This January marked 15 years since neo-soul icon D’Angelo unveiled his landmark album Voodoo and to celebrate its legacy, artists like Beyonce, Solange, Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth and Janelle Monáe have shared their own stories about how the album impacted and inspired their lives.
Voodoo was D’Angelo’s second studio album released in 2000 and is oft considered his magnum opus. It will have tough competition though as the anniversary of Voodoo‘s release comes just weeks after D’Angelo finally released its follow up, the wonderful Black Messiah, dubbed by some as the best album of 2014.
Paying tribute to the 2000 album, Solange’s label Saint Records collated various musings on Voodoo from musicians and published them on their website Saint Heron . Solange sets the tone for the homage to follow writing, “Voodoo is the church in which we all come to worship the religion of soul music.”
Another contribution is from Solange’s sister who you might know as Beyoncé. She writes that Voodoo is, “the DNA of black music; all the love, pain, social statements and rawness punctuated by his effortless vocal progression from his funky low register to his sexy falsetto.”
Janelle Monáe is similarly enamoured by the album writing that “the live musicianship” throughout it with its use of horns, guitar and bass has influenced the production-route she’s taken in creating her own albums.
Still, if a prize had to be given to the most verbose and cryptic prose though, it would have to go to the metaphor-heavy contribution from Dirty Projector’s Dave Longstreth. In what we think is a gushing ode to the album, Longstreth begins with the phrase, “Voodoo is a voice that’s been whispering vines into the margins of medieval manuscripts in some Alexandrian library beyond the barbarous antiquity of the present.” That means he likes it, right?
These collective sentiments towards Voodoo were echoed by super producer Rick Rubin this week when he wrote, “I don’t think there’s an album I’ve liked more than I’ve liked Voodoo in the fifteen years since it came out. I just think it’s spectacular.”
Read all the contributions, and the rest of Longstreth’s, over at the Saint Heron website.
