D’Angelo’s Voodoo Technology: African Cultural Memory and the Ritual of Popular Music Consumption

Abstract

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 Call-Response, 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 2995 debut album Brown Sugar, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts and went on to win the 2001 Grammy Award for Best RB 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. …