Untitled (How Does It Feel)

Album: Voodoo (2000)
Charted: 25
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Songfacts®:

  • D'Angelo wrote this steamy song with Raphael Saadiq as a tribute to pop superstar Prince, particularly his early ballads.
  • To accompany this track about the singer pleading for some love from his girlfriend, directors Paul Hunter and Dominique Trenier shot a music video of D'Angelo lip-synching into the camera, wearing nothing but a gold cross around his neck. Or so it appeared: He was actually wearing pajama pants during the shoot but pulled them low to preserve the illusion that he was naked. While the clip was popular, it also generated controversy for its alleged sexual objectification.

    D'Angelo said of the video: "Well, I want you to feel what I was feeling or try to at least express that," he explains of his unintentional sex appeal. "It's [his sensuality] a part of me. It's always been a part of me. I never thought about it until after the fact. I never really explored it like that. It's not that I never wrote songs like that. They just weren't on Brown Sugar. I just wanted to do a song like that." The singer also underwent an intense training regimen to achieve his ripped physique.
  • This earned D'Angelo a Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance in 2001. It was also nominated for Best R&B Song but lost to "Say My Name" by Destiny's Child.
  • This was featured in the 2011 romantic comedy No Strings Attached, starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher.
  • In 2015, D'Angelo explained to Rolling Stone that the only issue he had with the video was that it sometimes overshadowed the song, but that's he's made peace with it. "I think people gravitated to how sexy and beautiful the song was," he said. "It wouldn't have raised the eyebrows it did if the song wasn't good. The video was just accompaniment."

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