Half-formed, rambling, drunken thoughts (or: On the Question of Loud R&B Music)
Hey y'all, sorry it's been so far in between posts: ever since finals ended I've been galavanting all over England, first up to Scarborough in Yorkshire and then to Dartmoor in the southwest. In between weekend trips I've been frantically looking for jobs and trying to write my two theses, both due in September. Getting around to filling this blog is seriously tough, especially when I have no real thoughts to share. However, there has been something that has been stuck in the back of my mind, bugging me like a shell from a popcorn kernel clinging to the back of your throat, and it is on this thought that I shall now expound:
Last night, while I was soaking in the atmosphere of the dingy, mosquito-infested Chinese takeaway on Roman Road where I bought my execrable vegetables and tofu in black bean sauce, my ears were filled with that distinct sound of R&B music wafting in from the tower block 100 yards distant. Now, while back in the day I would sometimes play R&B as a beat-laden accoutrement to my steady diet of hip-hop, the limitations--both structural and content-based--of the genre were all too evident, even to a thirteen-year old kid. The fusion of R&B and hip-hop stylings exacerbated these deficiencies: the verse1 - verse2 - explanatory-guest-rapper-as-one-man-greek-chorus - verse3 structure hit in 1994 and still hasn't released its dread grasp of R&B, such that even mainstream artists like Mariah Carey employed it.* Anyway, the point of this all is that the days where I could acquiesce in Hot97’s smattering of R&B on their lineup are gone, though the problem now is that the R&B is becoming a.) steadily worse; and b.) increasingly pervasive. Of course the same thing could be said about rap music nowadays (shuddering at the memory of the Sprite and BluBlocker commercials) but when was the last time you heard talk of dope underground R&B? Perhaps I’m a bit out of the loop, but I just don’t think there’s much demand for unpolished, self-recorded R&B tracks of artistic or even conceptual merit—it would seem to be constitutionally and logically impossible for the genre.
Regardless of my hatred for R&B music, there is a deeper issue troubling me, and that is the pumping of R&B music. I can understand the motive for blasting Justin Timberlake in some club with a huge sound installation, but what is beyond me is when people pump lovey-dovey R&B from their windows or from their tricked-out rizzides. With hip-hop, I can understand the temptation to pump up the volume: there’s a certain cathartic joy in the beats, heightened if there is an aggressivity to the music: for instance, early Tribe can be blasted, but it doesn’t lose much at normal volume, but your run-of-the-mill Wu-Tang album sounds best when it’s super loud and the booming bass mixed with the menace of the music engulfs you. R&B, however, seems essentially to be a form of emasculated rap music for those who were of sensitive dispositions and who were better at singing scales and couldn’t drop mad science off the dome (lookin’ right at you Nate Dogg and Warren G!). It deals with issues of love, fidelity and romance—even if it is filtered through the medium of booty, babes and Bimmers.
I think it can be explained in the following way: we feel comfortable aggressively pumping hip-hop, or metal, or punk because there is a certain forcefulness to the music, but the thought of pumping Coldplay or Bright Eyes at full volume just seems wrong. Part of this comes, I think, from the aggressive nature of simply blasting your music—you are imposing your musical tastes on others, so in playing your gangsta rap at full volume, the content of what you are imposing is similarly aggressive to your action.** The difference between playing My Heart Will Go On and On at 400 booming watts and bumping R. Kelly’s Chocolate Factory at a similar volume is, quite easily, that in the latter case the music is thumping, and sounds good being played loud.
But what is the message that we would take from this? Are the blinged out homies driving around in their lowriders really trying to convey to everyone within 200 meters that they are tender-hearted individuals who would rather have a Smoove B-esque romp in satin sheets than slang dope or pop a cap in dat ass? This would seem particularly unconvincing, especially considering the baleful eye that they usually cast upon any passers-by, but this is likely because my experience is tempered by the fact that I am male. General observation shows that the same disdainful regard is rarely applied to females, unless they are hideously ugly or had a train run on them or somesuch. I’ve come to believe that wife-beater clad people riding in their cars, blasting R&B, can look past any conceptual incongruities in their action by the fact that it might serve to assist in the pulling of honeys. Regardless of what is actually said in the songs—something that is becoming less and less important to society at large these days—it IS eminently bumpable, so while you might want to roll around town playing Snoop Dogg, you might turn off some of the ladies with the blatant misogyny of his lyrics—if they are paying attention, that is. R&B, then, would serve as a nice middle ground for people who need some sort of social recognition by playing their music so loud that everybody else must listen to it as well, but who are concerned that the honeys might not want to hear about big pimpin’ and the like. Either that, or they genuinely like R&B and think that it should be shared with the rest of us, two sentiments which are utterly incomprehensible for me.
* Despite the ridiculousness of it all, ODB's rap on that Mariah track stands as one of the highlights of the admittedly weak sub-genre. "Me and Mariah...go back like babies and pacifiahs" was so patently ridiculous, so evocative of ODB, and simultaneously, perhaps, even a sly, ironic nod to the ridiculousness of a genre that would actually attempt to link him up with the squeaky-clean siren from Syosset.
** An interesting question would be whether or not, ceteris parabus, there is a discernable correlation between the volume of a song and its aggresivity , though admittedly this latter item is so vague as to be almost meaningless.
Last night, while I was soaking in the atmosphere of the dingy, mosquito-infested Chinese takeaway on Roman Road where I bought my execrable vegetables and tofu in black bean sauce, my ears were filled with that distinct sound of R&B music wafting in from the tower block 100 yards distant. Now, while back in the day I would sometimes play R&B as a beat-laden accoutrement to my steady diet of hip-hop, the limitations--both structural and content-based--of the genre were all too evident, even to a thirteen-year old kid. The fusion of R&B and hip-hop stylings exacerbated these deficiencies: the verse1 - verse2 - explanatory-guest-rapper-as-one-man-greek-chorus - verse3 structure hit in 1994 and still hasn't released its dread grasp of R&B, such that even mainstream artists like Mariah Carey employed it.* Anyway, the point of this all is that the days where I could acquiesce in Hot97’s smattering of R&B on their lineup are gone, though the problem now is that the R&B is becoming a.) steadily worse; and b.) increasingly pervasive. Of course the same thing could be said about rap music nowadays (shuddering at the memory of the Sprite and BluBlocker commercials) but when was the last time you heard talk of dope underground R&B? Perhaps I’m a bit out of the loop, but I just don’t think there’s much demand for unpolished, self-recorded R&B tracks of artistic or even conceptual merit—it would seem to be constitutionally and logically impossible for the genre.
Regardless of my hatred for R&B music, there is a deeper issue troubling me, and that is the pumping of R&B music. I can understand the motive for blasting Justin Timberlake in some club with a huge sound installation, but what is beyond me is when people pump lovey-dovey R&B from their windows or from their tricked-out rizzides. With hip-hop, I can understand the temptation to pump up the volume: there’s a certain cathartic joy in the beats, heightened if there is an aggressivity to the music: for instance, early Tribe can be blasted, but it doesn’t lose much at normal volume, but your run-of-the-mill Wu-Tang album sounds best when it’s super loud and the booming bass mixed with the menace of the music engulfs you. R&B, however, seems essentially to be a form of emasculated rap music for those who were of sensitive dispositions and who were better at singing scales and couldn’t drop mad science off the dome (lookin’ right at you Nate Dogg and Warren G!). It deals with issues of love, fidelity and romance—even if it is filtered through the medium of booty, babes and Bimmers.
I think it can be explained in the following way: we feel comfortable aggressively pumping hip-hop, or metal, or punk because there is a certain forcefulness to the music, but the thought of pumping Coldplay or Bright Eyes at full volume just seems wrong. Part of this comes, I think, from the aggressive nature of simply blasting your music—you are imposing your musical tastes on others, so in playing your gangsta rap at full volume, the content of what you are imposing is similarly aggressive to your action.** The difference between playing My Heart Will Go On and On at 400 booming watts and bumping R. Kelly’s Chocolate Factory at a similar volume is, quite easily, that in the latter case the music is thumping, and sounds good being played loud.
But what is the message that we would take from this? Are the blinged out homies driving around in their lowriders really trying to convey to everyone within 200 meters that they are tender-hearted individuals who would rather have a Smoove B-esque romp in satin sheets than slang dope or pop a cap in dat ass? This would seem particularly unconvincing, especially considering the baleful eye that they usually cast upon any passers-by, but this is likely because my experience is tempered by the fact that I am male. General observation shows that the same disdainful regard is rarely applied to females, unless they are hideously ugly or had a train run on them or somesuch. I’ve come to believe that wife-beater clad people riding in their cars, blasting R&B, can look past any conceptual incongruities in their action by the fact that it might serve to assist in the pulling of honeys. Regardless of what is actually said in the songs—something that is becoming less and less important to society at large these days—it IS eminently bumpable, so while you might want to roll around town playing Snoop Dogg, you might turn off some of the ladies with the blatant misogyny of his lyrics—if they are paying attention, that is. R&B, then, would serve as a nice middle ground for people who need some sort of social recognition by playing their music so loud that everybody else must listen to it as well, but who are concerned that the honeys might not want to hear about big pimpin’ and the like. Either that, or they genuinely like R&B and think that it should be shared with the rest of us, two sentiments which are utterly incomprehensible for me.
* Despite the ridiculousness of it all, ODB's rap on that Mariah track stands as one of the highlights of the admittedly weak sub-genre. "Me and Mariah...go back like babies and pacifiahs" was so patently ridiculous, so evocative of ODB, and simultaneously, perhaps, even a sly, ironic nod to the ridiculousness of a genre that would actually attempt to link him up with the squeaky-clean siren from Syosset.
** An interesting question would be whether or not, ceteris parabus, there is a discernable correlation between the volume of a song and its aggresivity , though admittedly this latter item is so vague as to be almost meaningless.
posted by Det. John Kimble at 19:16
7 Comments:
could you even really appreciate some good soul and r&b?
and i'm not talking about mary j blige and the like. i'm talking about artist who can sing and have something to say.
Somaday, I am sorry if you missed the point of this post, and I am sorry that the only way you can critique what I wrote was by trying to paint me as a racist. Notwithstanding the fact that if I were going to limit my listening to 'non-nigger music' I wouldn't have much of a selection, being that I live in East London, much of the R&B to which I was referring was from the Subcontinent. Beyond that, the actions I described i.e. tricked out rizzides, etc, are exhibited by people of many different races--particularly Asians and Subcontinental Indians, so I fail to see how this is really a racial issue.
Anyhow, I should say that I am a huge fan of soul music, and I think the biggest problem of most of the R&B you hear these days it that it is entirely lacking in soul. A distinction I could have easily drawn was between something like Al Green and [insert generic R&B artist]. Blasting Let's Stay Together would be just as incongruous as any other song I used to compare and contrast beforehand.
I guess the larger point I am trying to convey is that my post was not so much about the artistic merits of R&B (about which, as I did highlight, I am not particularly informed) but rather about a particular form of R&B being played loud, by particular people, in a particular way. It is true that I am no fan of R&B, but I am pretty sure that much of this distaste is a reaction to the cookie-cutter, paint-by-numbers approach to making music, which can prove artistically disastrous to any form of music (just look at what happened to hip-hop since the golden days of the early '90s). Put otherwise, this was a critique of what I perceive the form to be in its most widespread form, not what it could be. Perhaps my faith in the genre might be renewed were there to be a revival in artists who demonstrated artistic merit—I know there are a few Jill Scott type artists out there who I dig, but they seem to be in short supply—then I might be able to change my opinion on the genre. Were either you or Emerging Manchild to turn me onto some good shit, then I would be most gracious, but I’m tired as fuck and don't feel like debating this further.
PS: thanks for posting. About 90 percent of my posts are from Mister Fedward Hyde and I am quite gratified to have some other people chime in for once. Even if you are branding me as not liking nigger music.
PPS: Just to be straight, I love nigger music.
wow jason. if u weren't a racist u might have just asked for some good music, but instead you end with me supposedly branding u as not liking "nigger music." only proving my point. and by the way i got yours. what exactly is "nigger music" anyway?
and if u can distinguish the difference between real hip hop and the mass produced bullshit they put out now than u definitely know better.
shame...
Ok, Somaday, I’ll bite. First, let me say that I believe that any arguments about R&B music have already been covered in depth, and so I will not touch upon them here; rather I will broach the sticky topic of racism, or more specifically, the charge that I am a racist.
At the end of your last comment, you ask me: “what, exactly is nigger music anyway?” I could very well ask you the same question because, unless I have been in a hallucinogenic trance for the past twelve hours, YOU were the first person to use the term "nigger music." Of course, that's not outright calling me a racist, though it's going as far as possible in that direction while still affording some leeway to claim, "hey, never did I actually call you racist." Of course, you could argue that I implicitly endorsed the idea by responding to the first question with your term, but I was just reading “nigger music” as a way of saying “music that began in the black community” with an aim to shame me in some way. I’m not really one to make such distinctions, but of course they exist: rock, jazz, blues, rap, reggae, R&B, soul, all would fall under the term.
My beef is that, via the framing of your second post, you created a perverse choice for me: either I take your recommendations, or I see it all as "nigger music"; but beyond that, the implication of what you wrote is that from the content of my post, you fully expected me to brand it as the latter. That’s pretty unfair. Incidentally, I WAS interested in your recommendations, but--call me sensitive--I take exception when people intimate that I am racist, especially people who have never met me, do not know the circumstances of my life, and who cannot tell when I am being sarcastic. I am sorry if you didn't like the way I finished my last comment--maybe I should have maintained the quotation marks--but if you believe that was some sort of Freudian slip where I revealed my true nature as a card-carrying member of the KKK then you are sorely mistaken. I don’t want to get into an anti-racist pissing match, but as one who has faced racial discrimination often throughout his life, I think I have a pretty good claim to hate it as much as the next person.
ok. i may have limited responses by my initial wording. and perhaps both of us are sensitive. i just hate the term "nigger". perhaps i did set u up. i find the term highly offensive and in no way do i ever embrace it. perhaps i was not able to get the tone via your words.
I'm no fan of it either. Come to think of it, I don't believe that I had even written the word before last night. Anyway, to be fair, by using it I was trying to make a point a bit more forcefully, but, as you stated, tone is a terribly difficult thing to determine in the limited medium of the written word. If I offended you that was not my intention.
Now, if you have some good suggestions that will turn my head around, I'm all ears...
Julius, took me a while to read it. But this is such an outstanding, dead-on description on R&B.
It it were a book review, it would need to be labeled "the ultimate interpretation of rhytm and blues" (which i too detest)
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