Switched on Pop - D’Angelo and the Legacy of Voodoo (with Faith Pennick)

Episode Date: March 31, 2020

In the year 2000, D'Angelo released Voodoo—with some help from Questlove, Angie Stone, Raphael Saadiq, and a band of jazz veterans—an album that has cast a long shadow with its unique sound of stripped-down soul, Faith Pennick, who literally wrote the book on the record, joins to break how D'Angelo broke the "shiny suit" regime of R&B, explore how he conjured the spirits of J Dilla, Prince, and Roberta Flack, and consider how one video almost derailed his career. Check out D'Angelo's Voodoo by Faith Pennick, from Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 Series Songs discussed: D'Angelo - The Line, The Root, Spanish Joint, Chicken Grease, Untitled (How Does it Feel) Rev JC Burnett - Amazing Grace Prince - Kiss Justin Timberlake - Damn Girl Thundercat - Them Changes Slum Village - CB4 Charlie Hunter and Scott Amendola - There Used to be a Nightclub There Roy Hargrove - Strasbourg / St. Denis Solange - Cranes in the Sky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. 20 years ago in the year 2000,

Anno Domini Lo unto us was given the greatest of all albums, DeAngelo's Voodoo. And now, Charlie, 20 years later, we come together to celebrate this album, to learn the hidden stories behind its creation, to unpack the way it continues to influence contemporary artists. and to hear how the album's biggest hit almost destroyed its creator. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. This is Switched-on Pop Voodoo Edition. So I've been thinking a lot about this album Voodoo recently

because I've been reading a new book by Faith Pennick, simply called Voodoo. It's part of the 33 and a third series from Bloomsbury, where every book in that series breaks down, a single album. And so Faith has written about voodoo, which has caused me to go on this voyage of the soul back to my own childhood and sort of thinking about how this album continues to resonate even after two decades. So Charlie, what I want to do is break down some of the core musical qualities of this album with you. And then the second half, we're going to bring faith

into the conversation to think about the legacy of this album and how it affected its star DeAngelo. Sound good? It's about to get romantic in here. Oh, yeah. It's going to get steamy. Let's open a window. Because this is the first thing we're going to listen to today. I think when you think of voodoo, the first thing you think of is the sound of D'Angelo's voice.

It's potent. Yeah. Our vocabulary reaches a sort of vanishing point here. And the way we describe vocal timbre, as we've talked about on the show, we don't have the technical terms that are really necessary to disqual. describe DeAngelo's voice. No, I mean, you could go historical on it. Obviously, the connection to gospel. Yes.

If you want to go and find the right adjectives, it's totally subjective. And anything that you feel works. Yeah. I mean, here's what I feel. Ooh. Ah. Ooh. Oh.

Whoa. But you're right. There is some historicism here. And a lot of the sound of DeAngelo's voice comes from the Virginia church that he grew up in as the son of a preacher. So he is deeply steeped in the sounds of gospel music. And you can hear that just even in that little acapella clip we listen to, the way those harmonies stack up one on top of another,

the way he has this melismatic approach to singing, where you take a single syllable and stretch it out. Mm-hmm. And the way that he's constantly moving between something that sounds like speech and something that sounds like song, that's kind of a big part of the gospel tradition. You're preaching and you're constantly, and you're really, in order to get your message across, you're changing your timbre from talking to singing in any given moment. So we get all of that on voodoo, and I feel like a track like The Line is really a showcase for

D'Angelo's vocal prowess. The way in which she alters his voice to almost sort of play different characters. Like it in the hip hop world reminds me of like Kendrick Lamar where you're yeah nobody pray for me. It's like it's not sort of any one person it feels like there's 18 de angelo's happening at one time. Totally and again I think this is a deep part of a black southern gospel tradition. I mean we can listen to a recording from way back in 1927 by the Reverend J.C. Burnett. I think we'll hear a lot of this same vocal approach. Not only do we have that moving from talking into singing and sort of multitude of ways of communicating, but you also have the same sort of choir in the background.

Totally. And what's so neat for me about this is like, oftentimes when you think about a choir's job, it's to not stand out from the lead vocalists. And you usually do that by a sort of more constrained style of singing. And here we have just so much vibrato and really emotional kind of singing. And yet it still blends. Like it feels like it's actually all part of one texture, all these voices. Yeah.

No, this is an approach where every syllable gets like the maximum amount of emotion and depth. And at times what they're saying is less important than the way it's being sung and the way it's being expressed. So that's the kind of sacred side of this musical experience. Well, perhaps I think in the sacred experience, probably what's being said is probably extremely important. The feeling equally sort of bringing it up, but I'm curious about how it then translates into the sort of R&B context, especially when it becomes about sensuality rather than spirituality. There, it feels like the way of singing ends up being privileged. Totally. Yeah, no, there's this sort of sacred, celestial vibe to this album. And then there's the profane, the secular, the earthy.

And I think you can hear that on a track like chicken grease. So on that open another window now. Yeah. So on that previous track, the line, we could hear the sort of gospel influence here. Now we get the R&B influence and especially the influence of one of DeAngelo's icons, Prince on this track. In fact, the name of this track, chicken grease, kind of has two meanings. One is like deep south soul food cooking, you know, just like down in dirty, slap it on the chicken grease.

Right. And then the other is this term, which I learned from reading Faith's book, it's a term that Prince used sort of code word. When he wanted his guitarist or when he himself would want it to do this, chicken grease meant playing a minor. seventh chord in a 16th note pattern. Okay. Okay. So Charlie, I'm going to need you to get out your axe. Okay.

And hit us with a minor seventh chord. Okay. Yeah, sure. Like this. I mean, gorgeous on its own. Sweet. Just let that hang in the air for a second. But now we got to put the rhythm on top of it.

What does that sound like strummed in a fast 16th note rhythm? Yeah. That's chicken grease. Now all of a sudden, we got some chicken grease. If you want to hear it in Prince, look no further than one of his biggest hits, Kiss, at the very beginning of the song. Ah! There it is. And if we turn back to DeAngelo, there's actually a moment in the track where he yells out, like, give me some chicken grease on this.

And then sure enough, the guitar comes in with that chicken grease pattern. This is fun because at the beginning you were talking about how hard it is to describe the timbre. of a voice appropriately and how subjective it can be. And even though we have some highly technical terms of exactly what a chicken grease comprises in terms of its harmony and rhythm, it doesn't matter. It's just chicken grease. It has this totally original sound for Prince, which has then, of course, blossomed into all of popular music.

And here we've got chicken grease on DiAngelo. You've got chingres. And, you know, I think another way we can hear the influence of Prince and classic R&B in this album is in DeAngelo's falsetto. This is like such a characteristic sound of this album, and I think it's one of the ways that it's proved so influential. Like, if you listen today to an artist like Justin Timberlake, or even Frank Ocean,

it's hard to imagine the sound of contemporary male falsetto, something I talked about at length with Estella Caswell a few months back. It's hard to imagine the sound of falsetto today without this album because I think it redefined for so many male artists like the expressive possibilities of falsetto. That wonderful upper register of the voice. Yes. Nate, how's your falsetto?

It's a pretty good. Ooh. Excuse me. Yeah. Not very good. Okay, so we've covered the gospel influences on voodoo. We've talked about chicken grease. We've dug a little bit into falsetto.

So I think another defining musical texture of this album is its approach to rhythm. And in order to understand that, we have to go straight to this album's drummer, who's none other than Questlove. By the time that DeAngelo and I started the Voodoo record, which was like mid-96, that was the hardest thing ever because he wanted me to drag the beat, but then he dragged the beat behind me. And so now I got to program my mind to think, okay, this. This is the metronome. And now he wants me to play, which is, you know, I started having issues like, well, what if other drummers, like the musician community is gonna laugh at me?

And he's like, no man, trust me, like, use the force. My brain is broken. Yeah, so Amir Questlove Thompson, drummer for the live hip hop band, the Roots, now member of the Jimmy Fallon show, house band, kind of this ubiquitous figure in, contemporary popular music. Once known as the human metronome, when he's recording these tracks for voodoo, DeAngelo tells him, no, you have to deprogram your inner metronome.

Time is broken. And give us this kind of almost sloppy feeling behind the beat kind of rhythm. This is like such a characteristic sound of voodoo. And it actually comes not from a drummer necessarily, but from a hip-hop producer named Jay Dilla. Let's listen to Dilla's production on a track by Slum Village called CB4. It's time to react. Back on the scene, that's my Nicholas Mack. Tell her the place to be.

It's the place where she's at. There it is again. These kind of off-time, not landing exactly where you expect them to, drum loops. It's kind of like ragged behind the beat time. this became a sound that outlasted voodoo. Like this approach to drumming. Like after voodoo, producers are going to start de-quantizing their beats so that they land in unexpected places.

There's also the entire subgenre of lo-fi hip-hop, which so frequently references J-Doha and this sloppy but not sloppy drumming, this human drumming. I can't, I can't, it's hard to say because, like, it is so hard to. to play in time, it's way harder to play out of time and still sound good. Consciously out of time. And you're right. You know, it's funny you say that because I think one of the artists you can really hear being influenced by Voodoo today is the bassist and singer Thundercat. Oh, yeah. I mean, well, first of all, let's just listen to a little bit of a song by him like Them Changes in which you can hear a lot of this kind of behind the beat drumming approach. And it has this quality where like I feel like time is suspended every single time I'm

waiting for the snare to hit. Like here it comes here it comes here. Oh no. It's never exactly where you're expecting. Oh it's powerful. Thundercat has such a great quote about what you're talking about. The difficulty of playing drums like this. You know, he's a big fan of voodoo. He says overall the whole album brought me so much perspective on my instrument. One thing I will say, is that I hate what it did to drummers. Everyone wanted to be Questlove and fell miserably short. I mean, seriously, some of their grooves would sound as if someone stuffed two combat boots in a dryer

and put a microphone next to it. That's a beautiful metaphor. I know. I read that and I was like, damn, that's cold, but also, you know, pretty accurate. Jay Dilla passed away in 2006, but this sound is still influential today and definitely outlasted voodoo.

All right, we've got the gospel. tinge. We've got the chicken grease, the references to Prince, the falsetto, this quest love behind the beat drumming style. What else does this album offer? I think it gives us this kind of jam session approach to soul, something that totally revitalized the genre of soul and R&B at the turn of the millennium. And today continues to inspire musicians. I mean, this was an album, that was created by putting really talented people in a room, having them jammed together and see what happened. And at this point, we should talk about some of the other musicians who were in the room.

Yeah, who are these characters? These characters were the cream of the crop of jazz and session musicians of the day. You've got Pino-Paladino. Yes. Journeyman-based player. A name you might not be familiar with, but who you have heard playing with like every musician ever. Yeah, he's probably on thousands of records at this point.

Yeah, he is like the zealig of modern music. And then you've got a jazz guitarist. I guess what I want to call him named Charlie Hunter, but he's not exactly a guitarist. Charlie Hunter is a bit of an enigma, and as a guitarist myself, he's somebody who radically inspires me because he doesn't just play the guitar.

He plays the guitar with three bass strings on his guitar and plays bass strings. Yeah. and plays bass and guitar at the exact same time in a way that is utterly mind-bending, like doing calculus in your head. Yeah, it's bananas. He's also, is an amazing tambourine player, which I only know because I saw him live once, and all of a sudden he busted out a tambourine and just like took a tambourine stall,

and everyone was like, wait, what is happening? And why is this so good? We can play the sound, not the tambourine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, sorry, sorry, so here's a nice example. Here's Charlie Hunter. You're going to hear a bass line, and then you're going to hear some guitar. seep in and it's important to remember these are the same person playing the same instrument at the same time

I often think of the guitar as like a journey in trying to make your hand as uncomfortable as it possibly can to make chords that make no sense and he does that while simultaneously playing a baseline it's it's pretty mind-melting we've got Charlie Hunter and then we've got another sort of jazz conyacente in the room here Roy Hargrove on trumpet who is you know when you listen to to him in another context, you're like, how would this person work on a R&B album? This is like just straight up blistering jazz. Hargrove was one of those players who, on the trumpet, such a ubiquitous instrument. Yeah.

You can tell it to him immediately. Totally. Roy Hargrove passed away a few years ago, but he's still one of those artists who on trumpet has such ubiquitous sound, you can tell it's him immediately. And when their forces come together on certain tracks at the end, Angelo, Charlie Hunter, Roy Hargrove. It's like this kind of blend of jazz and soul and R&B that I think a lot of artists are still striving for. Let's take a listen to Spanish Joint.

Hargrove doing something with his trumpet where it's like got some like synth harmonies under it because it is definitely. It's multi-tracked. There might be some effect on it. You know, in Faith's book, the engineer Russell Alavado. talks about using all these specific microphones and ways of mixing the Hargroce trumpet, so it doesn't always sound like a trumpet you'd expect. That's another person who's worth mentioning here, the engineer behind this session, who recorded the whole voodoo album at Electric Ladyland Studios,

where Jimmy Hendrix once recorded that eponymous album. And they were literally like blowing dust off microphones that hadn't been used since the 1970s and hooking them up, it was all analog. That's also a part of this sound. I love how you describe this as like a jam session, like album with some of these amazing players because here it feels both, like it's a totally new sound that it feels like it comes from the confluence

of all of these players together who come from different styles and then like made something totally original, even including the engineer and the space and like all of it comes together to make this, sort of pantheon of an album. Yeah, totally. I mean, there's one great anecdote from the book where Questlove talks it about

Russell Elevado recording his drums and then playing them back through a guitar amplifier and then recording that, you can hear it on the track, which is just not even a full track, it's just like a little jam session that they stuck into the album

and it's simply called booty. Totally. It's like crunchy, compressed, boxy, the guitarian. It's cool. And again, we have that kind of behind the beat sound. I think, you know,

when you think about fast forward 20 years and you think about musicians kind of operating in the shadow of voodoo, I think we might take for granted how

this kind of jam session collaborative approach to music making is now very common today. Like, I think a lot of albums and tracks get made by putting

people in a room, having them, you know, play together and seeing what happens. And a lot of my favorite soul and R&B records of the last two decades kind of take this approach. And a good example might be Solange Knowles. Oh, definitely. And her album is a seat at the table.

And she is like a huge DeAngelo fan. Oh, really? Like she is a self-professed DeAngelo acolyte. And she even works with some of the musicians who worked on voodoo, like singer-songwriter Rafael Sadik. When we listen to a track like Cranes in the Sky, I think we're going to hear all of these elements. We're going to hear those stacked gospel vocal harmonies, these kind of sloppy behind-the-beat drum patterns. We're going to hear these songs that have this jam session vibe to them that like clearly emerge from late night sessions in a smoke-filled room doing whatever felt good until you find something that is just right. Let's check out cranes in the sky.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's all there. I mean, her stacked vocals, that harpy, synthy thing, which is just not in anyone's time. It's in its own time. Both these albums, you can really sort of, you almost feel like you're in the space that they're recording it in. It's not too polished. Yeah, there's a rawness in a kind of intimacy. So I feel like together we have deconstructed this famous album.

We have them all here on the studio floor. And I guess it makes me wonder, what is it about these unique characters, the rhythms, the gospel vocals, the jam session style writing? How do they come together to create this larger artistic statement? What is DeAngelo doing here? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think this album has become such a touchstone because of all the reasons we talked about. But at the same time, it exists in its own kind of little world, and there never has and never will be another album like it. It is this kind of coherent artistic statement, and this is an album in every sense.

You can listen from beginning to end, and it feels like one continuous journey. It's the product of three years of jam sessions. It's the product of $1.5 million of label money, a sum, which is kind of unthinkable today, and 4,000 bootleg Soul Train tapes that Questlove brought back from Japan and they would watch during breaks. I think this album remains so compelling because it's this unique statement of what R&B could be and what Soul could be. And it certainly kind of kick-started this whole movement that would become known as Neo-N. soul for better or worse. And yet at the same time, for all of those kind of superlatives, it just is what it is.

It is voodoo. Yeah, he's using the metaphor of voodoo to say, like, this thing is, you can take it all apart. But, of course, the sum is bigger than individual parts, and that is the magic. Speaking of which, there is one part of this album that is like the elephant in this conversation, the elephant in the room. Or should I say the naked, gleaming, sweaty torso in the room? because there's one song on this record, the biggest song, in fact, that we have decided not to talk about yet.

And that's for a very good reason. This is the song of all the tracks on Voodoo that had the most impact on DeAngel's career, both positively and deeply negatively. When we come back, untitled parentheses, how does it feel? Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness.

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My sense is that people want order at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Okay, Charlie, we have not discussed the one track that most people think of when they think of DeAngelo's voodoo. How does it feel co-written by DeAngelo and the great Raphael? Sadiq, this song is synonymous with sex.

Let's just be frank about it. And before we even talk about the video, let's talk quickly about some of the reasons this song is so sexy. Oh. Yeah. Take a minute to compose yourself. Can't quantize romance. And yet I would say that a 6-8 time signature is the sexiest of all time signatures.

One, two, three. Four, five, six. Yeah, I mean, maybe, like, historically connected to it coming from the waltz, which is dancing with your partner. I don't know. We'll give it. Yeah, I'll give it to you dancing closely, the sexy waltz. Certainly, it's got this, like, pulse to it with the underlying triplets. One, two, three, four, five, six.

But then it also has this kind of slow one, two, one, two, one, two, three, four, five, five, six. Right. So you've got like kind of both of those, you've got like something kind of fast and slow at the same time. Anyways. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I think sexiness is all about that tension. And this song is constantly doing it. It's constantly going from like soft to loud and back again. Right. You know? Even in the very first kind of beat of it. That's what I mean you can't quantize romance. Like you can't play it to a grid because it's multiple people trying to figure out, hey, what's going on here? Totally. Totally. I mean, there's no formula to romantic. racism and sexiness.

But there is, I think, in this song of a playbook to follow, which is the slow build. This is a seven-minute track. And when you get to these moments of payoff, it is orgiastic. Yeah, don't sleep on the bridge in this song, by the way. People leave out that deeply funky guitar break. I love how he's doing all of these sort of melismatic runs. the ooze and the oos and the oz. And then the instruments pick it up.

Yes. Right? They're like, they're in conversation with each other, which is great because this song in many ways is about a healthy sexual communication. Absolutely. Wow. Well said, Chuck. I think that reaches kind of a fever pitch towards the end.

You know, at this point is almost like a, yeah, like a dialogue between voice and guitar. And you can almost hear these two voices coming together as one. It's very, I'm, poof, I got to cool down. talking about it. All right. So at this point, we talked about sort of the positive legacy of this song. It remains a bedroom staple. Sure. But it also had some really negative consequences for DiAngelo, his career, his personal life. And it all has to do with this video. Its massive success would also prove to be DeAngelo's undoing. In order to break that down, let's bring in the author of the book on Voodoo, Faith Pennick herself. Let me put this in context. The album when it came out, that was not what R&B sounded like.

R&B was very regimented. It was, you know, very sort of colored by numbers. You know, you had Jodice. Destiny's Child was coming up. You quote Questlove in the book is calling it the shiny suit period. Right, the shiny suit time. Right, exactly. That's exactly what it was.

And some of that music is great, but Voodoo was on another level. And it was obvious that he was influenced by, you know, African and Caribbean music and jazz and rock. And, you know, obviously he comes out of a gospel tradition and was really trying to, you know, pull back a lot of older R&B references. The emotional intelligence that DiAngelo displayed on this record. I didn't see it coming. It went platinum. It sold more than a million copies. Obviously, it was a success, but not with a big S.

And I think a lot of people just weren't ready for it. Tell us a little bit about one of the underappreciated collaborators, kind of the secret songwriter in this voodoo album, Angie Stone. Angie Stone is the probably the unsung heroine of voodoo and of DeAngelo's career, frankly. She is a singer and songwriter. She's originally from South Carolina.

Angie Stone started out in a group called The Sequence that had a hit called Funk You Up. And from there, she became a solo artist and actually was put together with DeAngelo by Jocelyn Cooper who felt that Angie Stone could help DeAngelo become a better songwriter and frankly help him finish Brown Sugar at the time. He was in the middle of working on that album. She thought that Angie could help him be a little more disciplined

and get the work done and get the album finished. And he did. Brown sugar, babe. I guess higher of your love, I don't know how to be. In the process of them working on brown sugar, they became romantically involved. They had a child together.

When DeAngelo started working on voodoo, he was in the process of breaking up with Angie Stone. They co-wrote, one of the songs they co-wrote together is Send It On, which is basically a tribute to their firstborn son. It's a lovely song. I do wonder what was going through their minds in the sense of that they, you know, they wrote the song for their son. Meanwhile, their relationship was framed. And actually, Questlove, he said in an interview and vibe when the album came out in 2000,

that he guessed that voodoo in part is DiAngelo sort of working out the tumult of the ending of his relationship. but Angie Stone, she co-wrote four songs on the album and she is a big reason that he is where he is today and I do think she doesn't get the credit for that. I mean, obviously she has her own solo career as a singer-songwriter, but I do think, frankly, that it's the men that work on that album who get pretty much all of the shine, all of the glory.

and you know, Angie Stone is just sort of a footnote and I don't know, I feel that and I wrote about this in the book that she definitely deserves more credit in being a, at least, if not at least a seed as far as sprouting the ideas that DeAngelo et al

you know, created that ended up becoming voodoo. When the video for Untitled, how does it feel drops, it changes DeAngelo's world. What happens? Describe the, this video, which you simply call the video, and the impact it had on DeAngelo's career. The video starts out on the back of his head with his cornrows, and then he does a 180,

slowly comes around. You see his eyes are closed and you see his eyes open. You can obviously tell that I've seen us two gazillion times. And like when it's on his eyes and then, you know, you hear his voice. And as he keeps singing, it pulls out. finally, as it pulls out, it's like a mid-range shot of him from the torso up, from the belly button up. And he's totally ripped. He's just glistening.

He's got his little gold chain with the cross on it. And so he's thugged out, but in this sort of, he was your thug fantasy, for lack of a better description. I mean, he was the guy who was singing to you and singing to only you. And you got to look at a six-pack while doing it. And you were just like, yay. Dominique Trenear, who was his manager at the time, it was actually his idea for the video, and he was very clear that he wanted to make DeAngelo a superstar.

He didn't just want, you know, voodoo to come out. And it just sort of, you know, everyone was like, oh, that's nice. That sounds good. He had a master plan. And that was the entitled video. And DeAngelo, at least by first glance, being naked, even though he wasn't really naked. He had pants on, but he had sweatpants on.

But, you know, he, that was intentional. And he knew that it would be like, you know, lightning in a bottle. You know, he knew that, you know, people were just going to fall out, you know, basically when the video came out. Yeah. And I think DeAngelo was very uncertain about it because he's shy, you know, and I think that's the thing is like, you know, he's very shy. He's and sort of a nerd.

And DeAngel was sort of like, you want me to be naked? It was a game changer. I know people say that a lot, but women were stopped in their tracks, and particularly black women were like, it replaced, hi, how are you? You know, instead of how is your day,

it was, have you seen any of the Antilles? There was a point, I was on the phone with my hairstylist in Brooklyn. I was living in New York City at the time. And I was talking to her, and then all of a sudden there was a silence. And I thought, what happened? What, what, hello?

Are you there? For anyone who's ever been in a hair salon, it's usually pretty loud. You know, it's a lot of people going, yeah, I didn't know. You have, you know, blow dryers and people talking and the TV run. And in the distance, I could hear, and I went, all these black women are sitting there watching this video in real time. Total silence except just DeAngelo's voice, but not thought, oh, they're watching a video. Women, we were elated

because at the time, it was pretty much videos with, particularly again, this was the rise of hip hop. And you just had, you know, women in bikinis on top of cars at poolside, wherever, you know, and even like rock videos,

you know, like girls, girls, girls by Motley Crew and, you know, there was nothing for women to look at. And this was probably the, I don't know if it was, I don't want to say it was the first video ever, but the first video in a long time

where it was made for women to look at, for our pleasure, for our entertainment, and we could sit there and be like, yay. Unfortunately, it was probably too successful. It was probably in a sense that it took away from the album. It took away from the music, from the very prolific world. that DiAngelo and his team did on this album,

everybody now was focused on a video. The pressure to be a sex symbol more than a musician kind of derails DeAngelo's career following voodoo. He struggles with drug use and weight gain and run-ins with the law. And it's not until 15 years later that he releases his next. album, Black Messiah.

Nevertheless, Voodoo that my love is nice to see I will never train my heart. I will never train my heart. Nevertheless, voodoo remained one of the touchstones of soul, R&B, and pop music. And I'm sure we'll continue

to feel the influence of this record. record. Faith, thank you so much for joining us. This has been such a fun conversation. Thank you. You all pick up this book. It's simply called Voodoo by Faith Pennick, found wherever books are sold. And if you haven't yet, go listen to this album already. Yes, please do. It is too good for words. I'm Nate Sloan. And I'm Charlie Harding. Switchon Pop is produced by Megan Lubin and Bridget Armstrong and Brandon McFarlane is our extraordinary engineer.

Abby Barr is our social media manager and Iris Gottlieb is the illustrator of all illustrators. Deshaq Kerwaw and Liz Nelson are our executive producers and we're a proud member of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Catch our show on any podcast player and talk to us

at Switched on Pop on Twitter and on Instagram. We'll be back again in another week and until then. Thanks for listening.