I’ve had a really hard time assessing how I actually feel about this song. It’s always been completely overshadowed by the infamous music video for me. There’s a lot more to say about that, and I will get to it in a bit.
The song itself, though? To be honest, I just think it’s okay at best. The musical arrangement never did that much for me and I don’t love D’Angelo’s vocal performance here either. There are just so many other D’Angelo songs I like a lot better than this. If any of these elements were enhanced by the video, I’m among the people in the audience who isn’t titillated by the camera teasing peek-a-boo with D’Angelo’s crotch. So the appeal this had for me was always gonna be limited if the music itself wasn’t speaking to me.
Ughh… this video…
This video makes me uncomfortable to watch. I’m not uncomfortable because I’m not into D’Angelo in that way, I’m uncomfortable because I know D’Angelo was not into doing this. D’Angelo’s persona as a sex symbol was an image 100% concocted by D’Angelo’s record label. The man himself is an extremely shy, soft-spoken dude from a Pentecostal background. He just wanted to make music, but his label thought he had a look and a body that they could commercialize to fans as a thirst trap. Come hell or high water, that’s what they did. D’Angelo hated being sexualized every single step of the way that it happened.
This video in particular had such an overwhelming impact on D’Angelo’s career that it’s what most people to this day still know him for. A lot of people don’t even know what “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” sounds like, but they know the sexy naked guy in the video for it. D’Angelo was already uneasy with showing the world this much of his body in this one instance, but the video’s impact encroached on everything else he was doing. His performances at concerts increasingly got interrupted by women in the crowd yelling at him to take his clothes off and throwing dollars on stage at him like he was a stripper.
As we all know, since Voodoo and “Untitled”, D’Angelo completely disappeared off the map. His inability to deal with his sexualization brought about addiction to drugs and alcohol. D’Angelo’s image would pop off again on occasion during those years he had withdrawn, but only as unflattering mugshots on news stories about his arrests or health scares. D’Angelo finally followed up Voodoo with Black Messiah a decade and a half later, but he is still a hardcore recluse. ?uestlove has mentioned that at the height of his popularity, D’Angelo was so unhappy with his sex symbol status that he would quietly mutter offstage about how much he wanted to hit the bottle and get really out of shape so that people would leave him alone. It’s almost as if his career after Voodoo was intentional self-sabotage.
So it’s unfortunate that this is what D’Angelo is best known for, the least of which is that I think he has much better songs than this.
RATING: 5/10
A Single Hot Take 