Access Provided by University of Oregon at 11/08/12 5:01PM GMT D’Angelo’s Voodoo Technology: African Cultural Memory and the Ritual of Popular Music Consumption Loren Kajikawa The execution of Call-Response tropes opens the symbolic field, where reside the long-standing, sublimated conflicts, taboos, and myths of personal and group emotional experience and our relationships to them. —Samuel A. Floyd Jr., The Power of Black Music Voodoo is an ancient African tradition. We use “voodoo” in the drums or whatever, the cadences and call-out to our ancestors and that in itself will invoke spirits. And music has the power to do that, to evoke emotions, evoke spirit. —D’Angelo, Jet Magazine This current volume of Black Music Research Journal posits that, despite the great diversity of New World African cultures, examining their religious and musical practices can reveal noteworthy similarities. The trope of CallResponse, outlined in Samuel Floyd Jr.’s landmark The Power of Black Music (1995), provides an important hermeneutic for uncovering such connections. As a metaphor for the expressive economy of musical practices, ideas, and experiences across the Diaspora, Call-Response tropes focus our attention on the perseverance of African cultural memory within the United States and Caribbean (95–97). This essay examines the mobilization of African cultural memory in the work of neo-soul musician Michael “D’Angelo” Archer. Voodoo (2000), the much anticipated follow-up to D’Angelo’s 1995 debut album Brown Sugar, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts and went on to Loren Kajikawa is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology and musicology at the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance. He teaches courses on music of the Americas, music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and U.S. popular music. His current research explores how conceptions of race become audible in hip hop music. Black Music Research Journal Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring 2012 © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 138 bmr journal win the 2001 Grammy Award for Best R&B Album. The album’s title can be read as a symbolic gesture toward what Samuel Floyd Jr. (1995) has called the “subliminal, inarticulate, and implicit perceptions and relationships” that exist between the musical cultures of the United States and African Diaspora (230). Using language that seems to echo Floyd’s description of the expressive powers of Call-Response—a musical “trope of tropes” that informs a wide variety of black musical practices from antiquity to the present—D’Angelo describes his music as a “call-out” to the “ancestors” meant to “invoke spirits” (“Hot Singer D’Angelo” 2000, 58). Voodoo’s graphic design also invokes Afro-Diasporic religious practices. Some of these images feature photographs of what appear to be actual participants. But most of them show D’Angelo himself, often posing as though he were in the midst of some sort of ritual experience. Although much of the iconography of these photos is authentic to Caribbean religious practices—the sacrificial rooster that appears in numerous photos and the eleke (beaded necklaces) D’Angelo wears suggest Cuban Santeria—neither the album’s music nor its liner notes engage actual religious practices directly. It is easy enough to dismiss representations of Caribbean religious practices as exotic, romanticized, and inaccurate when they are produced and consumed by a white, middle-class demographic. The most egregious musical examples undoubtedly come from the jungle exotica craze of the 1950s and 1960s, which gave rise to the percussion-heavy primitivism of Les Baxter’s Ritual of the Savage (1951) and Robert Drasnin’s Voodoo (1959), among numerous others. But how are things different when the appropriation of African and Caribbean religious imagery comes from within black popular culture? We have here a call, but what should be our response? Explaining the logic behind the album in the earlier second epigraph, D’Angelo provides us with some possible answers. D’Angelo relates his understanding of African (and African-derived) religious practices to his own experiences at the Pentecostal church of his childhood, the Refugee Temple Assembly of Yahweh Yahoshua the Messiah. As a young boy, D’Angelo sang, played organ, and eventually served as music director of the church while his father preached (D’Angelo 2000, 70; Farley 2000). Because of his upbringing, D’Angelo stresses a responsibility toward the “power of music,” specifically “the drums,” and notes how when used properly as in “voodoo” they can “evoke spirit.” Thus, D’Angelo implies that Pentecostalism, African religions, and black popular music are closely related and share a common spiritual function. The album’s liner notes, by poet, musician, and performance artist Saul Williams, amplify these sentiments and connect the spirituality of D’Angelo’s music to the current state of the hip hop industry. Positioning Voodoo as an antidote for the hypermasculinity and materialistic ex- Kajikawa • D’Angelo’s Voodoo Technology 139 cess plaguing mainstream rap, Williams (2000) asks, “Is there any room for artistry in hip hop’s decadent man-sion?” He continues by expressing concern over “the glitter and glamour that has dominated most successful Black artistry of recent years,” charging that black musicians “seem to be more preoccupied with cultivating [their] bank accounts than cultivating [their] crafts.” His fiery prose then turns to D’Angelo, praising his ability to conjure the true spirit of past soul masters lacking in the work of other contemporary black musicians. To understand what Williams and other fans of D’Angelo’s music value about Voodoo, we need to pay attention to the role of sound in structuring musical experience. There must be something about his music as music that evokes or expresses a sense of spirituality. The production and reception of D’Angelo’s Voodoo reveal that both the album and its fans have contributed their own ideas about the relationship between D’Angelo’s neo-soul and the religious/musical practices of the African Diaspora. These connections may trade in what appear to be superficial invocations of Caribbean religious practices, but that does not mean that we should choose to ignore them. Few in the United States can be expected to have insider knowledge about such religions, and, moreover, Caribbean religions themselves are characterized by an unstable syncretism based in part upon the willful misunderstanding and reinterpretation of Catholicism. By thematizing appropriation and creative misuse, I want to explore how D’Angelo and his collaborators use various technologies to mix tropes from African American popular and sacred music, and to suggest along the way that Voodoo shares more with religious music than might first meet the ear. Put another way, D’Angelo’s aesthetics, which are grounded in soul, funk, and gospel, use black musical tropes to evoke a musical, spiritual connection to Africa and the Caribbean. Readers who expect hard evidence that D’Angelo elaborates directly upon Caribbean religious material will be disappointed. Such a find would be exciting, no doubt, but would miss the larger point. I am interested in tracing how connections might exist on a deeper cultural level through what Teresa Reed (n.d.) terms “shared possessions.” In making my argument, I hypothesize black music as itself a kind of popular religion, not in an institutional sense but as a means of accessing the numinous and extraordinary. I am not going to consider black secular music’s role in conventional religious institutions and practices, such as in holy hip hop (cf. Zanfagna, 2011). Instead, I intend to explore how spiritual experiences might manifest themselves in the ostensibly secular contexts of popular music consumption. While I am not alone in this endeavor, past studies have tended to rely on lyrical and televisual analysis (Spencer 1989). I want to move away from such methodologies and draw more attention to the role of sound in fostering popular music spirituality. 140 bmr journal Much thought has been given to the interpenetration of African American popular and religious music, particularly to the relationship between R&B/soul and black Baptist and Pentecostal traditions. The similarities between the rhythmic shouting of James Brown and black preachers like C. L. Franklin have been noted, and the fact that many soul singers such as Aretha Franklin learned to sing in local church choirs hardly needs to be mentioned. These are common and well-accepted examples of the continuity between black religious and secular styles. In many ways, R&B/soul musicians and their black religious counterparts can be considered as “two sides of the same coin” or even as Teresa Reed (2003) has posited “two utterances of a . . . multifaceted African American voice” (38). The connection between African American popular music and the religious traditions of the Caribbean, however, is another story. Despite praising D’Angelo’s musical artistry, one amateur reviewer (A music fan, 2000) of Voodoo complains that the images found in the album’s liner notes “are taking [the connection between R&B and Vodou] a little too literally,” asking rhetorically, “does [D’Angelo] really practice voodoo?” Skepticism about D’Angelo’s actual commitment to and knowledge of Vodou practices raises a good point. Without any ethnographic contextualization or explanation, the album and its imagery might be accused of reinforcing harmful stereotypes about the “dangerous” and “primitive” nature of the Caribbean, or, at best, reproducing a romanticized and oversimplified idea about its religions. Nonetheless, I am compelled to ask myself (and this skeptical reviewer) whether we might be missing something when we insist on such a literal reading. George Lipsitz (1997) has argued that misusing cultural signifiers can be an empowering act and suggests that “at times, musicians have to play in ways that are ‘mistaken’ by one code in order to remain faithful to another” (167). Moreover, D’Angelo’s own statement that his music draws on an “ancient African tradition” seems to command a more imaginative approach to understanding the album’s flirtation with Caribbean themes. Turning our attention briefly to the opening moments of Voodoo, we hear the sounds themselves leading us to new ways of understanding. * * * Like many recent popular music albums, D’Angelo’s Voodoo begins with a brief introduction. A seventeen-second sound collage features the sound of a male voice chanting, mixed unintelligibly with the sound of a wooden block beating out a five-stroke ostinato (Ex. 1a). Behind these sounds, an electronically generated whirling noise rises in pitch and volume, adding intensity and a sense of otherworldliness to the vocals and percussion. Over the course of these seventeen-seconds, the 3 + 2 pattern of the drums— Kajikawa • D’Angelo’s Voodoo Technology 141 click-click-clack, click-clack, click-click-clack, click-clack—is panned from low right to high right, from high right to high left, and from high left to low left as if to encircle the listener. As this brief prelude fades out, the tune “Playa Playa,” a loose funk groove featuring drums, bass, guitar, horns, and D’Angelo’s vocals, emerges and the album begins anew. Evoking the religiosity of the album’s title, this transition cues listeners in to the idea that the beginning of this album marks the start of a voodoo ritual. More exactly, perhaps, the sound collage suggests that some mystical power is being invoked, a power that will be made manifest as the introduction gives way to D’Angelo and his band. But what spirit, if any, is being called down by this electronic incantation? Listening closely to this opening again suggests an intriguing possibility. As the 3 + 2-stroke ostinato, vocal chanting, and electronic whirling noise fade out, drummer Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson delivers three rim shots Example 1. Musical pun on the clave pattern in “Playa Playa” from Voodoo’s intro. (a) Clave ostinato from Voodoo’s intro. (b) Fourth measure of “Playa Playa.” a) Clave ostinato from Voodoo’s “intro.” 1 - - 2 - - 3 - - 4 - x x x x x b) Fourth measure of “Playa Playa” - 1 - + - 2 x x x + - 3 x + - 4 x + - 142 bmr journal from his snare—pa-pa-pa—to mark the start of “Playa Playa.” These rim shots echo the wooden blocks of the introduction, drawing a musical parallel between Caribbean religious music and the soul grooves of Voodoo. The song proper begins with an eight-measure vamp, assembling the foundation for a funk groove: finger snapping on the 2 and 4 establishes the backbeat, and D’Angelo, whose voice is gradually faded in, can be heard singing, “We’re the Playas number one.” Finally, a prominent bass line repeats a short three-note figure, creating some tart cross-rhythmic tension with the percussion and vocals. The truly remarkable moment in this groove occurs toward the end of every fourth measure when guitarist Mike Campbell scratches out two choked chords. These two scrapes—chank-chank—answer the syncopated three-note bass figure, making a musical pun connecting back to both the opening rim shots and the 3 + 2-stroke ostinato heard in the introduction (Ex. 1b). These rhythms evoke, but do not necessarily copy the ostinato rapped out by claves in the voodoo introduction. As Anne Danielsen (2006) explains regarding the difference between traditional African polyrhythm and African American musical forms like funk, “The most interesting polyrhythmic relation . . . is probably not where a clear cut rhythm is combined with an equally clear-cut counter-rhythm. Rather, it appears when a layer of potential cross-rhythm is used to create small stretches in time that fall between a dominant basic pulse and hint at its virtual alternative” (71). Grounded in the generic 4/4 conventions of funk, the cross-rhythmic interaction between the bass and guitar parts in “Playa Playa” enliven the basic groove by providing syncopations that anticipate the main beats, pushing and pulling against them. Where the 12/8 clave pattern heard in the introduction consists of an irregular mixing of duple and triple rhythmic subdivisions, the fivestroke musical pun made at the start of “Playa Playa” is what Danielsen would term a “stretch” interpolated into a funky duple framework. This rhythmic transformation makes the musical version of D’Angelo’s argument in the foregoing epigraph: it asserts sonically the continuity and shared purpose of black pop and African ritual drumming. The transition between the introduction and the beginning of “Playa Playa” equates the form and function of a funk groove with an African or Caribbean religious rite. This interpretation is strengthened when the process is reversed at the end of “Playa Playa.” This time the same vamp that opens the song—threenote bass figure and two-stroke guitar chord intact—fades out as the chanting, wooden block ostinato, and electronic whirling noise return, confirming that what we have been listening to all along is supposed to function as a modern-day substitute for African or Caribbean religious music. The sounds of “authentic” African spirituality evoked at the beginning and end of “Playa Playa” are, most likely, a studio fabrication and not Kajikawa • D’Angelo’s Voodoo Technology 143 an actual field recording. In fact, some critics, presumably with insider knowledge, have speculated that the chanting voice is a looped recording of Jimi Hendrix’s voice (Jones 2000). Like the imagery of the album’s liner notes, these sounds somewhat problematically signify Caribbean religiosity. Yet such superficial evocations might also serve as a way of imagining a shared history, culture, and community for Diasporic people that potentially bridges divisions of language and nation. The equation of funk music with something powerfully African is not a new idea. Numerous fans, musicians, and critics have claimed that funk represents the blackest form of African American popular music, “a rhythmic connection with Africa” (Vincent 1996, 8). For many since the 1960s, the heavy emphasis on cross-rhythm and syncopation in funk music has epitomized the core of a black aesthetic based upon an African approach to rhythm, sensuality, and spirituality (Ward 1998, 350–351). What needs to be pointed out, however, is that despite discourse about the polyrhythmic Afro-centricity of funk, the style itself, associated most prominently with James Brown, Sly Stone, and George Clinton, has relatively recent origins. With some notable exceptions, clave-like rhythms were not prominent in African American music before the 1940s and 1950s (Sublette 2004). I point this out not to undermine those who hear something distinctly African in funk music, but instead to highlight the role musical aesthetics plays as a means for imagining and rebuilding connections among Diasporic cultures. The cross-rhythmic tendencies of “Playa Playa” and other songs on Voodoo reflect a common image of African and Caribbean religiosity in which moments of spiritual transcendence can be found through repetitious irregular rhythmic figures that induce trancelike states. In fact, numerous fans testify to the spirituality of D’Angelo’s music in their comments regarding the Voodoo album. As a part of my research, I surveyed over 322 customer reviews of Voodoo available on Amazon.com’s website and found support for the hypothesis that black music is widely understood among its popular audience to include a religious component. While online reviews such as these do not enable me to verify each informant’s identity, we can assume these reviewers have at least enough economic and cultural capital to participate in Internet-based discussions about music. What makes this approach valuable, however, is access to a geographically diverse body of listeners who share enthusiasm for D’Angelo’s music, a sample that I would have otherwise been unable to amass. Many of the reviews, of course, say little more than that they strongly recommend (or don’t recommend) the album. But nearly a third offer surprisingly revealing testimonials, including detailed commentary that offers us some insight into the religious implications of the listening experience. As one reviewer confesses, “It got me deep. [D’Angelo] touched my inner-soul 144 bmr journal with his beautiful words and music” (Yvon 2000). Another fan spoke to the healing properties of the album, urging potential listeners to “Let [Voodoo] take you higher” (illcuz 2005). One overriding theme emerges, gesturing toward the specific properties of D’Angelo’s music that seem most salient to the album’s positive reception. The theme around which a majority of the fan reviews turn is the value of immediate experience. D’Angelo’s music is not an album to admire objectively, dispassionately, or to ponder from a distance, but rather one to engage with directly, losing oneself in the pleasures of sound. For example, one fan argues that the album must have been named Voodoo because it works its “magic on you until you’re immersed in a simmering cauldron of thick R&B and soul grooves, snapping your fingers and just nodding your head” (Lennon 2003). Another reviewer describes the songs as putting “you into another world,” and that “it makes me feel ‘high,’ and I don’t even smoke” (Harmonhb 2000). Yet another listener praises the album for the way “the spell it concocts creates an atmosphere almost separate from reality” (Richardson 2000). Attempting to emphasize the immediacy of the album’s groove-based aesthetic, a fourth fan asserts that “Voodoo isn’t just an album, it’s an experience” (Open Mike 2004). For me, this last comment speaks volumes. On its surface, it seems to say very little—are not all instances of listening experiences? But such inability to articulate suggests we read this comment productively for what it does not (can not?) say. Perhaps words simply came up short in conveying the depth of experience; I prefer to be generous, reading such commentaries as shorthand that points toward elements of musicality that exceed or precede language. In other words, they gesture toward the ineffable, toward the ways in which music can imbue the mundane with spiritual depth. Judith Becker’s (2004) explanation of “deep listening” can help to specify more precisely how popular music might include a spiritual component. Becker argues that deep listeners, people who concentrate on listening to music intently, often experience something akin to a trancelike state. In a secular, industrialized society such as that of the United States, which for the most part marginalizes experiences of ritual trance, engaging with music—popular or otherwise—has become a site where such spirituality is, for once, unremarkable (2). In the liner notes to Voodoo, Saul Williams (2000) makes exactly this suggestion, implying that as “traditional churches have grown empty,” popular musicians like D’Angelo can fulfill a vital spiritual role. Referring to D’Angelo’s voice as the “libations” that mark the start of a “Voodoo ceremony,” Williams’s eclectic, hopeful prose implies that not only is there a religious component to D’Angelo’s music, but that the R&B/soul music of the United States might be productively viewed through the lens of Carib- Kajikawa • D’Angelo’s Voodoo Technology 145 bean religion. Without elaborating further, however, Williams continues with his own more cultivated version of the Amazon.com reviewers’ effusions, cautioning that he does “not wish to overly dissect this album. Its true dissection occurs in how it seeps into your life, shapes your moments.” Thus, both Williams and the Amazon.com reviewers make an implicit argument about the Voodoo compact disc (CD), positioning it not as a text to be objectively contemplated, but as a process to be subjectively experienced. Both the production and reception of the album construct Voodoo as the antithesis of a commodified musical object, implicitly celebrating Afro-Diasporic values that resist textualization and abstraction in favor of participatory, unified aesthetic experience. Anne Danielsen (2006) describes “the state of being funk” in ways that mirror (in significantly more precise language) the descriptions offered by Williams and D’Angelo’s fans: Our focus turns inwards, as if our sensibility for details, for timing inflections and tiny timbral nuances, is inversely proportional to musical variation on a larger scale. When funk is experienced in this way, music ceases to be an object that exists apart from us. Dancing, playing, and listening in such a state of being are not characterized by consideration or reflection but rather by a presence in the here and now of the event. (144) D’Angelo’s Voodoo is an album in which nearly every song is built around some sort of cyclic funk groove, and in the black religious cultures of the circum-Caribbean and United States alike, repetitive musical practices hold the key for participants to experience moments of spiritual transcendence. As we have already seen, D’Angelo’s fans highly value the funky, groovebased form of the songs on Voodoo. At the same time, however, the CD (or mp3) that fosters such experiences is integrally part of mass-mediated consumer culture. If there are traces of circum-Caribbean religion informing the production and reception of Voodoo, then we can expect them to be highly mediated. * * * The “out of time” feeling listeners describe in discussing D’Angelo’s groovebased music makes perfect sense given that he came up through Pentecostalism, one of the few Christian church traditions in the United States that highly values a trance component in worship services. Reed (2003) characterizes Pentecostal church services as prioritizing “a Spirit-led approach to temporality” (22), which I interpret as a description of trance. In Pentecostal worship services, participants experience moments outside ordinary time when they are possessed by the spirit or Holy Ghost. Describing her childhood church experiences, Reed (n.d.) recalls how, after being possessed by the Holy Spirit, a woman often needed the help of other 146 bmr journal church members to “fan her, wipe the sweat from her brow, and escort her back to real time” (emphasis mine). As Reed argues, such experiences are analogous to practices of ritual possession throughout the Caribbean. In all such instances, “spirit possession” occurs when, “through acts of worship involving ritualistic drumming, dancing, and chanting, the divine agent temporarily, yet dramatically, inhabits the body of the devotee.” Many of the songs found on Voodoo appear to enact, enable, or otherwise comment upon such forms of religiosity. An example of such a musical construction of time occurs in “The Root,” a song in which D’Angelo uses the powers of technology to simulate and enact a version of spiritual ecstasy. Focusing my remaining analysis on this song, which D’Angelo has named as his favorite track on the album, will help to draw out the connections amongst D’Angelo’s brand of R&B, Pentecostal music, and Caribbean religion. The climactic moment in “The Root” is singled out for praise by one fan who notes, “Voodoo proves that D’Angelo has matured as an artist, the music and his vocals are so tight (the best example is ‘The Root.’ The multi-layered harmonies and the roundrobin vocal approach at the end of the song is [sic] simply SPELLBINDING)” (Pennick 2000). Numerous other fan reviews of Voodoo also single out “The Root” as an especially powerful artistic statement. One reviewer characteristically implores readers simply to “experience it” (Josh 2001). The recording that engenders this experience was created at Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios in New York City and trades quite deliberately on Hendrix’s own flirtation with Voodoo themes, as well as his interest in using the power of the recording studio as an extension of his compositional resources. Saul Williams (2000) makes this connection explicit, asking, “What sounds are evoked from a room where Jimi once slept?” Williams’s rhetorical question implies that the studio space itself might shape the sound of the album. As we have already seen with its electronically fabricated introduction, Voodoo invokes the power of the studio from its very start. Rather than fall into a familiar (and invidious) binarism between live musicianship and technological mediation, I intend to concentrate on the way D’Angelo uses the studio to carry on Hendrix’s “belief in the power of electric sound” (Waksman 2000, 170). The graphic artist Len Peltier’s design for Voodoo provides a crucial “hermeneutic window” through which we can further our understanding of how D’Angelo and his production team use music technology to simulate the musical, religious practices of North American and Caribbean Diasporic cultures (Kramer 1990, 9). While the album art uses authentic-looking images of Caribbean religious practice, the scheme within which Peltier displays them resists naturalization. In fact, the design seems to insist that we reflect upon the technologies of mediation that shape our encounter Kajikawa • D’Angelo’s Voodoo Technology 147 with the music. Examining the album cover (Figure 1), we observe that the design not only features an image of D’Angelo’s naked torso, but the catalog number of the album, set in a font that looks computer-like, is also prominently placed over it. In fact, Peltier chooses the UPC/EAN Barcode font, the same typeface imprinted mechanically upon all sorts of consumer products that we encounter countless times each day. By placing the catalog number in the foreground of the design, Peltier highlights the album’s status as a commodity of global capitalism, one copy among millions, reproduced, distributed, and sold around the world. The bottom-left corner of the cover discloses handwriting scribbled over D’Angelo’s image. The writing, fragmentary and hardly legible, highlights the surface, reinforcing the two-dimensional nature of what we hold in Figure 1. Cover art for Voodoo prominently featuring the album’s catalog number. 148 bmr journal our hands. Rather than allowing us to be pulled in to believing that what we are seeing is truly D’Angelo, these design elements cue us into the fabricated nature of the sound object, suggesting that what we see (and perhaps by extension hear) is a simulation, much like the electronic sound collage that begins the album. The album art continually revisits these themes of technological mediation, including Peltier’s decision to use the UPC/EAN Barcode font for Saul Williams’s liner notes. In this case, the computer-like font itself contrasts markedly with the natural images over which they are superimposed. Paradoxically, it is the most authentic-looking image of the liner notes that is most subjected to these design tactics. The second to the last page of the liner notes features the production credits for the album. The image of the woman, with her eyes rolling back into her head while she dances with a rooster, has two levels of text superimposed over it. The lower layer of text displays text from a proof-sheet or mock-up version of the design, with some directions crossed out or reconsidered. The upper layer of text sits in a white text box and features the same text as the lower layer, albeit with the revisions intact. By including a rough-draft version of the copy in his design, Peltier makes the idea of mediation itself an integral thematic element of the design scheme. Rather than naturalize or reify the finished product, Peltier’s design is palimpsest, revealing multiple temporalities on the same surface, emphasizing the work of writing and revising. In similar fashion, the songs on the Voodoo album were recorded live, but the finished product was meticulously remixed and edited electronically. The musicians who played on the recording sessions—Roy Hargrove, Ahmir Thompson, Charlie Hunter, among others—are all skilled in live, improvisatory settings. D’Angelo took advantage of this, noting that “sometimes we’d be in the studio and Ahmir would come up with a beat and we’d just jam and things would just happen very spontaneously. Lots of times we’d just go in there and just play and we’d have the tape rolling” (Virgin Records 2000). These production choices manifest themselves in songs that have a live performance feel in the sense that they take their time to unfold (i.e., most of the songs on the album measure 6–8 minutes in duration). Yet, despite D’Angelo’s suggestion that what we hear occurred naturally in the studio, the finished product reveals layer upon layer of electronic revision. More to the point, many of the experiences of heightened intensity that fans and critics comment upon in their reviews rely heavily upon studio effects, particularly the overdubbing of D’Angelo’s vocals. In “The Root,” D’Angelo enacts a trajectory of spirit possession that simulates a powerful experience of sensual, religious ecstasy. Possession is figured most prominently in the lyrics and aesthetics of “The Root” as D’Angelo’s powerlessness in the face of an unnamed female. The lyrics Kajikawa • D’Angelo’s Voodoo Technology 149 speak of a woman who “done worked a root,” an expression taken from African American folk or hoodoo magic, which means a spell has been cast using herbal roots and that D’Angelo is now under her control. D’Angelo’s lyrics play with images of hoodoo (“left my mojo in my favorite suit”), using the trope of folk magic, like many blues artists before him, to speak about how his confidence and manhood have been undermined. D’Angelo also dramatizes his powerlessness through other evocative metaphors. His lover has taken his “shield and sword,” conventional signifiers of masculine strength, or more likely a biblical reference signaling that D’Angelo’s faith has been called into question by this encounter. There are times, however, when the literal meaning of D’Angelo’s lyrics seems to take a backseat to the way in which he sings them or the way his voice is altered by electronic studio effects. As critic Jon Caramanica (2000) writes, “[D’Angelo’s] purrs, whispers, and groans dominate an album where words are rendered moot in the face of luxurious grooves.” The shift of balance from literal meaning to figurative expressiveness in African American musical traditions has been well documented. Singers in the gospel tradition, Olly Wilson (1992) explains, have an oral tradition of immense variety: “the presence of a myriad of vocal sounds used in performance (moans, groans, yells, screams, shouts, shifts in sonority), a seemingly inexhaustible repertory of vocal injections used to intensify musical expression” (329). Whereas Saul Williams’s liner notes encourage us to listen harder at the points where D’Angelo’s vocals become difficult to understand, it is also important to honor other listening practices; perhaps the sounds themselves paint a more accurate picture of what this music offers. Such a moment occurs at the climactic third chorus of “The Root.” In this final chorus, little actually changes in terms of the musical structure. In fact, Hunter plays the same bass and guitar accompaniment, and D’Angelo sings the same melody we heard in the previous two choruses. The alteration that makes the climax possible, however, is that the chorus is looped by omitting the cadence that previously set the words “till the end of time.” As a result, the descending chromatic motion of the chorus progression is set in perpetual motion for nearly two whole minutes. The alteration and extension of the chorus might make the end of “The Root” boring and diffuse, were it not for the way D’Angelo and sound engineer Russ Elevado use studio technology to multiply D’Angelo’s vocals, mixing moments from the entire recording session to create a one-man call-and-response. Over the main melody and rhythmic foundation of the chorus, D’Angelo and Elevado piece together a number of melodic fragments, creating cross-rhythms and countermelodies that push and pull against the original vocal line. These alterations give rise to a distinctive rhythmic feel found in AfroDiasporic musical traditions. Building on the work of John Miller Chernoff 150 bmr journal and J. H. Kwabena Nketia, Shannon Dudley (1996) describes this sensibility as the way a “fixed rhythmic group provides a basis for the singer to enliven the music by anticipations and delays, reinforcements and elaborations of expected accents and patterns” (285). D’Angelo, a veteran of live performance in both church and secular contexts, uses the technology of mixing and overdubbing to dramatically expand the role of his voice, deploying these rhythmic strategies in the recording studio to reproduce just such an interactive rhythmic feel. His vocal gestures are of the type that signal emotional intensity in gospel music, building up, or “driving,” from periods of relaxation to moments of peak activity (Wilson 1992, 337). D’Angelo’s frail falsetto, featured in the previous verses, finds itself replaced here by layers of spirited singing. As the energy builds, D’Angelo moves away from antiphonal responses in his falsetto voice and more into his chest and throat, using more of the “throaty,” “strained,” “hoarse,” “raspy,” and “shrill” sounds that Horace Clarence Boyer (1979, 23) identifies with climactic moments in gospel music. Although Boyer offers no interpretation of why such timbres signify, I infer that they best convey intensity of experience through the perception that such timbres require a great deal of effort. Rather than float or hover above the musical accompaniment, D’Angelo’s vocal call-and-response conveys a sense of spiritual elevation absent in the previous sections. The sheer density of antiphonal activity is striking. According to Boyer (1979), this type of multiplication of vocal gestures signals emotional climax in gospel performance: “In the gospel singer’s anxiety to create emotional climaxes by bombarding listeners with perpetual sound, he bridges almost all rests and phrases by holding over a single tone or by interpolating text over the rests and breaks in the melodic lines” (29). But with the help of studio technology, D’Angelo can do more than “bridge rests.” His call-andresponse begins with two overlapping voices, but at certain points in this section it expands to three, a contrapuntal wall of sound that overwhelms our sense of the original tune. D’Angelo’s mixing of melodic fragments, some sung in his falsetto voice and others in his chest or throat, some altered by studio effects and others sounding more natural, work especially well to pull the listener in multiple directions simultaneously. The effect is to enact the dissolution of D’Angelo’s centered subjectivity, giving listeners a visceral sonic representation of what spiritual transcendence might be like. Such aesthetics evoke the live interplay of leader, choir, and congregation that lead the atmosphere in a Pentecostal church to become “charged with Holy electricity” (Reed n.d.). This simulated experience is both sensual and spiritual. Against the relative stasis of the other verse and chorus sections, the sheer density and dynamism of the musical environment could model sexual ecstasy. Although Kajikawa • D’Angelo’s Voodoo Technology 151 I have been referring to this section of the song as the “climax,” which it undoubtedly is, such a word can be misleading. For example, McClary (1991) and Walser (1993) have discussed the aesthetics of conventionally “masculine” forms of climax in musical forms as diverse as Beethoven symphonies and heavy-metal music. A common denominator in these forms is the way musicians and composers create the illusion of control. Whether in the long-range teleological harmonic progressions of a symphony, or in a well-crafted, virtuosic heavy-metal guitar solo, the audience witnesses a display of centered, rational subjectivity. As McClary and Walser have also argued, however, not all musical climaxes need work in this way. Considering an example by another artist prone to experiment with black musical traditions and technology can help to illuminate the kind of holy profane mixture D’Angelo has concocted in “The Root.” In a brief analysis of the music of Prince, Walser (1994) discerns an example of Deleuze and Guattari’s “libidinal economy,” noting that “Prince . . . even appears to lose control of his voice at the end, as he breaks into screams . . . he enacts his own loss of control, the dissolution of his centered subjectivity in the face of desire” (96). Put another way, Prince creates a musical subjectivity that is empowered to surrender control. The kind of sexual ecstasy D’Angelo enacts in the climactic moment of “The Root” similarly surrenders, as the linear, rational unfolding of the song’s melody gives way to the multidirectional wall of sound. D’Angelo’s layered vocal interpolations decenter his musical presence, modeling a form of desire consistent with what we might imagine possession to feel like. Indeed, that some listeners occasionally hear and experience D’Angelo’s music in this way has been documented. The following excerpt from one critic’s review suggests that D’Angelo has succeeded in offering his listeners an experience of possession: It happens with me and my bandmates on the way home from Toronto, pumping “The Root” at 10 p.m. At the end of the track, when the chorus gets repetitious and the adlibs get intense, the energy in the truck goes up. Every instrument becomes crystal clear and, save for the driver, every head on board goes screw-face as heads bob to the same rhythm, in the same motion, in the same direction. (Turner 2000) This description points toward the open-ended and “uncontrolled” flow of time and energy in African and African-derived cyclic music. In such musical practices, climax depends on the dynamics of group participation and centers around the rhythmic interactions, the tensions and releases, created by the interplay of participants. Such a process certainly happens in the music D’Angelo grew up performing: the extended chorus described earlier mirrors the “drive sections” of African American gospel songs that 152 bmr journal “serve to unite singers and their listeners in the immediacy of spiritual communitas” (Allen 1991, 296). I also want to suggest that what we hear is not only a simulation of the live, participatory musical practices of Pentecostal churches, but also quite possibly a more speculative simulation on D’Angelo’s part of the Caribbean religious experiences evoked in the packaging of his album. Theologian and initiate Joseph Murphy reports that Santeria practice is designed to afford its practitioners with experiences of a deeper reality or level of consciousness. Murphy (1993) describes the dancing and music of Santeria as a “technology” by which initiates embody, through ritualistic possession, the dynamism of the spirit world, granting them access to higher levels of consciousness (130–132). I find evocative Murphy’s choice of the word technology to describe Santeria musical practice. In “The Root,” D’Angelo uses overdubbing and other studio effects to create a simulacrum of spiritual climax in which one might imagine a/the spirit descending upon the minds and bodies of practitioners. As Teresa Reed (n.d.) observes, this Pentecostal moment has an analogue in the religious traditions of the Caribbean: “In an effective black worship experience, be it in the United States or in the Caribbean, these spiritual crescendos may happen once or more than once, and they may happen to varying degrees; but they do happen, and the rhythmic element, however produced, is one of the ingredients that ripen the conditions necessary for these climaxes to occur.” Reed argues that moments analogous to Caribbean spirit possession occur in Pentecostal religious practices such as the tarrying service. While I do not have space here to reproduce her argument, I contend that, just as Reed finds remarkable parallels between “catching the spirit” in the Pentecostal church and Caribbean “spirit possessions,” the musical, visual, and verbal elements of D’Angelo’s Voodoo that we have explored point toward a similar nexus. A key difference, however, is that Voodoo’s version of African spirituality, which is produced and consumed as a mass-mediated commodity, alters and transforms Diasporic traditions even as it attempts to simulate and propagate them. Whereas the original Afro-Caribbean ritual traditions are communally based, orally transmitted, and locally experienced, what we bear witness to on the Voodoo CD is of a very different nature: we hear one voice multiplied and in dialogue with itself. In other words, D’Angelo pulls us into a musical enactment of spiritual possession, but it is a world constituted by fragments of his own persona. The fragmentation and multiplication of D’Angelo’s persona suggest an inward orientation associated less with communal folk practices and more with modern conceptions of interiority and individualism—or perhaps just the dictates of the modern pop market, which necessitate crowning D’Angelo a star. If we consider the ways in which most people will experience these sounds: via CD or Kajikawa • D’Angelo’s Voodoo Technology 153 mp3 in the privacy of home, under the movable sonic shell of headphones or in the car as described earlier, we can understand why some critics have dismissed Voodoo as narcissistic, or as one reviewer colorfully put it, “like lolling around the love shack with a dozen D’Angelo’s” (Sullivan 2000). If in the black church the lead singer testifying says “I,” but the congregation hears “we,” perhaps when D’Angelo sings “I,” his fans hear “me.” D’Angelo’s individualistic Voodoo aesthetic can be seen in the album’s graphic design. As I have already shown, Peltier’s design offers a series of apposite comments on the self and technology. The musical technology of the studio that enables D’Angelo to sing call-and-response with himself finds itself answered by images in the graphic design that multiply D’Angelo’s presence. Just as overdubbing and mixing enable D’Angelo to occupy multiple sonic locations at the same time, in effect decentering his musical persona, Peltier’s images (Figures 2 and 3) show us multiple D’Angelos on the same page, in the same field of sight. Comparing these images closely reveals that the two photographs—each representing a finite moment in time when the shutter snapped—have been carefully spliced together to suggest we are seeing one photograph, one moment in time with two (or three!) D’Angelos. Peltier also chose to reproduce key images in black-and-white, aligning them (perhaps unconsciously) with the ethnographic work that Zora Neal Hurston and Maya Deren carried out in the 1930s and 1940s. Although contemporary photographer Thierry LesGoudes captured these images especially for the Voodoo design, they often seem to replicate common images from earlier periods. Were it not for the obvious difference in production values, one might even feel compelled to grant some of the photographs from Voodoo an aura of historicity and verisimilitude. In addition, these images of D’Angelo playing the conga and dancing position him as a participant in some sort of ritual. Both photographs seem intent on capturing or freezing a moment of experiential time, as though we are being given a small window into a ritual whose temporal dimensions greatly exceed the limitations of still photography. In Figure 2, one D’Angelo has his eyes open, the other his eyes closed, suggesting an inward-oriented, contemplative mood. Figure 3 features images of D’Angelo dancing with a rooster, an important sacrificial object in many Caribbean religions, including Santeria and Vodou. He stands holding the rooster in one hand, tilting his head slightly to his left, his body glistening, under the directional lighting, again lost in a moment of ritual time. These images, however, differ greatly in one important way from ethnographic attempts at representing Caribbean religiosity. The one thing that distinguishes all of the liner-note photographs from those taken in the field is not just their composition or the production quality as their subject material. Simply put, the images in Voodoo show significantly Figures 2 and 3. Multiple images of D’Angelo spliced together from Voodoo’s liner notes. 156 bmr journal fewer participants. The idea of ritual here has been altered, reframed from a communal practice to an individual consumers’ imaginary relationship with D’Angelo and his music. In other words, Voodoo’s audience is not participating in a self-contained, locally based, communal ritual. Instead, they are being pulled into gazing at (and listening to) D’Angelo as part of the modern-day practice of popular music consumption. Joseph Murphy’s description of Santeria ritual possession, whose purpose is to grant practitioners higher levels of consciousness directed inward at the level of individual consciousness, realigns itself now with the intersection of mass-mediated popular music consumption and spirituality we imagined earlier, a coming together to offer listeners extraordinary temporal experiences. Wearing a Voodoo mask to suggest an experience that is immediate, carnal, erotic, and grounded in the body of the participant, D’Angelo and his production team create a similar intersection, a sonic experience of the religious suited to the technologies through and contexts in which contemporary audiences listen—portable CD players, iPods, and the privatized settings where consumption occurs. The manner in which Voodoo deploys decontextualized signifiers of Caribbean religious practice probably does more to obscure their original meaning than bring D’Angelo’s audience into the fold of traditional religious practice. The album draws upon the aesthetics of communal musicking while focusing listeners’ attention on one star performer at the expense of his other collaborators. What is more, the medium of the album itself as a commodity seems to orient listeners toward an atomized, individual music experience and away from the communal rituals of African American and Caribbean religious practices. Yet, I have tried to demonstrate how listeners find new experiences of spirituality enabled by these dislocations. Through its blend of gospel, soul, and funk, Voodoo not only suggests similarities among African American, Caribbean, and African musical cultures, but also offers fans the opportunity to participate in a secular, spiritual experience. While D’Angelo’s connection to authentic Voodoo might appear tenuous, the quality of the experiences enabled by his music seems to reveal to us a set of cultural meanings and group experiences that have been perpetuated within Afro-Diasporic culture. One of the things our close reading of Voodoo accomplishes is to suggest that when listeners of funk or hip hop find themselves lost in a repetitive groove, they may be accessing a sense of the religious informed by African cultural memory. That many of Voodoo’s listeners are unfamiliar with Caribbean religious traditions and may also not even have African ancestry—one of the enthusiastic customer reviews cited earlier was from Montreal and another was from Amsterdam—demonstrates the complex cultural power of black popular music in an era of global capitalism. As George Lipsitz (1997) has argued, through musical activity people often Kajikawa • D’Angelo’s Voodoo Technology 157 seek to pass in unfamiliar cultural contexts, choosing “a particular disguise on the basis of its ability to highlight, underscore, and augment an aspect of one’s identity that one can not express directly” (62). Scholars researching spirituality in secular pop music should keep their ears on the sound, asking, what experiences does a certain form of music enable and why do listeners value them? CDs and mp3s are commodities sold to line the pockets of music corporations. But they can also encode the key to paths, experiences, and other valuable ways of being in the world that affirm the power of black music to inspire a sense of spirituality in the most unlikely of places. The question that remains to be answered is how this or that music will eventually shape our lives, our moments. references ahoward7. 2000. D’Angelo works his Voodoo MAGIC. Amazon.com. http://www .amazon.com/review/R3VWARESBQ6081/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm. Accessed May 20, 2007. Allen, Ray. 1991. Shouting the church: Narrative and vocal improvisation in African American gospel quartet performance. Journal of American Folklore 104, no. 413: 295–317. Baxter, Les. 1951. Ritual of the savage. Capitol T-288. 12-inch LP. Becker, Judith. 2004. Deep listeners: Music, emotion, and trancing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Boyer, Horace Clarence. 1979. Contemporary gospel music. Black Perspective in Music 7, no. 1: 5–58. Caramanica, Jon. 2000. D’Angelo Voodoo. Boston Phoenix CD Reviews. http:// weeklywire.com/ww/02–07–00/boston_music_clips.html. Accessed October 5, 2005. D’Angelo. 2000. Voodoo. Virgin Records 48499. CD. Danielsen, Anne. 2006. Presence and pleasure: The funk grooves of James Brown and Parliament. Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. Drasnin, Robert. 1959. Voodoo. Tops 9694. CD. Dudley, Shannon. 1996. Judging by the beat: Calypso vs. soca. Ethnomusicology 40, no. 2: 269–298. Farley, Christopher John. 2000. D’Angelo: Salvation sex and voodoo: He worships Marvin and Jimi. He shot a video in the nude. And his new CD is a masterpiece. Time January 24: 70. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,995906,00.html. Accessed 29 July 2008. Fink, Robert. 2005. Repeating ourselves: American minimal music as cultural practice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. 1995. The power of black music: Interpreting its history from Africa to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Harmonhb. 2000. It’s a beautiful thing. Amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/ 158 bmr journal review/RBFGLM9J4455N/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B000035X1 M&nodeID=&tag=&linkCode=. Accessed October 11, 2011. Hot Singer D’Angelo. 2000. Jet July 3: 58. illcuz. 2005. 5 years later and still in LOVE. Amazon.com. http://www.amazon .com/review/R11ZMDQKEZ9LM4/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm. Accessed May 20, 2007. Jones, Steve. 2000. Voodoo makes for funky magic: D’Angelo takes the time to get his spell right. USA Today January 25: 6D. Josh (T.O). 2001. ***MASTERPIECE*** except . . . Amazon.com. http://www .amazon.com/review/R1CSF6Q6GJLJ1T/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm. Accessed May 20, 2007. Kramer, Lawrence. 1990. Music as cultural practice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lennon, Kurt. 2003. Ride the groove. Amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/ review/RAYCSCMD1XMHA/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00003 5X1M&nodeID=&tag=&linkCode=. Accessed October 11, 2011. Lipsitz, George. 1997. Dangerous crossroads: Popular music, postmodernism, and the poetics of place. New York: Verso. McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine endings: Music, gender, and sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1998. Rap, minimalism, and structures of time in late twentieth-century culture (The Geske lectures). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. A moving piece of soul music. 2000. Amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/ review/R2NWHK4TSRYNI2/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm. Accessed May 20, 2007. Murphy, Joseph. 1993. Santeria: African spirits in America. Boston: Beacon Press. A music fan. 2000. Beautiful. Amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/review/ R1LW1Q4E8W6EFG/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm. Accessed May 20, 2007. Open Mike. 2004. The definition of neo soul. Amazon.com. http://www.amazon .com/review/R2BQDZ056EVA5/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm. Accessed May 20, 2007. Pennick, Faith. 2000. Voodoo: The new opiate of the masses. Amazon.com. http:// www.amazon.com/review/R1WBH7HXNFBLQP/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm. Accessed May 20, 2007. Reed, Teresa L. 2003. The holy profane: Religion in black popular music. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. ———. 2012. Shared possessions: Black Pentecostals, Afro-Caribbeans, and sacred music. Black Music Research Journal 32, no. 1: XX-XX [in this issue]. Richardson, Kevin R. 2000. This album sets a new standard. Amazon.com. http:// www.amazon.com/review/R3R8909O83J8UO/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF 8&ASIN=B000035X1M&nodeID=&tag=&linkCode=. Accessed October 11, 2011. Spencer, Jon Michael, ed. 1989. The theology of American popular music. Special issue, Black Sacred Music: Journal of Theomusicology 3, no. 2. Sublette, Ned. 2004. Cuba and its music: From the first drums to the mambo. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Kajikawa • D’Angelo’s Voodoo Technology 159 Sullivan, James. 2000. Slow jams and sly rhumbas. San Francisco Chronicle February 6. Turner, Khary Kimani. 2000. Rising spirit: D’Angelo climbs the ladder of musical evolution and gets closer to the source. Metro Times. http://www.metrotimes .com/20/29/Features/musRising.htm. Accessed October 5, 2005. Vincent, Rickey. 1996. Funk: The music, the people, and the rhythm of the one. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Virgin Records. Press release, the original Voodoo. 2000. Archived at Scene. http:// musique.music.scene.ca/artist.aspx?id=4752. Accessed 1 February 2012. Waksman, Steve. 2000. Instruments of desire: The electric guitar and the shaping of musical experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Walser, Robert. 1993. Running with the Devil: Power, gender, and madness in heavymetal music. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 1994. Prince as queer poststructuralist. Popular Music and Society 18, no. 2: 79–89. Ward, Brian. 1998. Just my soul responding: Rhythm and blues, black consciousness, and race relations. Berkeley: University of California Press. Williams, Saul. 2000. Liner notes. Voodoo. Virgin Records 48499. Wilson, Olly. 1992. The heterogeneous sound ideal in African American music. In New perspectives on music: Essays in honor of Eileen Southern, edited by Josephine Wright and Samuel Floyd Jr., 327–338. Warren, Mich. Harmonie Park Press. Yvon (a.k.a. da illest). 2000. nice treat 4 yo’ ears. Amazon.com. http://www .amazon.com/review/R24ZLO3D12BPMB/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8& ASIN=B000035X1M&nodeID=&tag=&linkCode=. Accessed October 11, 2011. Zanfagna, Christina. 2011. Building “Zyon” in Babylon: Holy hip hop and geographies of conversion. Black Music Research Journal 31, no. 1: 145–162.