With the 1995 debut of D’Angelo’s stellar Brown Sugar, the world was introduced to a new type of soul man whose musical sensibilities were as invested in the eternal grooves of mack daddys Bobby Womack, Curtis Mayfield and Barry White as he was in the world of hip hop. A former teenage rapper who loved A Tribe Called Quest and Gang Starr, the Richmond, Virginia native was a blunted breath of fresh air when first inhaled. But with the exception of a few singles, namely the DJ Premier produced “Devil’s Pie,” a cover of Prince’s b-side classic “She’s Always in my Hair” and the brilliant Lauryn Hill collabo “Nothing Even Matters,” not much more was heard from him for the next four years.
Finally, in the spring of 1999, there was chatter within the industry that D’Angelo was ready to unveil his new music. Having switched managers from the suit-wearing record man Kedar Massenburg to the looser Dominique Trenier, who rolled like a rock star, D’Angelo was no longer the wide-eyed teen who made Brown Sugar. In addition to the TV appearances, worldwide touring and a devoted audience that was waiting for him to change their musical world once again, D’Angelo had also left the South for good to become a Manhattan resident.
His sophomore album Voodoo was partly a product of hedonistic New York City in the late 1990s, when everyone acted like the freaky bohemian they wanted to be while eating Ecstasy tabs like Tic-Tacs and funking each other until the dawn. Recorded at Electric Lady Studios on West 8th Street over four years of sessions, Voodoo was culled from over 72 hours of music, a fusion of jazz, funk, R&B, hip-hop, sex, gospel and laid-back Blackness.
The heavy funk of “Left & Right,” featuring rappers Method Man and Redman, was promoted as the album’s first official single simply because the label believed it had potential to be a major hit. “Smack your ass, pull your hair,” D’Angelo sang, “and I even kiss you way down there /you know I will / Think I won’t?” In the liner notes to the vinyl edition of Voodoo, soul scholar Jason King wrote that “’Left & Right’ is the preacher’s kid at his most carnal.” With its swamp funk groove, nasty guitar licks and lecherous lyrics, “Left & Right” was a bump-n-grind track originally conceived as a duet between D’Angelo and his friend Q-Tip. Though listed in the album credits as co-writer and supplying “vocal percussion,” Tip was replaced by the more commercial Def Jam duo.
The year before, D’Angelo had recorded the Trackmasters-produced duet “Break Ups 2 Make Ups” for Method Man’s album Tical 2000: Judgement Day. “Dominique Trenier thought that Q-Tip’s verse was wack,” recalled Gary Harris, the former A&R man from EMI Records who helped guide Brown Sugar from raw demos to stellar finished product. “With ‘Left and Right’ chosen to be the first single, the main issue wasn’t necessarily about the music, but about making it hot.”
The next step in that process was virtuoso director Malik Hassan Sayeed’s performance video of D’Angelo and his band the Soulquarians, a brilliant Afro-impressionistic visual experience textured with saturated colors, out-of-focus shots, strange lighting, quick cuts, simulated sex and more than a few moments of true beauty. A native New Yorker who served as cinematographer on Spike Lee’s films Clockers, Girl 6 and He Got Game, Sayeed also spent years working as DP beside hip hop auteur Hype Williams on numerous blockbuster music videos as well as the visually dazzling urban gangster flick Belly, starring Nas and DMX. Years later, Sayeed would be one of the collective of directors who worked on Beyoncé Knowles’ celebrated Lemonade as well as Jay-Z’s “4:44” video. An underrated filmmaker, Sayeed’s influence can be seen in the work of cinematographers Branford Young and James Laxton and the still photography of Khalik Allah.
The video for “Left & Right” was filmed in the summer of 1999 over the course of two weekends inside a vacant building in the Wall Street area. “Malik’s concept for ‘Left & Right” was exceptional,” remembered on-set producer Rich Ford Jr. “It was a concert video that paid tribute to funk shows of the past.” Conceived during a period when the video-music airwaves were dominated with the ultra-bright gloss, the murky colors of “Left & Right” was the antithesis of that trend. Walking through the set that resembled a decaying tenement from David Fincher’s Se7en infused with a Felliniesque circus vibe.
Minutes after arriving on set, I peeped funk father George Clinton standing in the corner nonchalantly smoking from a crack pipe as topless dancers sauntered by him. “It was crazy,” Ford recalled. “I kept asking George to go somewhere else and smoke, but he really didn’t care who saw him.” Standing against a brick wall, I stared silently as D’Angelo swaggered to the bandstand from his dressing room. D’Angelo looked like a dandy bohemian on par with Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Arthur Lee, Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. The once pudgy piano player had a new body builder physique and an electric ax strapped around his shoulders.
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