As MTV takes its last gasp, shuttering its final music channels in the UK, it feels strangely nostalgic to look back to the days when multiple television channels streamed music videos for hours each day, but it gave rise to the pop-as-product 2000s and the influencer era we find ourselves in now. Artists are meant to be seen, while they are being heard. Not every artist leaned into attractiveness back then. Some made their videos work with quirkiness or humour, like Busta Rhymes or Missy Elliott’s wacky clips, which had them dressed like cartoon characters. Saucy, sensual R&B groups wouldn’t be nearly naked, but cloaked in an open leather jacket, pants and combat boots in the hot desert sun, for some reason. When Untitled dropped and a topless D’Angelo spun slowly as the camera moved in and out and up and down his torso with the speed of dripping molasses, everyone took notice.
Alamy“In college, I lived in a house with two other Black women with very different tastes in men,” recalls Fredara Hadley, an author and ethnomusicology professor at Juilliard. “But from the first chord, all three of us would crash land onto the couch to watch that Untitled video as if we had not just watched it several hours before.”
Hadley notes that the video was released during a time of female objectification in music videos across genres. Britney Spears’ Oops!… I Did It Again came out the same year, but so did Destiny’s Child’s Independent Women. And while video vixens had been spinning their careers into empowerment, men weren’t being presented solely and obviously for the female gaze. D’Angelo’s video stood out, winning him a Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance in 2001. Voodoo took home R&B album of the year, with love-drunk lyrics that reveal a more romantic throughline. On Lady, D’Angelo sang about loving his girlfriend and wanting to tell everyone about it. The Root is about him being so in love with a woman that he asks a doctor for help.
“It was kinda therapeutic for me to do [The Root]… because I’m so pathetic in the song,” D’Angelo says in a 1999 documentary filmed about the making of Voodoo. “That’s what The Root is, she got it on me and I’m just fucked up.”
Untitled, then, was the departure. Journalist Touré, who interviewed D’Angelo for Rolling Stone in 2000, recalled in a recent Instagram clip that the video was the brainchild of D’Angelo’s manager, Dominique Trenier. She talked him into doing it, but when he arrived at the shoot, the singer wouldn’t leave his car. After being convinced to participate, Morgan recalls a female friend who was on set that fateful day describing the event as “uncomfortable” because the “exploitation” was evident. That presence continued with Thompson describing D’Angelo doing push-ups before gigs to make sure his body was in line with the Untitled image.
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