back. He says it's not just the way "Untitled" turned D'Angelo into "the Naked Guy," though of course that didn't help. It's something bigger. "We noticed early that all of the geniuses we admired have had maybe a ten-year run before death or, you know, the Poconos," he says. "That renders D paralyzed. He said he fears the responsibility and the power that comes with it. But I think what he fears most is the isolation"—the kind that fame brings.
On "The" Video That Changed it All:
Three weeks after its January 2000 debut, Voodoo hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts. Some early reviews were tepid (only later would Rolling Stone list it among its 500 best albums of all time), but it sold more than a million units in five weeks (and 700,000 since). The record would eventually win two Grammys, for best R&B album and best male R&B vocal performance for "Untitled." But as D began to fall apart, the video would be the only thing many fans remembered. "The video was the line of demarcation," says Harris. "It sent him spinning out of control."
Paul Hunter, the director hired to make the video, says his work was misunderstood: "Most people think the 'Untitled' video was about sex, but my direction was completely opposite of that. It was about his grandmother's cooking."
[...]I've imagined a lot of things that inspired the song's rousing lyrics (Love to make you wet / In between your thighs cause / I love when it comes inside of you), but collard greens weren't among them. Hunter is quick to explain that he, like D, was raised in the Pentecostal church.
"When I used to sing in the choir," Hunter says, "after the rehearsal, you go in to eat. I remembered seeing the preacher looking at a lady's skirt one week and then, the next Sunday, talking about how fornication is wrong." Such mixed messages about the pleasures of the flesh were intertwined with the pleasures of the palate—part of the same sensual stew. "So I was like, 'Think of your grandmother's greens, how it smelled in the kitchen. What did the yams and fried chicken taste like? That's what I want you to express.' "
The video was the brainchild of co-director Dominique Trenier, D's manager, whose goal—some still see it as a stroke of genius—was to turn his client into a sex god. D'Angelo had been working hard with his trainer and was cut down to muscle and bone. Never in his life had D been this taut and virile, and Trenier seized the opportunity to create a true crossover artist without losing his loyal base. Initially, Hunter says, to capture the heat they were hoping for, "we were going to build sort of a box for a girl to come and mess with him. We all said, 'Well, how can we push it?' "
But when the shoot began at a New York City soundstage, the fluffer turned out to be unnecessary. D's memory was all he needed to bring it home. The video may have looked like foreplay, but it was actually about family, Hunter insists—about intimacy. Later, when I tell D'Angelo this, he says, "It's so true: We talked about the Holy Ghost and the church before that take. The veil is the nudity and the sexuality. But what they're really getting is the spirit."
The shoot took six hours, and it changed D's life. Trenier got his wish: Thanks to D'Angelo's luscious physicality, albums started flying off the shelves. But the trouble began right away, at the start of the Voodoo tour in L.A. "It was a week of warm-up gigs at House of Blues just to kick off the tour, draw some attention, break in the band," says Alan Leeds, D's tour manager then and now. "And from the beginning, it's 'Take it off!' "
On Being The Sex Symbol:
D'Angelo felt tortured, Questlove says, by the pressure to give the audience what it wanted. Worried that he didn't look as cut as he did in the video, he'd delay shows to do stomach crunches. He'd often give in, peeling off his shirt, but he resented being reduced to that. Wasn't he an artist? Couldn't the audience hear the power of his music and value him for that? He would explode, Questlove recalls, and throw things. Sometimes he'd have to be coaxed not to cancel shows altogether.
"One time I got mad when a female threw money at me onstage, and that made me feel fucked-up, and I threw the money back at her," he says. "I was like, 'I'm not a stripper.' "
On His Music And Pending Comeback
