Welcome to the New York Times Popcast, those dream and eyes of mine of music, news, and criticism.

I'm John Caramanico.

It's not that important, but I'm on vacation this week.

Not really on vacation.

I'm just in my house.

And DiAngelo passed away this week.

And that is a person who it is worth coming off vacation to talk about.

DeAngelo died at 51 earlier this week.

I'm certain that you're familiar with his oove.

At the beginning of the show,

you're listening to Brown Sugar.

This is the title track of DeAngelo's first album from 1995.

DeAngela released three albums in his lifetime.

He released Brown Sugar.

He released Voodoo in 2000.

Black Messiah in 2014.

Three singular albums that are, to my mind, all masterpieces, but that function in different ways, even if the sort of underlying gifts are the same.

DeAngelo arrived at a moment in the mid-90s when hip-hop and by extension, R&B, because R&B was really in concert with hip-hop by the time his first album came out, were at an intense period of glamour and glitz and shininess.

And it's hard to overstate how striking it was to hear brown sugar and to understand that he was a person who had absorbed all the same music, all the same reference points, was living the same life, and had come to a completely different proposition.

A few years later, when voodoo arrived, that is the product of intense labor and study from DiAngelo, as much a historian and preservationist as a musician, made in concert with Questlove and is sort of in proximity and in collaboration with the collective that would come to be known as the Salkyrians.

DeAngelo had a huge success on that album with a song called Untitled. You certainly know the video in which DeAngelo is singing largely unclothed, and that song

became so successful and so defined his public image that it began to destabilize his work and became a

...