<BR>Well, I think you have a point about the five year thing. There's a great story about Miles Davis and John Coltraine where Coltraine complains to Miles that he can never find the right time to finish his solo, that he can always think of 75 different ways of continuing that all seem essential. So Coltraine asks Miles how to finish a solo. Miles comes back with hands-down the greatest quote of the twentieth century: "Just take the fucking horn out of your mouth." Funny story, but what it really gets at is the problems perfectionists in art create for themselves. Great musicians hear music in their heads and seek to translate it into music. When you're a perfectionist you always face limitations, because you can never get the sounds you play to match that ideal sound in your head. So you obsess, you curse yourself, doubt creeps in, the whole works.<P>I imagine D went through something like that. Here he is, appointed by so many (not self-appointed) to be the next Messiah in black music--tell me that ain't pressure? Tell me he's not tripping, trying to make this one something special? Not only is he trying to realize the sounds in his head, EVERYONE ELSE is counting on him to make the music that is in THEIR OWN HEADS. What he needed was someone to just say, "Let it go. Take the horn out of your mouth and put the mic down."<P>Or maybe not. See, I think Voodoo is the strangest, weirdest, trippiest, most fucked-up record I've heard in ages, and I love it. the first time I put it on, I was overwhelmed. Quest is right--this ain't a casual album. After I listened to it straight through I wanted to play it, oh, about 50 more times, but I couldn't. For one thing, I needed to digest it. For another, I was exhausted. <P>It's hard effin work to listen to Voodoo. This is not "The White Album." It's the sound of a guy working one groove for an entire album, trying to exhaust the possibilies of a certain sound. He keeps going back to the well, digging deeper, pulling more and more up, throwing in that weird noise on track 2 and those melodies on track 4 and everything else, but he's not doing it to make something operatic. It's the opposite--think about how sparse the album sounds. He's trying to identify something primal, something raw and nasty and beautiful, something that speaks to why we all fell in love with music in the first place. Basically, he's trying to define the funk in its most elemental state. Not even Prince, with all his early minimalist ish, did that as tirelessly as Voodoo does. The last guy to work a groove this hard, to explore the true possibilities of rhythm, was James Brown. <P>Which starts to answer where I stand on the influence question ;) Seriously, if you think D's overrated as an innovator, where does D steal his sound from? Prince, sure, but Prince could never do a song that sounds as organic as half of Voodoo's cuts. When I listen to Voodoo, I hear JB, P-Funk, Prince, so many others, but he's putting the pieces together in ways I haven't heard yet. It's so funky, but so dark. It's so fun, but underneath it's so damn serious.<P>All of what I'm saying is, I like the album. Don't jusge it yet. Anyone who tells you they know what to make of it yet is full of shit. This si one of those albums that'll take five years for people to even BEGIN to understand. In 50 years people'll study Voodoo like people today study Billie Holiday or Sun Ra. The only thing I can figure ou right now is that I can't stop playing it.<P><BR>Bryan<P>All I wanna do is disco machine gun!!<P>"I believe in one love."<BR> ---Massive Attack