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.
