When the music became ceremony: D’Angelo’s Caribbean connection

Born Michael Eugene Archer in Richmond, Virginia, D’Angelo’s legacy is largely tied up with music that emerged in the mid- to late ‘90s that would be marketed as ‘neo soul’. His 1995 Grammy-nominated debut album, Brown Sugar – which he wrote and produced as a teenager – was the catalyst for this unique sound of music that blends R&B, Jazz, hip hop and soul.

Still, in recent years, D’Angelo has pushed back against this categorisation of his music. For as he told Red Bull Academy in a 2014 public lecture: “I never claimed I do neo-soul, you know. I used to say, when I first came out, I used to always say, ‘I do black music. I make black music’.”

Thus, it is within this context that lies D’Angelo’s greatest legacy: the manner in which he used his music as a medium of the black experience. For this writer, that is what D’Angelo’s music is – an experience that was unapologetically black, and anyone who was up for it would be subjected to my dissertation-level analysis of this fact. He drew upon the works of pioneers before him to shape a future of what happens when art, in the hands of black people, is given time and space to be dissected, studied, worshipped, and reimagined without capitalistic and predatory influences. His music (spread across three studio albums, a live album, and a compilation project) challenges the preconceived limitations of this black expression. As such, his discography was never confined to the borders of the US but drew upon the unique cultures that exist within the black diaspora – the Caribbean included.

CARIBBEAN CULTURE

Most evident of Caribbean culture in D’Angelo’s discography was his widely acclaimed sophomore album, Voodoo. The album, which came five years after his debut, was recorded in the legendary Electric Lady Studios. Coming off years of dealing with writer’s block and being dissatisfied with the music industry, D’Angelo would assemble some of the most revered musicians of that time to collaborate with. The group styled themselves ‘The Soulquarians’ and featured the likes of Questlove, J Dilla, Erykah Badu, Common, Roy Hargrove, and Q-Tip, among others. Some of the most acclaimed albums of the decade came out of this collective.

Voodoo is named after the West African-derived tradition that is widely known for its Haitian derivative – Voudou. Still, the album was released when anti-black racism and anti-immigrant sentiments plagued Haitian refugees and immigrants in US society, and this speaks to the radical politics of the album. Up to this point, the only US-based musical act to acknowledge anything related to Haitian culture in their music was The Fugees. Yet, Voodoo, which put on display the religious reverence of music, pushed back on the negative stereotype of Voodoo traditions, which are often demonised and othered in Western media. The album gave it space to be celebrated. Thus, the role of Afro-religious traditions in Haiti’s political history should also be considered through the lens of this album. As Ryan Dombal stated in his review of the album on the music outlet Pitchfork, where the album was given the rare perfect score of 10.

“While probably using voodoo’s exaggerated and misrepresented image within modern popular culture to add some mystique and danger, D’Angelo’s also likely referencing the religion’s African origins and how it was coveted by uprooted slaves, feared by slave owners, and ignited the Haitian Revolution of 1791.”

CUBAN RELIGIOUS CULTURE

D’Angelo also tapped into Cuban religious culture for this album. Months before its release, D’Angelo and his team journeyed to Cuba to take promotional photos for the project. While there, he would take part in a Santería ceremony. Santería is the Afro-Cuban religion that blends elements of Yoruba and Roman Catholicism. It is no wonder that it appealed to D’Angelo, the son of a Pentecostal pastor, who grew up directing the church choir. In pictures of the ceremony taken by Thierry Le Goues (who most people might know from his black and white pictures in Tommy’s House in Belly, the 1998 Hype Williams-directed movie that was partially shot in Jamaica), D’Angelo is seen wearing ceremonial beads called elekes, which are insignia for the Orishas, deities in Santería. According to a February 2015 Facebook post by IFA: Òrìsa Scientific Spirituality, the five elekes worn by D’Angelo represent Orisa Oya, Eshu, Shango, Obatala, and Orunmila.

Other photos also show D’Angelo dancing with iyalochas (women priestesses in Santería) and playing the batá drums. In the Santería tradition, the batá drummers are called Omo Añá (children of the spirit of the drum), where the drums are used to communicate with the Orishas. Then, just like Haiti’s political history previously mentioned, one must view D’Angelo’s actions through the lens of Caribbean history. In 1816, the same year as the Bussa’s Rebellion of Barbados, the Caribbean colonial overlords enacted a slave code that placed stricter regulations on black enslaved people’s gatherings and barred them from playing drums. According to the academic Dr Petal Samuel, who studies anticolonial thought, politics, and aesthetics in the Caribbean and its diaspora, this slave code was enacted because “the colonial authorities and planters were fearing that certain kinds of sounds could either signal or induce slave rebellions”.

As such, this history and D’Angelo playing alongside the Omo Añás gives context to his description of the album. As he told Jet Magazine in a 2000 interview:

“I named the album Voodoo because I really was trying to give a notion to how powerful music is and how we as artists, when we cross over, need to respect the power of 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. That’s something I learned in the Church when I was very young, and that’s what I wanted to get across.”

In the end, these photos of D’Angelo appeared on the album’s vinyl release. Still, Santería went beyond the album’s graphic design – it eventually made itself on the album. The opening lines of the project, the first seconds of Playa Playa, are a scene from the aforementioned ceremony. In a 2020 interview with NPR, D’Angelo’s engineer, Russell Elevado, explained this when he was asked, “What’s going on?” at the beginning of the album.

“That was actually a track that was recorded in Cuba. They went to take pictures for the album, and while they were there, they were at a ceremony – like, Santería. So that’s a remote recording of a real Voodoo ritual.”

Just like how the drums are used to initiate both Santería and Voodoo ceremonies, so do they open D’Angelo’s album (ironically, the album’s final song is titled Africa). If anything, the album is a spiritual escape – a ceremony of some sort. As Dr Loren Kajikawa would write in his paper, ‘D’Angelo’s Voodoo Technology: African Cultural Memory and the Ritual of Popular Music Consumption’,

“[D’Angelo’s] Voodoo is an album in which nearly every song is built around [a] 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.”

The poet Saul Williams also expanded the parallels of Afro-religious traditions and contemporary music when he wrote in the liner notes of the albums:

“When you pour that wine on the ground in that video shoot that has become your life, will you be ready to hear the voice that pours from the bottle to inebriate the very ground on which we walk? It is libations such as these that are the start of every Voodoo ceremony.”

Furthermore, the reverence for black women in these Afro-religious practices shines through D’Angelo’s music. On the album’s 12th track, Untitled (How Does It Feel), the lines between lust, love and intimate worship of his partner became blurred. On prior projects, he would address this veneration and awe of black women. As he sang on his duet collaboration with Ms Lauryn Hill, Nothing Even Matters:

“I sometimes have a tendency

To look at you religiously

Cause nothing even matters, to me”

D’Angelo would also tap into Caribbean music in the making of the album. In the 33 1/3 book series, Faith Pennick wrote about Voodoo. In it, she interviewed Charlie Hunter, whom D’Angelo instructed and other musicians on the album “to play really behind the beat, so far behind the beat that it sounds uncomfortable”. This technique, Hunter explained, had its roots in Cuban music, which he described as “so incredibly advanced, creatively”.

Then on the ninth track on the album, Spanish Joint, D’Angelo played the keyboard as he collaborated with some of music’s most revered instrumentalists – Questlove (drums), Charlie Hunter (bass and guitar), Giovanni Hidalgo (congas), and Roy Hargrove (horn) - to create a record that merged Latin grooves with Afro-Cuban jazz, R&B, and funk. In incorporating these genres in the song, D’Angelo showed his appreciation for the different black expressions across the diaspora. As he stated:

“I’m making black music. That’s the only outline for me, really. That’s the only boundary to stay with. It’s soul music. I’m going all out in those terms.”

GRAMMY AWARDs

A year after its release, Voodoo received the Grammy for Best R&B Album, and D’Angelo gained another when Untitled (How Does It Feel) won the Grammy for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance. In 2024, it appeared 57th on Apple’s 100 Best Albums, and it appeared 11th on Rolling Stone’s Best Albums of the 21st Century list.

Almost 14 years after his acclaimed album, D’Angelo would release his next project: Black Messiah. Released in the wake of numerous incidents of police brutality against black people in the US, the album serves as a call for political action against injustice. Still, this album, which would appear in numerous “best albums of the year” lists and earned a Grammy for Best R&B Album, also explored themes of love, anxiety, and spirituality. With this, it allowed for the listener, especially black men throughout the diaspora, to confront the anxieties around their identity as they move through the world. For as Lauryn Hill said in her tribute to him in the wake of his death:

“You imaged a unity of strength and sensitivity in black manhood to a generation that only saw itself as having to be one or the other.”

Then, the controversy around his decade-long hiatus from the music scene showcased the complexity around black men’s relationship with being seen as humans beyond their sexual and physical desirability. This, D’Angelo himself would address on Back to the Future (Part I), track six of Black Messiah:

“So if you’re wondering about the proper shape I’m in.

I hope it ain’t my abdomen that you’re referring to.”

Although Black Messiah does not have overtly Caribbean elements like those of Voodoo, its impact was still felt among black West Indians. In a December 2024 interview with The Gleaner as part of the 5 Questions With ... series, the acclaimed Jamaican producer J. L. L. said this when asked about the music that was currently on his playlist:

“Lemme tell you. That D’Angelo album, Black Messiah, is a project [that] I [always] go back to. It’s a project that just makes me go inside myself. It makes me really just feel like a black man. When I listen to that, it’s like the top of where I wanna be in music, that album, Black Messiah. I don’t listen to it as often cause I don’t want to play it out, but when I do, it never ceases to amaze me.”

D’Angelo died on Tuesday after a long bout with cancer. He was 51. Since his passing, there has been an outpouring of tributes to the musical genius whose legacy gave everyone permission to give themselves time and grace to study, appreciate, and explore their different creative interests. It is with this that I hope that he is finally at peace and somewhere, in another life, he is having a jam session with his friends Roy Hargrove and J Dilla – both of whose lives were also cut short due to illness.

J.T. Davy is a member of Tenement Yaad Media, where she writes and co-produces their popular historical podcast, ‘Lest We Forget’. Send feedback to jordpilot@hotmail.com and entertainment@gleanerjm.com.