The Popcast is hosted by Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The New York Times. It covers the latest in pop music criticism, trends and news.

When a meaningful, transformative artist dies, battles over legacy are a given. But Whitney Houston’s death posed a different kind of challenge. The second half of her career, which involved public battles with drugs and vastly diminished recording output, had already undone much of the good will earned in the first half, in which she was one of the most popular and powerful pop stars of the 1980s and early 1990s.