The Culture Corner: 25 years later, D’Angelo’s ‘Voodoo’ still sounds groundbreaking

At the turn of the millennium, R&B and soul was taking root with a new, younger audience, partly thanks to D’Angelo, whose 1995 debut, Brown Sugar, was a big driver of the neo-soul movement.

In 2000, he released his highly anticipated second album, Voodoo. In this session, World Cafe correspondent John Morrison joins me to talk about that record and how D’Angelo built on his sound, how he mixed things up, and the impact Voodoo made.

“While it may be very much rooted in classic R&B and jazz and all of these older Black music forms, Voodoo really helped establish a roadmap for the genre’s future,” Morrison says.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.