How Does It Feel?

Twenty years after Voodoo, revisiting my first encounter(s) with D’Angelo’s “Untitled”: part seance, part sexual awakening.

“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.”

The Apocalypse of John // Revelation 21:1

Poor John . . . Alone, exiled to the isle of Patmos, must have had some wild shit going on in his life, too, as he wrote down his apocalypse — new heaven, new earth, the works. I understand, brother. I do. Compared to that my dreams at the close of 1999 were pretty tame: all I needed was a new home, a need that was not revealed to me by God but by my cousins, who began to joke, around the time my mother disappeared and my sister left for college, that I was homeless. And as with many things I laughed at in those days without actually being amused, I worried they were right. I was not without a place to leave my clothes, have a meal, lay my head — a place to live, if only in the most basic sense of the word. But I could not tell them where my home was at that time and even now you’ll have to let me look beyond the brick and mortar to trace some outline of my home in all the places I have been. The first of which appeared on the first day of the first year of the new millennium, when D’Angelo released the second single from his second album, Voodoo: “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” On the same television that I watched Peter Jennings bring in the year 2000, I watched D’Angelo’s video for this song. A lot. So much that after the first few (dozen) times I had it memorized, and watched it crouched before the screen in the dark with the sound off, so that everyone in the house thought I was asleep.

Have you seen it?

The opening frame is full of blackness. You know something is coming. You can sense the camera moving. As it moves, the magic meaty top of a golden brown ear comes into view. It’s D’Angelo’s.

From the ear your eyes follow the back of his head, the tight brown flesh between narrow rows of braided hair. You scan the perfect rows around to his left ear, past the jagged sideburns, across the glowing cheek- bone and finally come to rest on his eyes. You are so close to his eyes you cannot see the forehead above or the nose below. He cannot see you be- cause he is not looking.

Open your eyes, D’Angelo. The eyes flutter once, twice. He looks at you.

His eyes are calm like he’s been watching since the dawn of man and already knew what you were doing when he wasn’t looking. You want to die, it’s that perfect.

The stare is too much and he knows it. The camera rushes down the bridge of his nose and rests on cool gleaming lips. You are a child but those are not the lips of children, they are man lips god lips spread lazily over a tiny gap in small marble teeth.

Pan out from the lips that you’ve fallen into, see the goatee that runs to a trace of beard lining the beatific jaw and around to those ears and into the blackness behind him.

The strong neck offering a path to shoulders that shine in the studio light of God and-wow-a real man chest that is flanked by one tattooed wing on his left arm. The chest is bare except for a simple gold link chain that hangs down in the valley carved in the middle of his heart. At the end of the chain is a gold Jesus hanging on the cross.

The feet on the cross point down his sternum to a crooked belly button that has come into view inside the ample muscles between the strong veiny arms that swing at his sides, above the place you can’t believe the camera is panning back to show. He is naked.

You can’t hear him but you know what he is asking at this moment, in the song.

How does it feel

You don’t know.

He takes a glance (nervous?) to his right — the first time he is not watching you or down below or God behind his eyelids. We are not alone and we do not know who’s there. But D’Angelo doesn’t stop.

The shot goes back to his face, up close. His head drops. His eyes close. His hand grabs at his chest, which now fills the entire screen-the most perfect chest you’ve seen, adorned with the tiny golden replica of the most perfect sacrifice.

He is sweating now. The drops run down to the navel but don’t enter it, they just keep running down. The camera does, too. How far? How far down?

Oh wow. You are watching a stomach drenched in sweat and writhing all by itself. It doesn’t matter that you can’t hear a word D’Angelo is saying. The words don’t matter. You haven’t breathed in two and a half minutes, as far as you know.

He starts to turn. You think it might be the camera, moving to show a different angle. But he asked you how it feels, not what you think, and you feel like he’s turning away. You worry you may never see him again, though he has the back of four men’s backs and that wing across his left arm, so you know that you could mount him and fly away. Where are you going, D’Angelo?

With his back turned and his arms partly raised to show his clenched fists, he lifts his head, which now is bathed in the light. You watch him cry out, again and again. Then he’s turned back around to face you, but he’s not really here. It looks as if he’s close to tears. His stomach is pumping like he can’t catch his breath. He’s staring down-at what?-and lifts his right hand to put it behind his head. He starts to smirk. He’s smiling. Something is happening down there. Inside of him. He raises his left hand but doesn’t put it behind his head-instead he puts a fist to his temple like his mind is about to ooze out of his ear.

What. Is. Happening?

The camera draws you quickly to his face. He throws his head back and opens his mouth wide enough to let the scream flow, wide enough that you can see the dark pink line running down the back of his throat. You see the blackness inside his nostrils. You see the muscles in his neck. You see his eyes, clamped shut. Now he’s gone again, swerved out of the frame.

This is what your life is supposed to be. This feeling. He swerves back, he looks at you, and you know it is a different look than the first. Different than any look anyone has ever given you. D’Angelo is not fucking around this is not a game this is not lust this is an earnest plea and a question that only you can answer: How does it feel?

That’s what he’s asking. Crying. How does it feeeeel? And his face is full of pain like he needs to truly know how it feels or else his mission cannot be complete. He punches the air and sweat flies across his face and runs down his brow.

He doesn’t take his eyes off you again until he opens his mouth and looks far into the darkness above him and the darkness sends down light. When he looks at you again you wonder if he’s angry but you know he’s not ashamed. You are not ashamed anymore, either.

You have wanted so badly to escape. Once a month, sometimes more, you’ve prayed the prayer of salvation, hoping to feel the Holy Ghost and to know that even you can be forgiven. You keep praying because you haven’t felt it yet and fear you never will. But now you feel it. You feel it in the way he shakes his head, how his body rocks and his knees buckle, the sincerity in his eyes when he looks at you and mouths what no one else has said to you before: I want to take you away from here. You feel naked and beautiful and right.

For thirty seconds more, D’Angelo swerves in and out of the frame, his fists punch the air, his head rocks back and his mouth bursts open.

And then it’s over.

He looks at you and lets his mouth rest. The screen blacks out. But you have seen and felt it all. Found a piece of what you needed, a piece of home: a place that, even when it’s gone, you can still feel inside; a place that, as wrong as it might be, is still worth going to. At least, a place where D’Angelo stands stark naked and offers to take you away — you are a thirteen-year-old boy, not a saint.

Related posts:

No Commission is a concept originated by super producer, art collector, and Harvard Business School graduate Kaseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean. He and wife, Alicia Keys, are the owners of an expansive art…

This tutorial is an expansion on how to create legends on the complex chord diagram with circlize, and the manual can be found here. Parts of this tutorial will be very similar to what chapter 13–15…

According to the Regional Research Reports, the Global Tungsten Rods Market size was valued at a million USD in 2021 and will reach multi-million USD by 2030, at a CAGR of 5.20% from 2022 to 2030…