The video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” helped turn D’Angelo into a cultural touchstone. “The most controversial music video to air in years,” a The New York Times article called it in 2000, “it depicts the muscular, cornrowed singer, adorned only in a crucifix necklace.” The clip supercharged D’Angelo’s career and also helped derail it. And it certainly wasn’t his idea.
A reserved visionary, D’Angelo — who died of cancer at 51 on Tuesday — was never a prolific artist as he helped usher in the neo-soul movement three decades ago. Five years elapsed between his groundbreaking debut album, “Brown Sugar,” and his acclaimed 2000 follow-up, “Voodoo.”
“Untitled,” a crooning ballad written and produced by D’Angelo and Raphael Saadiq, was envisioned as a nod to Prince’s impact and legacy. D’Angelo’s manager, Dominique Trenier, saw the song an opportunity to increase the singer’s popularity and sex appeal. He wanted the video to convey a piercingly intimate encounter. “We didn’t want an onscreen love interest,” Trenier told The Times in 2000. “We wanted him to be able to make contact with whoever was watching it one-on-one.”
To achieve that, he wanted D’Angelo to appear naked — or as naked as could be portrayed in a video that would endlessly loop on MTV and BET.
“Initially, to him, it seemed completely bonkers,” Trenier told Spin Magazine in 2008. “He didn’t quite get what I was saying. He kept going, ‘What do you mean, naked?’”
He wore a necklace, but naked ultimately meant a muscular D’Angelo posing for a lingering shot that focused on his lips, chiseled arms and abs as sweat dripped from his torso.
“I was skeptical at first when Dom came to me,” D’Angelo said in 2000. “I was like, ‘Yeah, is this really gonna work?’ But when I got there to do it, I felt pretty comfortable.”
D’Angelo told the writer and filmmaker Dream Hampton that he discussed the video’s concept with Trenier for about a half-hour.
“Then we didn’t talk about it again,” he said. “I just showed up. And it was really about concentrating on my performance. I had to sing the song 17 times.”
The video was shot in New York City and directed by Paul Hunter. In showing a Black male body on sexualized display, the clip immediately stood out. It landed during an era of “Total Request Live” that typically aired sanitary offerings from boy bands such as ’N Sync and the Backstreet Boys alongside videos featuring the largess of hip-hop’s bling era and the video vixens within.
Before the video, D’Angelo was known primarily as an artist. Now he was a sex symbol. On tour supporting “Voodoo,” fans often screamed and pleaded for D’Angelo to strip onstage. That kind of attention was not the type that D’Angelo had striven for. In the ensuing years, he fell into addiction, suffered from writer’s block and mostly turned away from making music until “Black Messiah,” which arrived in 2014. As he stayed in seclusion for more than a decade, the sight of him in the “Untitled” video was still the image much of the world was left with.
“I feel really guilty, because that was never the intention,” Trenier, who died in 2016, said in 2008. “‘Untitled’ wasn’t supposed to be his mission statement for ‘Voodoo.’ I’m glad the video did what it did, but he and I were both disappointed because, to this day, in the general populace’s memory, he’s the naked dude.”
For decades, the true message of the video went over nearly everyone’s head, Hunter and D’Angelo disclosed in a 2012 GQ interview.
“Most people think the ‘Untitled’ video was about sex,” Hunter said. “But my direction was completely opposite of that. It was about his grandmother’s cooking. Think of your grandmother’s greens, how it smelled in the kitchen. What did the yams and fried chicken taste like? That’s what I want you to express.”
D’Angelo agreed: “It’s so true,” he added. “We talked about the Holy Ghost and the church before the take. The veil is the nudity and the sexuality. But what they’re really getting is the spirit.”
Jonathan Abrams is a Times reporter who writes about the intersections of sports and culture and the changing cultural scenes in the South.
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