The R&B Renaissance

The R&B Renaissance

by Dean Van Nguyen

I.

“Rhythm and blues music” has always been a rather slippery expression. Essentially replacing “race records” as the terminology used by the industry as a catchall idiom for music made by, and for, black America, some would say it has been more of an ideal than a fully functioning genre. At different times soul, funk, blues, and rock’n’roll have all been a part of the R&B sound. Over the years it has swayed from live instrumentation to synthetic drum beats and from afro-sporting guitar maestros to slick, all singing, all dancing entertainers—what other genre could claim both George Clinton and Bobby Brown? But regardless of the sound fashionable at the time, rhythm and blues music always had precisely that: rhythm and blues.

In the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, however, a cross-pollination took place between R&B and hip-hop that all but swallowed up both genres. Rap had spent the previous two decades gathering such a commercial head of steam that by the turn of the millennium its artists were the new pop stars. Hip-hop became hook-heavy, with the biggest sellers often employing the services of R&B singers to provide the radio-friendly choruses on their tracks. Once mighty rap stables like Death Row became more or less defunct, the void they left behind was filled by softer versions of the formula. Labels like Murder Inc. and So So Def pinched the same template by signing up a whole host of talent and matching them up on various records, while employing more pop-oriented producers and their own R&B singers, ensuring their work was consumer friendly. This epiphany came just before the bottom dropped out on record sales, and the albums sold by the millions.

While rappers took a couple of giant steps towards the softer R&B sound, the singers themselves reciprocated. Looking at the hip-hop star persona as the key to commercial glory, artists like R. Kelly and Usher toned down their sensitive sides, and cranked their thug way up. With street cred a necessity for success, R&B as we knew it was run off the tracks. But having toiled in the doldrums for all this time, the genre has been experience its first boom in 15 years. A clutch of new artists are bringing the rhythm, the blues, and, perhaps most importantly, the soul back to R&B. And they’re doing it without rehashing sounds of bygones eras.

For the full story visit: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/146740-the-rb-renaissance/