Voodoo (D'Angelo Album) - Aftermath

Aftermath

The music video for "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" portrayed D'Angelo as a sex symbol to mainstream music audiences, which had repercussions on The Voodoo Tour's second half. During the tour, female fans yelled out for him to take his clothes off, while others tossed clothes onto the stage. As trumpeter Roy Hargrove recounted, "We couldn't get through one song before women would start to scream for him to take off something It wasn't about the music. All they wanted him to do was take off his clothes." This led to frustration and both onstage and offstage outbursts by D'Angelo, with him breaking stage equipment. Questlove later said, "He'd get angry and start breaking shit. The audience thinking, 'Fuck your art, I wanna see your ass!', made him angry." Although some were cancelled due to D'Angelo's throat infection during the tour's mid-March dates, many shows were cancelled due to his personal and emotional problems. D'Angelo chose on several occasions to not perform on scheduled dates, and delayed others to do physical workouts like stomach crunches. According to Questlove, three weeks worth of concert dates were cancelled, including two weeks worth of shows in Japan. He elaborated on the experience in a 2003 interview for The Believer, saying that:

I mean, everyone’s insecure, but he’s insecure to the level where I felt as though I had to lose myself and play cheerleader. Some nights on tour he’d look in the mirror and say, 'I don’t look like the video' It was totally in his mind We would hold the show for an hour and a half if he didn’t feel mentally prepared or physically prepared. Some shows got cancelled because he didn’t feel physically prepared, but it was such a delusion He was like, 'They don’t understand. They don’t get it. They just want me to take off my clothes' Had he known what the repercussions of 'Untitled' would’ve been, I don’t think he would’ve done it.

In the same interview, Questlove also said that he had not been fully compensated for his work on Voodoo, stating "I didn’t get the rest of my check." Several of D'Angelo's peers and affiliates have noted the commercial impact of the "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" music video and The Voodoo Tour as contributing factors to D'Angelo's period of absence from the music scene. His former music manager, Dominique Trenier, explained his disappointment of the music video's impact in a 2008 interview for Spin magazine. Trenier was quoted as saying that "to this day, in the general populace's memory, he's the naked dude". According to tour manager Alan Leeds, the experience "took away his confidence, because he's not convinced why any given fan is supporting him." After the end of the tour in 2000, D'Angelo returned to his home in Richmond, Virginia. Following the suicide of his close friend, MTV-affiliate Fred Jordon, in April 2001, he started to develop drinking problem.