Switched on Pop - How D'Angelo changed music, in three songs

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

On October 14th, the visionary musician D’Angelo passed away at 51 years old. Only releasing three albums during his lifetime, he synthesized influences from gospel, jazz, rock, and hip-hop to create a singular and transcendent sound artists still try – and fail – to emulate today.  On this special episode of Switched On Pop, Charlie and Nate are joined by producer Reanna and engineer Brandon to celebrate D’Angelo through his music, discussing one song from each of his albums and highlighting his musical genius. Songs Discussed D’Angelo – Untitled (How Does It Feel) D’Angelo – Brown Sugar The Hawkins Family – What Is This? D’Angelo – Feel Like Makin’ Love Roberta Flack – Feel Like Makin’ Love Parliament – Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker) D’Angelo – Cruisin’ Smokey Robinson – Cruisin’ D’Angelo – The Charade Curtis Mayfield – (Don’t Worry) If There Is A Hell Below, We’re All Going to Go Jimi Hendrix – All Along The Watchtower Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

That's why over thousands of businesses have made. made the switch. So why not you? Try Odu for free at Odu.com. That's ODOO.com. Welcome to Switch on Bob. I'm producer Rianna Cruz. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm engineer Brandon McFarlane. So the four of us have convened today to celebrate the life and career and above all music of the immensely talented multi-instrumentalist and performer DeAngelo. We haven't talked about DeAngelo on Switched on Pop since episode 158, where Charlie and Nate, you two, talk to the writer of the 33 and a third book on DeAngelo's second record, voodoo. Faith Panic, yeah, that's a great convo. DeAngelo is a musician who has so much impact.

You can see it in the slew of tributes from collaborators and fans alike on social media, in print outlets. And since we are all fans to varying degrees, today is going to be all. all about DeAngelo. Yeah, man. That was DeAngelo's Untitled off the Voodoo album. Man, I haven't heard that song in a while. Album came out when I was maybe a sophomore in high school. I connected to this album in DeAngelo from the very beginning, like so hard, I think because

the music really spoke to me as not only a hip-hop head, but as a church baby. DeAngelo's a church baby. I'm a church baby. I grew up in a church where music was so much of my daily life. And so I always felt this parasycial connection to DiAngelo in that way. And I found out his influences, DeAngelo's influences as a child in church, were literally the musicians that I grew up with. So we have that connection through the Hawkins family.

The Hawkins are a family. of musicians and singers and songwriters from Oakland, California, where I grew up. What's a highlight track that's like a typical Hawkins family thing? I think if I play this song, you can automatically make the connection to DiAngelo.

The song is called What Is This? By Walter Hawkins and the Hawkins family. And from the first couple of seconds, you'll get it. But do you hear what I'm talking about? Absolutely. That song is from 1980, and it feels like it's 15 years ahead of its time. The roads, the groove, even the vocal, the way it's written, when I think about DeAngelo,

and I think about his foundations in, like, gospel and funk and rock and roll, which I'm sure we'll get into later. He just was this conduit for black music that is just one-of-one talent that we're going to miss. Brandon, I really appreciate you sharing your personal connection to the music because I feel like we also owe you for this convening. When we found out about DiAngelo passing and it was just devastating, there was a chat with you on Slack that was like, we got to celebrate this music. So thank you for instigating this chat. I think a lot of people put him in this bag with other R&B contemporaries like Badu or Maxwell or Lauren Hill with respect to all of them. This guy was different. You know, this guy was like, if Dylan and Prince had a baby different.

So on that note, to honor such a powerful and impactful musician, the four of us are going to listen to three songs together, one from each of DiAngelo's records and talk about the beautiful things that can be found throughout his catalog. Let's start with his first album, Brown Sugar, and of course the title track, Brown Sugar. Brown Sugar, babe, I guess how off a love. Immediately we got so much cook in here.

First song off of his first record, and he's coming out of the gate hot. I mean, everybody can feel that this is hip-hop we're hearing. You know, like you can feel it in the drums. The drums feel like DJ premiere or Marley Mall, like hip-hop drums. So automatically he connected to fans of rap music before he even sung a note. Brandon, I love what you said about DeAngelo being. a conduit for so many histories and cultures of black musical expression. And this track, Brown Sugar, is co-produced by an iconic beatmaker in the hip-hop world,

Ali Shahid Muhammad, of a tribe called Quest. The fact that DeAngelo could bring that gospel Neil's soul sound to some of the best hip-hop producers in the game, whether it's Ali Shahid Muhammad on this album or later be DJ Premier on Voodoo. I think that speaks about his ability to reach across all these different styles and assemble them together into something you'd never quite heard before. And just for context, this is 1995. If we do a quick search of R&B music in 1995,

we have boys to men on bend-ed knee. We have Jodacy freaking you. This doesn't sound like. any of that. I guess how off a love don't know how to behave. You know? It's so different. What I like about this track is that it feels like you can extract larger musical genius

from its simplicity. Like right off the bat, this is a storytelling song. Like the first line from the jump, let me tell you about this girl, maybe I shouldn't, right? Like it sets the tone already and it kind of launches you into this narrative, which is compelling, you know? I enjoy it. Let me tell you about this girl, maybe I should.

I'm madder and filth and the name was brown. See, we'd be making love constantly. That's why my eyes are all ashamed. Blood-burking me. The way that we kiss is unlike any other way that I be kissing when I'm kissing, what I'm missing, won't you listen? Brown sugar, babe. I guess high off your love, I don't know how to be. Okay, so we have the narrative part of it, but we also have his flow.

Yeah. That he is singing, yet he has a very strong sort of rap, hip-hop sensibility. When he rhymes something like, her name was Brown Sugar C, which kind of goes across the bar, rhymes it later with shade blood, burgundy, and then the intensification of rhyme that I'd be kissing, when I'm kissing, what I'm missing, won't you listen? Clearly he's listening to the notorious B.I.G as much as he's listening to, Marvin Gay and all the great old soul heroes. I mean, even the beat, if we take the beat and really break it down, this is a loop.

This is maybe a four-bar loop that, I mean, he's expounding on with his vocals and there's a solo, but he's just rocking to the loop like a rapper would. And I like the solo a lot. I think the solo is this like kind of out of left field moment in what is largely like a simpler song. It's like a pump fake. You get these, like, clear vocals, right? Which are not really what you hear in DeAngelo music largely. You get this looped instrumental, which is not, again, something that he's known to do.

And then you get this, like, jazzy solo in the middle that makes it so classic DeAngelo. There's a nice triple meaning of Cut Me Up Something. Obviously, this is a song about cannabis, but it's also... Not so obvious to... you know, a 15-year-old Nate Sloan vibe into this song back in the day. I don't know if Brandon, you were more clued in than I was, but I was like, oh, this song is about a girl.

No hidden meaning here. And it's only now listening to him like, oh, his eyes are a shade blood burgundy because he's high. No, Nate, I'll admit, I had no knowledge of the metaphor at, this is 1995, so what am I? So me and you are together there.

But also he's cutting up a record and he's cutting a solo. Really nice triple meaning. Nice. It's another way he occupies the lineage of folks like Marvin and Stevie and Prince. He's a multi-instrumentalist. He can rip a solo on the organ. He can shred on the electric guitar. He can even sit down behind the drums and give you a beat.

Like this guy is. so adept at playing so many different instruments, which might come from his church background, like Brandon mentioned. I feel like that is going to be the fundamental influence on so many of these aspects of his musicianship. Yeah, I don't know if you guys remember the music video, but they had scenes where he was playing every instrument.

He was on the drums and keys and the guitar. And I was just like, wow, dude, he really play all of them. And I mean, he's basically like a human and sampler like because he's that good. That's sick. I mean, also though, I think something to note here is his vocal technique. He is an incredible singer. You know, we're going to discuss this at length today, I'm sure. But there's a special acapella edition of Brown Sugar that was released on the deluxe of the album.

And you could really hear the technique that he's delivering to these vocals. It's so cool. Brown Sugar, babe. I guess high off your love. I don't know how to behave. A lot of folks might notice the falsetto first and the amazing performance of it all. The first thing I notice is that there's still a rhythmic pocket

when you're only hearing the acapella. Like I can almost hear the whole track. He's carrying so much identity of the song just in the voice. A choir of one truly like, yeah, what he can do with falsetto and stacking harmonies is unmatched. It's awesome. Brown Sugar was released in 1995, as we said earlier, and five years later,

DiAngelo released his heavily anticipated follow-up record, goes to number one, does Gangbusters, the album, Voodoo. I think it makes sense to zero in on DeAngelo's cover of Roberta Flack's song, Feel Like Making Love. On this song, he spins out Roberta Flack's song, which is less than three minutes long,

into a six-and-a-half-minute groove. It's nuts. If you listen to the original Roberta Flack song, you could see how much DiAngelo transforms this song into being his. When DiAngelo talks about his falsetto in interviews, he uses it to display sensitivity, like masculine sensitivity. It's just perfect.

I think that he's treading that line of like always asking, like, is it funky? And then let's move from there. probably from lots of jam sessions. Pino Palladino, the bass player and the Soul Aquarians band that he used to record the voodoo album and Questlove on the drums and just I just imagined him in the studio like just working that groove until it was nice and tight. There's a really nice contrast between what's happening between Questlove and Pino and how DiAngelo is singing. DeAngelo is bringing the lush, sensitive side of the original Roberta,

flack, but the way that the drums and the bass punch and command attention in the track, there's a more assertive, really sort of strong quality to those drums set against his vocal, also then the horns, which are just like, so gentle. The contrast of strength and gentleness that you hear in this track is very potent and powerful. Those horns from the late great trumpeter Roy Hargrove. Yeah. DeAngelo brought him in from the world of jazz. along with the guitarist Charlie Hunter, they brought that improvisatory flavor to this recording. I think you're right, Rihanna,

it's like such a transformation of the Roberta Flack original, the groove, the pocket, and then what they do at the end of each of these choruses. That's the time. Feel like baking dreams come true. And then in the Roberta Flack version, We get a little interlude and then goes back to the verse. But here, DeAngelo, Questlove, Roy, et cetera, Pino,

they all just kind of settle into this little funky, this like E-dominant groove. And they're just going to hang out there for a while. They're like, I got no rush. I feel like making love. But I'm not in a rush. I can take my time. I can hang out in this, like, funky E-7 groove for a while.

And then when I'm ready, I'll go back. That's the time. You know. It's such a different approach. It's like you said, Rand. It's stretched out. It's in no hurry. It pays so much respect to the original,

but is so thoroughly its own thing. If I can combine Roberta Flex version with like a parliament funkadelic song, that's how we got here. All of parliament songs are at least five minutes long because the groove is so good to them they cannot stop playing. That's what I think is happening.

in here is like the mix between Parliament, like bringing that funk foundation into Seoul and R&B of the 70s, Roberta Flatt. And I think throughout his entire career, we'll get to this a little bit later. DeAngelo really pays fealty to

the grades that have come before him. And covering Roberta Flack here is a choice, similar to how on Brown Sugar, he covered Smokey Robinson's classic, Cruzen. Rihanna, can you spin us a little bit of the original Smokey Robinson version so we can hear how DeAngelo put his stamp on this one.

Oh, absolutely. One of the greatest choruses of all time, I think, transformative. Yeah. Smokey's the goat. Once again, I feel like DeAngelo has taken this incredibly anthemic, super familiar song, and kind of transformed it in this way. He puts it in that dark subdued world of his. There's a little bit more of an edge to his cruise than Smokies, you know?

Something about the harmonies. He's putting a lot of like seventh chords in there. He's putting a little bit of an edge in it that's missing in the smoky version. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's like minor. He starts the chorus off minor. That's crazy. Yeah.

So it's like, who's in his made for love? And then he does these crazy harvets. Something like that, right? Nice. Yeah, yeah. That's smart. There, there it is. Now we're in church.

No, no. There's a church. It's still smoky, but there's just that little extra, you know, sauce on top. Songs that he's covering, right? Feel Like Making Love, which came out in 1975, Cruzen, which came out in 1979. They have very vocal-forward productions. The vocal is intelligible and it's at the front of the mix. Something that is present throughout DeAngelo's catalog,

and you could hear it on his cover, Feel Like Making Love, his voice is not at the front of the mix, it's in the middle of the mix, right? And I saw somebody call DeAngelo, quote, mumble R&B, because you can't really tell what he's saying a lot of the time by design. Like there's a lot of ad libs, a lot of percussive vocals buried in the mix here to create an immersive vocal environment. I think that's the running joke. Like there are certain songs I still don't know the lyrics too.

And had this not been a cover, I probably wouldn't know. the lyrics to this one either. It's just like, who knows? I read an interview with Sam Sanders talking to the literal engineer of voodoo, who was like, I to this day don't even know what he was saying in that room. And that guy engineered the record. Like, it's so by design. It's remarkable. That's Russell Elevado. And he and DeAngelo did things to make his voice sound even harder to understand, like, DeAngelo would record to tape, and then they would speed it up using a varuspeed player. So his voice would sound kind of high and a little chipmunk-a-fied, making it even more

difficult to understand, then he would layer that in with, like, his low bass notes. And so when you put it all together, you're like, where is DeAngel? What is he saying? But, yeah, I think you're right. I think he's trying to obscure the words in order to immerse you in his. sound world. There's a lot of things buried in there and I think Brandon you called him a one-man choir before. It's very clear that that's his intent. If you listen like about two and a half minutes into feel like making love, you could hear all of these people. It sounds like there's

people in the studio but I know it's just DeAngelo layering his vocals over and over again. How come no one else can do that? It's so, it's wild. It's like that is the DeAngelo sound. No one can quite capture it. Somebody like Beyonce, who talks about DeAngelo with the highest reverence, is because of this album's, because he did so much on the vocal end that if you could sing, you had to listen to this album to hear what he was doing. I don't know how to best explain it. When it comes to feel like making love, there's a sexiness that surges through all of his music. And because of that, his legacy is often quite unfairly reduced down to being a sex. symbol in Jason King's essay on DeAngelo's voodoo. Jason King wrote about the effects of what the

entitled video had on DeAngelo's career. Of course, the entitled video, DeAngelo is wearing only a crucifix dancing in front of a camera, just him and his body. And DiAngelo, in that moment, King says, became recognized in the culture as more of a bachelor stud than a serious musician. And that had detrimental effects to his career and also his mental health, frankly. You know, he retreated from the spotlight after this. And I think labeling DiAngelo is a sex symbol merely ignores his larger talent. You know, even the songs that are sex forward on voodoo, like Untitled, Parentheses, how does it feel? These songs have inner musical lives.

There's melodies in the vocal stacks and phrasing in the lyrics that feel wholly unique. It's rare that I hear a song where I'm like, I have never heard any of these pieces before. Like this is something totally new. Well, and of course the rhythm, which has been talked about ad nauseum, this group inspired by the loose rhythms of the producer J. Dilla bring this very loose idea of playing

all over the beat in ways that are totally unexpected, they really gave a new language to how a band could approach rhythm. The bass could be so far behind the beat. The vocal could be ahead of the beat. The drums could be right on. But maybe the hi-hat is also off. It's all over the place. And we hadn't heard anything like that.

And in some ways, maybe it does feel so romantic that people didn't even recognize the innovation because it was so effective at communicating what it was setting out to do. Yeah. And I think we mentioned this before. about the simplicity that DiAngelo strived for in his records, the space between everything, the three instruments that are there,

the drums, the bass, and the keys, and then DiAngelo, like, you can count seconds almost in between them. You know, it's just like, boom. It's full of space that makes it an anomaly to me. So on his first two albums, it's clear DeAngelo has established a through line of musical invention and beautiful. But often in the public eye, that talent became overshadowed by the sex simpleness of it all. That image put a self-imposed stoppage on DeAngelo's career.

And when we come back from break, we'll talk about his musical return in 2014. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try O-D-O-F-Free at O-D-O-D-O-O-com. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-O-com. So 14 years after the release of Voodoo, DeAngelo returns to music with what you can be fairly called an opus, I would say, dedicated to black people and black music at a time of political unrest and upheaval.

That is the album Black Messiah, DiAngelo's most political and expansive record. You released it in 2014, and in the liner notes, DiAngelo says that the album is inspired by people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough

and decides to make change happen. So the album carries this message, but at the same time, the record serves as a genre-spanning reflection of the black music canon while centering D'Angelo's all-encompassing musicality. Both of those things, the message and the music can be heard on the track, the charade.

Again, his voice is not at the front of the mix, but in the midst. You know, it's like you're watching a live performance and everything is kind of swirling around you. Yeah, yeah, it's slippery. It's behind the beat, but the guitar is driving it. Then the chords in the guitar, you can't really get a hold on. But the harmonies are already there, like the P-Funk style,

like with the pitched up stuff happening with DeAngelo's voice. Yeah, it comes at you very fast. There's also a sitar on the hook. I don't know if you all clock that, but the satire that kind of fades in and out with this, little riff throughout right here. Is that the maybe sitar guitar, something you also hear on Stevie Wonder tracks? Mm-hmm.

It's so fast it feels like a Prince riff. Yeah. Yeah, it's that Dan Electro electric sitar thing probably. That's cool. If I could think about black artists from the past that he'd be channeling here, I'd probably think about Curtis Mayfield, one of the like four runners of protest music in the 70s. He has a song called If There's Hell Below, we're all going to go.

Let's hear a little bit of that. When you enter into the sound of political protests, the spaciousness, silence doesn't work as well. Listening to Curtis, it's noisy, it's boisterous, it's distorted, it's incredibly full. I think we hear that same approach on Black Messiah as well. Right, DeAngelo sings. All we wanted was a chance to talk. Instead, we got outlined in chalk. Feet of bled a million miles we've walked,

revealing at the end of the day, the charade. Something so beautiful about this song that I'm realizing as we're listening to it together is that it's so murky and dark, right, as we've been saying. But the satar hook adds a little bit of levity, and it brightens the space in a way that feels like an auditory glimmer of hope, right? Like, he's singing about these things that are dark and sad and talking about how black people have walked so long, and he uses the words relegated to savages.

And yet you have this little glimmer in there that stands above the mix. That's like, do, do, do. Another way of thinking about the use of that instrument is that the sitar has a main, string that causes other sympathetic strings to resonate. So this might be a bit of a reach, but it's kind of like people listening to his message and the sitar resonating as other voices are hearing that message. It makes sense that that message is also crowded and hard to hear, just like his vocals often are.

It's very fitting in this track because isn't that the nature of protests? Is that your voice is so often being drowned out. And yet, there are those sympathetic resonating voices along with him. I would say that wouldn't even be a reach, considering how skilled a musician and artist he was, being able to make you feel even before the words kind of resonate with you. Listening to this song, I mean, it's fitting. It's like it feels like something that should be listened to in a group. There's a communal element to it. Again, with the mixing, it feels like you're watching a performance of it on the street. And there's so many vocals layered in there. It feels like you're. you're in the middle of a crowd. He's reaching to the people listening to the song and galvanizing them to march with him. Came in heart. I wanted to talk about DeAngelo being influenced by funk and rock and roll and maintaining that black history with rock music and being able to still

be that bridge. And this song, with the way the drums are hitting and the guitars feels like a Jimmy Hendricks song. Oh, yeah. Oh, those hammer-ons, that kind of a thing. Yeah. That's very Jimmy. I have to believe

that he was influenced by Jimmy to make some of the songs on this Vanguard album. And even on this, though, we're hearing, like, vocals buried underneath the guitar. Like, Jimmy's still singing, but the guitar is at the front of the mix.

It's crazy. I can see DiAngelo listening to this and feeling very inspired on multiple fronts. Gosh, we have the church. We've got rock and roll. We've got hip hop.

We've got R&B. He was synthesizing all of it. Yeah. And not making it sound dated. Like, it all sounded fresh. How? How did he do it? And I guess that's the question that we leave here with today.

How did DiAngelo do it? These are just a few selections from DeAngelo's all too small catalog. He only released three albums in his lifetime. So it's a finite amount of work. And with his passing, we are losing not just the creator of beauty. music, but as we've spoken about, an instrumentalist and an innovator. Someone who understood the idea of a groove more than perhaps any other musician this century. I'm not sure that there's anybody that can take his place in the canon because DiAngelo is so singular and

on another planet in terms of talent and vision. I think it's really appropriate that the closing of Black Messiah ends with a song in another life. And it feels like almost a little send-off. It's too prescient. He's ascended. He's left us all feeling ascendant. Thank you all for coming together to celebrate DeAngelo's music. Absolutely.

Thank you for doing this. Anytime. I'll be running brown sugar all day. Switch on Pop is produced by Raina Cruz, engineered by Brandon McFarlane, edited by Lissa Soap, illustrations by Arras Gottlieb, theme music by Jossi Adams and Zach Tenario of Arc Iris, who helped the show win a Signal Award for Best Original Score. We're very proud. We're so thankful to Zach and Jossi.

We're also so thankful to you all for supporting us. Switch on Pop has also won the Signal Award for Best Music Podcasts. It is just such a pleasure making this show with all of you and getting to think about music every single week. To be clear, it's the Gold Award, Charlie. I don't know if you said that. We won gold. Yeah. Nice.

Yes, yes. And the rest of our credits. Switch on Pop is a production of Vox Media. We are part of New York Magazine and Vulture. You can subscribe at NYMag.com slash pod. We'll be back next week. We're going to hit for tat on Tuesday. And until then, thanks for us.

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