D’Angelo and the Power of Last Albums

Cannonball with Wesley Morris

The New York Times

News Commentary, Society & Culture, News, Arts

4.8 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The world is different once an artist dies. The same goes for their music. Since D’Angelo’s death, Wesley keeps returning to “Black Messiah” — to him, a perfect final album. What makes an artist’s last record resonate with us long after they’re gone? Wesley invites his friend Alex Pappademas, a senior culture editor at GQ Magazine, to listen back to some last albums that have haunted them both. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm Wesley Morris and this is Cannonball Today.
0:11.4	What are these three albums have in common?
0:13.2	Double fantasy, in utero, back to black.
0:28.7	In the week since DeAngelo died, I've been doing what people do when they hear that an artist has died.
0:30.8	I listened to his music.
0:36.7	He has three superb, differently superb albums, Brown Sugar from 1995.
0:48.3	You're my name, voodoo, which came out in 2000.
0:58.6	This is the one that's considered the masterpiece.
1:05.5	It's also the album that's synonymous with what the popular imagination reduced this man to.
1:06.8	A six-pack?
1:08.5	We all know the video.
1:18.6	It's nothing but a camera inching closer and closer to him and his abs as he sings to us naked.
1:31.7	It's a miracle that the video didn't actually ruin our appreciation of how good the whole record is.
1:40.3	But for me, the album that I keep coming back to is the last one, the one that came out in 2014, 14 years after voodoo.
1:41.7	Black Messiah.
1:47.4	Let your day slip away.
1:49.9	Come with me and cry.
1:53.4	For one thing, it's a turning point album.
1:58.4	The man singing it no longer wants to sound only sexy.
2:01.5	He sounds contemplative, in pain, unsure.
2:17.6	He was thinking about what it means to be a man and a lover, but also an African-American and a citizen,
2:20.3	and a spiritual descendant of the Black Power movement.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 17 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The New York Times, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The New York Times and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.