As fans honour the loss of R&B legend D’Angelo and recall his sensual, slow-burn video for Untitled (How Does It Feel), it’s time to consider if the artistry wasn’t skin-deep.

There was a point in the 1990s when R&B fans couldn't be more scandalised. There was a sliding scale of sexuality that was either subtly imbued or gratuitously stamped across the melodies that crested the Billboard charts during the decade of D'Angelo's 1995 Brown Sugar debut.

Groups like Intro remade Stevie Wonder's Ribbon in The Sky, but they also sang that they wanted to slip and slide inside their listener. Elsewhere, Silk was hollering about licking someone up and down in falsetto. On the other end of the spectrum, Mint Condition, Brian McKnight and Boyz II Men sang romantic ballads about being down on one knee, despite their woman’s cheating because, "Baby, I knew about it and I just didn’t care".

Then, D'Angelo's Brown Sugar arrived, bringing a fusion of hip-hop, jazz, gospel and R&B in a relaxed and musical new way. It was a mellow groove, breaking through the noise with originals and remakes, like a cover of Smokey Robinson's Cruisin'. His church boy roots shone through on songs like Higher, where the organ opens the track like a gospel revival.

But with his second album, 2000's Voodoo, he was catapulted into the pop stratosphere when one video, Untitled (How Does It Feel), unleashed unbridled thirst, sexual exploitation and objectification on a global scale. It was a seismic shift for a preacher's kid from Virginia who just wanted to create amazing music, like his heroes Prince or Otis Redding, but it couldn't be undone: swivelling there as if slow-roasting, he was reduced to a beefcake live on air.

"If the Untitled video was your entry point to D'Angelo, then you missed the point," says Dr Joan Morgan, writer and director of the Centre for Black Visual Culture at New York University. "I think what women responded to with D's music was the fact that he really liked women. He was like a really old-school soul singer and there was no conquest mission in the music."

As MTV takes its last gasp, shuttering its final music channels in the UK, it feels strangely nostalgic to look back to the days when multiple television channels streamed music videos for hours each day, but it gave rise to the pop-as-product 2000s and the influencer era we........

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