Rolling R&B Thread 2010

mostly for that always building never resolving piano line

Holy crap! This Keri Hilson album is awful!

not really

i'm not sure what more anyone would think a keri hilson would be like, but it really exceeded my expectations - obv not a masterpiece or anything, this is k.hilson after all, but several tracks that surprised me, in a good way. "pretty girl rock" and "the way you love me" are great singles, this was probably my favourite cut though - just v pretty and emotional:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ejbUMRY2t4

http://thequietus.com/articles/05494-cassie-the-dream-janelle-monae-jazmine-sullivan-ciara

Great work, Lex.

yah agreed reblarged that on tumblr

Thanks for that article Andy K. I have only recently come to RnB after a year of listening to The Dream's discography. I've just been tapping the genre for its inherent beauty that has all but eluded me in prior years. I really like this article, it kind of gives validation to my love, because none of my friends want to move beyond The Dream, and some of these songs might sway them.

I wish I could convey the weight of my sudden infatuation with RnB. Like I would absolutely love to be in The Dream or Stargate's shoes, making radio hits and producing dope shit for pretty black girls and boys to sing.

Also, has Chris Brown's child-like voice been discussed? After listening to Deuces and Yo Excuse Me Miss, it sounds like he never lost the boyish effects in his voice. For example, on Deuces, he sings, "Better, better, better," with a soft, almost imperceptible 'L' at the end of the word, "Betterl"... Ha, maybe not, but does anyone else hear it? I feel like it's the main reason I keep coming back to him. I love it.

thx guys! felt dissatisfied when i filed but only cuz it inevitably felt incomplete, also i couldn't think of a single way to actually tie the kelis paragraph (originally written in august) into the rest of it before passing out.

merry xmas r&bros, here's kellz singing the actual words "this is a christmas remix" - secretly one of the highlights of his new one for me - this song has been admitted to the elite membership of "xmas songs lex loves", which previously consisted entirely of "all i want for xmas is you" and "8 days of xmas"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXQnRhUDJ3c

in the album version he sings "i'm just a snowman / lookin for a snowgirl" <3

Awesome article Lex. It's so important that we have critics who make R&B their aesthetic centre (if you'll forgive me for simplifying your tastes a bit) - and that those critics can do it justice!

Lex, you are KILLING it.

yeah great piece lex, props for that!

so many albums came out recently that I haven't gotten to really listen to seriously - jamie foxx, keyshia cole, keri (I did listen to this once and I liked the faux-reggae tune a lot)- plus catching up on stuff that I kind of slept on (bilal, jose james, k. michele mixtape, etc.) and Diddy, R. Kelly & Ciara's albums have been monopolizing my listening time - wish they wouldn't have all come out so late in the year. Love Letter reads to me like a pure exhibition of his talents - like, for those that have complained about his output over last few years/him not making "grown music" - he just tossed this album out to shut them up. He can do this kind of classicism in his sleep. The whole thing sounds effortless - I'm quite excited to hear Zodiac now.

overall, I think 2010 was a transition period for R&B - I don't think it was an amazing year, but there's definitely something interesting brewing

Tbh I probably cared less about r&b this year than any time in the past 5 years at least. Most stuff just wasn't doing it for me, at least not in large quantities. I listen to a bunch of the stuff you guys are gushing over and I'm just like ehhhhh.

no need to put any subjective qualifiers on that, think it's blatantly obvious that - usual suspects putting out the odd good record aside - r&b *as a genre* is in the abject doldrums right now and bears very little relevance to the world at large, never mind setting its trends

then again though i don't put washed-up cutesy slyphs on a creepy indie ice pedestal much less put their acapellas over ruff sqwad tribute productions six years after the fact, so maybe i'm just not enough of a r&b lover to hear the excellence all around idk

but there's definitely something interesting brewing

where

then again though i don't put washed-up cutesy slyphs on a creepy indie ice pedestal much less put their acapellas over ruff sqwad tribute productions six years after the fact

lol

well yeah, I agree that this wasn't a particularly great or even good year for R&B, but I think - as we've talked about in this thread a few months back - that the genre is getting a lot more removed from the pop charts and you're seeing a return to these sort of traditional, 90s R&B signifiers and aesthetics - Miguel & Jazmine are obvious examples there, but also Monica, even Ciara's "Ride" is very 90s R&B to me... I think this could end up producing some really great stuff. Plus there's a total lack of a bona fide R&B STAR right now (closest there is is Trey Songz? At this point Beyonce, Usher, et al have moved on to poppier pastures), so there's a huge vacuum there. Plus The-Dream, Ne-Yo, etc. are all kind of waning right now, so again there's the space for someone new to come in and shake things up... so mostly I'm just optimistic about where things are headed, though I can see why you'd say the genre is in the "abject doldrums"

would you really argue though that those 90s signifiers you hear were any more prevalent in 2010 than in the last few years preceding? i mean miguel/ jazmine/even monica to a extent were just missy and salaam remi doing what they always do - the jazmine album was a wonderful articulation of it and one worth getting excited over but still kinda a fluke rather than a pointer to any future i think. likewise 'ride' you could also argue was a kinda micromanaged trick/terius pastiche vision along the lines of how they played mariah's last album; they did (or tried doing) the same for atl bass on that album too but you wouldnt say that was coming back either. (alas!)

i'm happy to be hopeful cos as you say there's an enormous vacuum and these things are perhaps cyclical anyway, but yeah.

did i totally miss the atl bass thing on mariah's album? cause i really don't remember a damn thing about one other than that is was next level boring.

meant the ci-error album. soz if unclear

mariah's was a good fucking album though, albeit perhaps not up to a foreign exchange fan's connoisseurship of next level boring

i haven't listened to 'memoirs' since around when it was released, but i bet that it would benefit from being removed from the context of 'love vs money' & the electrik red album

ho ho xp

i saw a commenter on an r&b blog call ciara 'basically extinct' which i thought was a top shelf zing

haaa

One thing that has struck me about R&B in 2010 is a sense that the fan base (even the intelligent / perceptive / on-point sectors of it - and perhaps this is why it's notable) doesn't seem to know what it wants the music to do.

Defining things against perceived bad directions ("Time Of My Life", say) helps but then turns it into a rear-guard action, a fight to preserve a space for R&B rather than demand or even anticipate anything of it. Maybe that's the only fight we can have at this particular point.

Like, one thing (among many) that struck me about lex's piece is that he sets up all these competing archetypes of R&B which each have thrown up a great album or two this year - Sade vs Erykah vs The-Dream vs Trey Songz vs Fantasia vs Jazmine vs Ciara vs etc. And I love pretty much all of these albums. But all of them feel like signs of the persistence of existing archetypes (a relieving thing, don't get me wrong). Am I wrong in thinking that the non-newb R&B fan would have difficulty making a case for any of these as "the new thing"? (to the extent that there is a new thing it's the very guetta/bep dominance we resist)

"The new thing" is habitually overrated and I suspect this is (properly) an underlying thread in lex's piece anyway - but at the same time it's perhaps this very fragmentation that has allowed R&B to succumb so quickly to the guetta/bep sound.

bears very little relevance to the world at large, never mind setting its trends

this was kind of the basis of my piece? it doesn't follow that it's in the doldrums right now though. tbh i might have been inclined to agree with you if you'd said that a few months ago - it's easy to set auteur types like sade/erykah/terius aside from the main thrust of the genre - but, y'know, lots of people came through in the last quarter.

i don't really hear a "new thing" or whatever - and i'm not arguing that any of these are pointers to the future. i'm not remotely confident that r&b will do any better, commercially or critically, in 2011 than it has done for the past few years (though i shall continue to shout at rock critics for being divs in this regard). as tim says my point is that those things are overrated and don't preclude excellence appearing all around.

the jazmine album was a wonderful articulation of it and one worth getting excited over but still kinda a fluke rather than a pointer to any future i think

most great r&b albums this year seemed like flukes. so what?

there basically isn't really any sort of narrative running through r&b, and if you take the macro view there's nothing to really latch on to, but when it came to submitted my p&j ballot i found i had MORE r&b albums in there than i normally would.

well yeah sure, mine would be the same. we are r&b fans after all.

obviously the issue of a "new thing" is a lot more nuanced than simply oppositionalizing cyborg auteur media shit vs organic 60s soul mom dinosaur stuff or whatever. as tim alludes to it's also to do with a healthy sense of self within a genre, and as it stands right now some old light from familiar stars don't make no constellation. like i wouldnt say dancehall broke any new ground this year but it was always in pretty rude bubbling conversation with itself - although i do realise this is something of an imperfect analogy.

should also make it clear also that i was originally only discussing future pointers in response to brainwasher's declaration and not using it as a stick to beat your bit. (though personally there's only so much "ciara returns to original values!" and "terius 'rewards his fans' with more of the same!" i can take it seems.)

come to think of it dancehall did also retreat to a awkward pseudo-90s after its period of giddy excess - i guess this is maybe what brainwasher was getting at in terms of r&b looking back, in order to redraw its own parameters and re-establish a collective consciousness or some sort. i still think this is a bit of a stretch however.

most great r&b albums this year seemed like flukes. so what?

― lex diamonds (lex pretend), Sunday, 26 December 2010 09:36 (2 hours ago)

not sure if i follow - in fact i suspect i strongly disagree. like i didnt mean fluke in general terms of "oh hey a good album wow" but in the sense of jazmine's same previously boring aesthetic coming together so entertainingly. far as memory serves that's not really something i can attribute to any other album this year.

cannot overstate how key 'love you long time' on that jazmine album is - it may be far from the best song qua song on there but it comes at the precise moment when, just as your suspension of disbelief starts to flag and you begin to tire of the retro kiss-chase, the thing grabs you by the lapels like NO, REALLY REALLY THOUGH

it definitely defines the album for me more than any other song, i think. it's just so exultant.

it's also to do with a healthy sense of self within a genre, and as it stands right now some old light from familiar stars don't make no constellation

lack of constellation doesn't mean the stars shine less brightly. idk i think this desire for a big, overarching narrative is exactly the excuse that rock crits have been using to ignore the genre post-timba/neps, so my answer to this nebulous "lack of sense of self" is still "so what?" - r&b isn't as localised a scene as dancehall or uk funky or whatever, so i don't think it's as dependent on that to satisfy - looking at its protagonists as individuals can be as rewarding as looking at their positions within the whole play.

it's not JUST old light, either - certainly there was much i found unexpected, if not actually "innovative" in the monáe sense, in r&b this year.

I agree with you lex, but... rock critics being into R&B at the beginning of the decade doesn't change how great that era was. It's not like timbaland/neptunes/rodney jerkins/etc. was some kind of indie critic conspiracy foisted on r&b and hip hop from the outside. It was really people who always focused on R&B who invented that narrative (albeit not the IDM comparisons) and rock critics latched on belatedly.

If anything the current state of R&B criticism focusing on artists rather than scene-narratives encourages lots of people - not just eternally-damned rock crits but even otherwise decent people - to divide the genre into auteurs/stars and others, to pay attention to The-Dream and Rihanna and Ciara but disregard all the inspired one-off singles that always make up 60% of what's great about R&B.

I see some of this in myself: I find it a lot harder to motivate myself to keep up with Keri Hilson, say, than it was to do likewise with, say, Christina Milian a few years back. I'll keep being invested in R&B regardless, but I wouldn't say no to a greater sense of excitement amongst listeners (R&B listeners) about the music generally.

yeah i do think prime timba/neps was a bit of a golden age obv, in terms of innovation as well - but there's no excuse for paid critics to drop the entire genre like they did when that ended.

i kind of feel that music across the board has gotten a lot more personality-driven, that you're a lot less likely to see random one-off singles (or if you do, they're because they flop and the trailed albums never emerge, eg richgirl). but idk, i don't really care about pandering to people's motivation - i think a lot of people expect hot r&b hitz to be delivered to them on a silver plate, and claim they have no time to go looking for them themselves, even as they go looking for music in all other genres. fuck 'em!

ummm lex don't fuck 'em, some of us work in jobs that aren't designed around hearing new r&b. hell, i'm currently working two jobs that aren't. i just don't have time to do anything other than read this thread and usually even then i get *months* behind on my bookmarks.

i get the righteous indignation that comes from having a toybox stocked with incredible playthings and everyone's all like "oh i don't play with those anymore". motherfucker, they're fun!

cannot overstate how key 'love you long time' on that jazmine album is - it may be far from the best song qua song on there but it comes at the precise moment when, just as your suspension of disbelief starts to flag and you begin to tire of the retro kiss-chase, the thing grabs you by the lapels like NO, REALLY REALLY THOUGH

― r|t|c, Sunday, December 26, 2010 7:26 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

oh absolutely, really felt the euphoria of that moment on my first listen of the album

wow @ this song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxQj4Hs7v9E

reminds me of Surface "Happy" + Daydream-era Mariah.

WOAH WOAH WOAH

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ys9zgnqzys

chase n. cashe is a dope producer

Drink my Pain Away is great!

yeah good looking on both of those bw, really feeling the keyshia

chase n. cache is one person?

say it out loud

ah

that always gets me in trouble

the cover of the keyshia album is abominable

song rocks tho

wait, Keyshia Cole released an album last week? i didn't even know she was, like, getting ready to drop an album or had a single out or anything.

yeah the single was a minaj feature that wasn't really very good at all

musta had to clean out a whole wig store to shoot the video for that

the minaj/cole single set up camp on 106 and park for the past month

aw man, I had no idea fantasia attempted suicide earlier this year :(