best song The-Dream Love/Hate

well "purple kisses" was def begat by j. holiday's "bed" but yeah you can def trace shit out from l/h to things on lvm and e red

What's the reason for this poll lasting seven months?

accident

Ah ok. I took to this album instantly by which I mean "Shawty Is da Sh*!" is one of the most deeply eccentric ballads (I guess you'd call it) I've ever heard. But I still can't get beyond being merely impressed with the second one. Even here, the album moves from intense love to intense like with "Playin' In Her Hair." And "Mama" is flat-out godawful.

Easily "Shawty Is da Sh*!" for me. His harmonies with himself sound like Thelonious Monk piano clusters and there's like, what, five different melodies in four minutes.

Still not sure how to position this album in relation to its Album of the Decade contender, Year of the Gentleman. Yet again, it boils down to that high points vs. consistency thing with the latter an easier overall listen but lacking something as epochal as "Shawty Is da Sh*!"

ah man idk, i feel almost completely opposite about the two albums - i think ne-yo's gets really mushy and samey at the end but has 3 of the strongest r&b singles of the past few years whereas dream's is the better, more consistent and enjoyable album

"Mama" is amazing!! That bit where the dying android whispers "I've been thinking of you/always thinking of you" totally slays me.

I feel like Love vs Money suffers slightly for the lack of a similarly mushy ballad.

the main reason why LvM isn't quite as good as L/H is that the production isn't as colorful

i think there's some truth in that yeah

"Livin' a Lie" is great but it doesn't really fit the mood of the album I think; I'm glad it and "Mama" come at the end.

The Rev otm about the production, he switches gears so many times on this album but it's so seamless.

I hum "Fast Car" at least three times a week.

i know i'm way way in the minority here but i definitely like the 2nd album more than this one. still waiting for one of these songs to grab me like "Fast Car" did on the first listen.

i way prefer LvM too, even without the "concept" a lot of its individual tracks feel like more compelling versions of L/H tracks - like 'luv songs' and 'falsetto' vs 'sweat it out' and 'put it down' isn't even a concept. then again i think i like the 1st half of LvM more than most (tho agree that the 2nd half is where the real O_O stuff is)

i think i voted 'nikki' anyway

'mama' is great sorry losers

i think ne-yo's gets really mushy and samey at the end but has 3 of the strongest r&b singles of the past few years

So wait. Which are the three?

man "fast car" through "purple kisses" are all such classics and for that stretch alone this might be better than the new one. the first two songs are great too but such outliers, can't really get with "ditch that"

i love ditch that, but after deliberating i think my answer is falsetto.

brilliant as it is, this is not better than love vs. money. the answer is still "nikki," btw.

And why exactly are they livin' a lie?

(almost) every song is this album is amazing, but how could it not be I Luv Your Girl? am i alone in this?

i voted "Shawty Is da Sh*!" but i don't know the whole album that well, TBH.

i know i'm way way in the minority here but i definitely like the 2nd album more than this one. still waiting for one of these songs to grab me like "Fast Car" did on the first listen.

― hop up out the shed, turn my scag on (some dude), Friday, July 10, 2009 9:03 AM (1 month ago)

think i'm with you now - "fast car" is grrreat but "purple kisses" is my favorite

man every time ppl say r&b reached its peak in 03 or whatever i wanna point out that this and New Amerykah came out in 08

and yes just to beat deej to it - this was officially released in december 2007 but it's a 2008 album to me

i voted for it in my album list for 08 ...

I think my 4 favorite albums of 08 were all r&b (those two + foreign exchange + solange) + people who say that are mostly dbags who don't normally follow r&b who started listening to it for a couple years because of some trendy popism thing so balls to them

Haven't heard the Foreign Exhange album, but I agree that L vs M, L/H, and the Solange album were three of the best of 2008.
For me it's a toss-up between "Shawty Is Da Sh*!" and "Nikki"

people who say that are mostly dbags who don't normally follow r&b who started listening to it for a couple years because of some trendy popism thing so balls to them

yeah the r&b "boom" - well, the boom in music crits listening to r&b - was really fuelled by appreciation of the production and the auteur status of timbaland and the neptunes. but a ton of people never really cared about r&b as a genre - even in 2001 i remember reviews of aaliyah basically saying "great singles, but ew ballads" - and for them, r&b judgment boiled down to "cool sounds: y/n?"

i mean, obviously their problem for being idiots! but unlike, say, radio pop, i don't feel that r&b ever really dropped off since 2003 or whenever.

Yeah any r&b "boom" that took place is completely crit-centric, which is basically to say, who gives a damn. As far as "ew ballads" goes, I completely feel free to disregard anyone's opinion if they want to speak on r&b but are averse to ballads.

xp Might as well take another chance to stump for the FE album. Super-intimate, with lots of duet vocals, subtle yet memorable songwriting, lyrics that kind of take a love-realism angle, some time-signature trickery, very precise and rich high-tech-sounding production. Sounds kind of like a cross between an Air and Aaliyah album, although it's mostly anchored around Phonte's baritone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCXNaV7CKig&feature=fvw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GplxJW8ez-w

I dunno, I think it's pretty easy to over-estimate the extent to which popular discourse reduces R&B to a kind of "cool sounds" producer fetishism exercise.

All of the people I know who typify that intense engagement with R&B circa 2002-2004 followed by rapid drop-off actually missed Timbaland mark one almost completely, their reference points are more like "Crazy In Love", the first JT album, "Work It", "1 Thing"... not "We Need A Resolution", "Bills Bills Bills", "Caught Out There", "Try Again" et. al.

I think what was going on during that period was that R&B as a genre and R&B as a pop crossover phenemenon and R&B as something written about by critics all coalesced into a basically unanimous chorus line regarding what the music should be, which if anything isn't cool sounds at all so much as hyper-sexualised modern funk - this is what unites the disparate approaches of The Neptunes, Rich Harrison and Timbaland circa 2002 (it's telling that for this particular crowd Under Construction is very much the Missy album).

I think that there's a very broad swathe of middle-class white urbanites for whom this was the perfect incarnation of R&B to wholeheartedly embrace: big catchy songs splashed all over the radio, sung by recognisable stars, while drawing on a respectable and (importantly) "authentic" canon of black soul/popular music (James Brown, Jackson 5/MJ, Sly, the right Prince), and joy-juiced with satisfyingly raunchy modern production. At all the house parties I went to in this era "Get Busy" and "Baby Boy" were sandwiched in between "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough" and "Sex Machine".

Yes, the whole critical engagement with Timbaland/The Neptunes etc. as auteurs fed into this, but ultimately the people who actually were writing about R&B for broadsheets are still writing about R&B for broadsheets, only now The-Dream is the auteur they write about. The trickle down didn't quite work out like that: all my friends and acquaintances in this category knew about The Neptunes (because of Pharrell and the unmistakeable sound of their tracks) but didn't really know who Timbaland was.

So what happened? Well, the successive sonic incarnations of R&B simply haven't appealed to that kind of audience in the same way: crunk was too harsh and aggro sounding ("Yeah" aside) and R&B's subsequent lurch towards the eighties (ice cream cake city in the clouds synth arrangements, general trebliness, the wrong Prince) and dance music (4X4 beats), while not disliked by this audience (they'll embrace crossovers like "The Way I Are") simply doesn't feed into their ideas about what R&B should be, so they have little interest in investing in it as a genre rather than as the occasional origin of massive pop hits they get into. But yeah, stuff like "Forever" seems to strike this crowd as cheesy in a way that "Rock Your Body" didn't.

What recent stuff does this audience love? "Single Ladies" and "Umbrella". No woah modern production there, but it helps that they're big singalong songs by recognisable crossover stars and using breakbeats.

Also it's worth pointing out that at the beginning of this decade a lot of the big R&B releases actually did tend to have fairly poor ballads, or at least the difference between the quality of the majority of the uptempo tracks and the quality of the majority of the ballads was marked - see The Writing's On The Wall and Fanmail and Survivor and Fear of Flying and Full Moon (though I adore the cheese-tastic "WOW" on that one). People who think these albums tend to fall down in the balladry department aren't necessarily blinkered.

Aaliyah was an exception to this rule, sure, but then in some ways it's an easy exception - all of the ballads on that album had high-tech production anyway, so it's not as if liking the ballads on it would have been a particularly brave move. Pink's first album is a better case I think: the three ballads on there are conservatively produced but all fabulous.

Nowadays I think it's an impossible distinction to draw, but I also think that the quality of R&B ballads generally went up at some point in the mid-00s.

I think Lex is mostly having a pop at Reynolds plus acolytes rather than the sort of audience you're talking about, Tim, but yeah I'd agree with your take on things.

I spent much of the night in the pub on Saturday attempting to wind Lex up by taking a variety of inflammatory critical positions that I don't really believe. But the one thing I do kinda agree with is that for all this talk about the 00s being the era of the super-producer, those producers have been lucky to come along in an era of widescreen technicolor big global brand POP STARS - way way more of them than in the 90s.

A number of commercially underwhelming Timba/Neptunes/Dream projects (Elektric Red being the most recent) show that cool noises alone don't get you very far without the right frontperson. I suppose that's why Beyonce ended up with the massive lengthy career and, say, Tweet didn't.

I think you're right.

I just don't think there are that many of those Reynolds plus acolytes at the end of the day (also Reynolds put me onto Mya's "It's All About Me" way back when, one of the most gorgeous glutinous R&B ballads ever!).

I should probably shift back my "ballads suddenly improving" development to, I dunno, maybe 2003. I think one thing that changed is that whereas before artists or their handlers seemed to want to balance risk-taking club tracks with more familiar/"safe" songwriting on the ballads, at some point artists started coming out with quite risky, oddball ballads... everything got a lot more talky and idiosyncratic. Look at "We Belong Together".

In this regard, arguably "Burn" was more important to the development of R&B this decade than "Yeah" was.

And certainly R Kelly was a massive influence on everything.

Ha ha everyone I can think of who is actually like Lex's complaint ended up being into dubstep, Erykah Badu and Jay Dilla, maybe that's why they aren't checking for Electrik Red etc.

everyone i know into electrik red is also into dubstep, erykah and j dilla - who are these people you're talking about??

if i'm having a pop at anyone it's pfork and co - and probably not mainstream pop audiences, but more the "tastemakers"/"gatekeepers". but "ew ballads" is a sadly widespread stance. "r&b ballads got better" - this sort of ignores the history of r&b pre-2000!

disagree that sean paul, justin timberlake et al were the peak of this in 2003 - i think of r&b's critical peak as missy's so addictive album rather than the consciously old-skool under construction (which is probably her most consistent album, for whatever that's worth). 2001, basically.

rich harrison was never a recognisable auteur name like timba and the neps...

"who are these people you're talking about??"

About five or six people (guys mostly) I know IRL, plus like half of dissensus.

Also I know I've got a stake here but, um, who writes about R&B albums a lot on pitchfork apart from me anyway? They simply didn't cover it at all during the 2000-2001 era, as far as I can recall.

" "r&b ballads got better" - this sort of ignores the history of r&b pre-2000!"

Yeah, I'm saying they were in a particularly bad patch circa 2000. Obv there have always been amazing R&B ballads since day dot.

"i think of r&b's critical peak as missy's so addictive album rather than the consciously old-skool under construction (which is probably her most consistent album, for whatever that's worth)."

If you're talking about reynolds alone, sure, (actually reynolds' interest in Missy peaked with Supa Dupa Fly) but as a widespread popular crit phenomenon then I don't think it crested until after that.

"rich harrison was never a recognisable auteur name like timba and the neps..."

Yeah but now I don't know who you're talking about. If pitchfork, then any dudes listening are self-conscious enough to have known who rich was certainly by the time "1 Thing" came out. If you're talking the general middle class uni-educated indie-leaning white public then I think they knew The Neptunes but neither Timbaland nor Rich.

Basically these guys who are like "Timbaland was amazing" but don't listen to other R&B are also into: Luciano/Villalobos, wonky (esp. wossisname from LA), mnml ssgs style stentorian Berghain berlin techno, anything post-Basic Channel, Tectonic Plates/Hessle Audio/Martyn, Theo Parrish obv, and anything that falls within those parameters.

Amazingly, people who over-identify with the "I only listen to futuristic music" w/r/t commercial R&B tend to adopt the same stance w/r/t everything else.

Obv. a lot of good music falls within these boundaries!

It's okay to like music for cool noises you guys. That's not why I like The-Dream etc. but let's not get all pop-rockist just yet.

I agree!

Probably half of Lex's point is that Timbaland/The Neptunes aren't the only guys to make R&B with cool noises but they're the only ones acknowledged as such by a certain audience.

If you're talking the general middle class uni-educated indie-leaning white public then I think they knew The Neptunes but neither Timbaland nor Rich.

i'm sure they'd have known timbaland! the double-act with missy, the vocal presence on half his songs even before he tipped into pop star status himself in 06/07.

Yeah, I'm saying they were in a particularly bad patch circa 2000.

disagree totally! even apart from aaliyah, there were loads of ballad-heavy r&b albums released in 2000-01 - alicia keys, kelis, d'angelo, mjb...just off the top of my head. DC were rarely good at ballads but they were always kind of anomalous in that respect.

i guess i'm talking about the uk broadsheet press here - in 2001 i had no idea pitchfork existed (oh happy days), and i've rarely read reynolds on r&b b/c lol why would anyone do that. i'm not really having a pop at anyone specific though, it's just a bunch of wrong-headed ideas that seem to be rather commonly held across non-r&b critics and those that read them.

It's okay to like music for cool noises you guys

yeah, praising cool sounds isn't a bad thing - cool sounds are cool - but judging everything within a particular genre to "cool sounds y/n" is horribly reductive and ignorant.

i didn't really start buying R&B albums regularly until i started freelancing 4-5 years ago, although it'd been my favorite singles genre for years before that and for a while i wasn't barely buying albums anyway. so i guess i'm part of the problem!

Also I know I've got a stake here but, um, who writes about R&B albums a lot on pitchfork apart from me anyway? They simply didn't cover it at all during the 2000-2001 era, as far as I can recall.

ha i wrote a D'Angelo review they never published. D'Angelo!

Fancy.

Shit wrong poll.

Nikki

voted "nikki" but i sort of hate alex for pointing out what a bad line "springtime, summertime, falltime, winter" is in one of these threads. now it bothers me every time.

lol sorry but seriously that line

i really like "nikki" but mainly because of the way the beat bleeds in from "fast car"...tho "fast car" is probably my 2nd fav song on the album "nikki" really signals that this shit is about to get real

xp ha why don't you like that line? and you reviewed voodoo (i assume)? would have liked to have read that

how could it not be I Luv Your Girl? am i alone in this?

Nope. I've probably listened to that song like five hundred times in the past six months. (OK, maybe not that much, but even after the first album finally clicked -- I hadn't listened to it enough -- that one never fails to mesmerize. "Fancy" seems like the idealized version of what's going on in "I Luv Your Girl" musically for some reason but haven't figured out why I think that yet.)

a) because FALLTIME and b) yes, Voodoo

more like failtime eh

falltime is not that bad

ty also sry horseshoe, i kno. when i was younger i didn't like tomatoes + i knew that was wrong also