I'm Wesley Morris and this is Cannonball Today.

What are these three albums have in common?

Double fantasy, in utero, back to black.

In the week since DeAngelo died, I've been doing what people do when they hear that an artist has died.

I listened to his music.

He has three superb, differently superb albums, Brown Sugar from 1995.

You're my name, voodoo, which came out in 2000.

This is the one that's considered the masterpiece.

It's also the album that's synonymous with what the popular imagination reduced this man to.

A six-pack?

We all know the video.

It's nothing but a camera inching closer and closer to him and his abs as he sings to us naked.

It's a miracle that the video didn't actually ruin our appreciation of how good the whole record is.

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.

Black Messiah.

Let your day slip away.

Come with me and cry.

For one thing, it's a turning point album.

The man singing it no longer wants to sound only sexy.

He sounds contemplative, in pain, unsure.

He was thinking about what it means to be a man and a lover, but also an African-American and a citizen,

and a spiritual descendant of the Black Power movement.

...