I have a confession to make. I still listen to R&B; I realize it is late in the game and R&B died around 20 years ago. But I never really got into Neo Soul and am more of a pop fan than anything. For a lot of you Usher is old school, but I still listen to him. But what really gets me is that ghetto low budget R&B, groups like Jagged Edge, or artists like Tank, Avant, Jaheim, Joe.

Most of you my age don’t want to admit it, in fact you’re still blasting that latest Underdog’s produced track, and that’s okay. But back in the day it was producers like Darkchild, which was like Stax records to Timbaland’s and Pharell’s Motown sound, when you wanted something with less gloss that was more real. Somewhere we lost our way; how many of us listened to Keith Sweat back in the day only to pass him over for artists like Christopher Williams or Al B Sure.

Keith worked hard. He was a fixture on the top ten until ‘92, five years after he debuted. You didn’t hear much from him until ‘96 when “Nobody” and “Twisted” came out, and these days he hasn’t received any radio airplay for a while. Keith stands for everything that today’s artists like Chris Brown do not, there were no thick, overproduced dance sounds, no electro-pop, no sequencers, none of that stuff. There was auto tune though.

Yet he had a lot of love from true R&B fans though, and he remained relevant when a lot of his peers had disappeared from the music scene. When that sound of R&B took over in the late 80s there were a lot of critics writing on the wall. They figured that the true rhythm and blues they had grown up on was dead on arrival and no longer relevant to today’s culture. Computers provided a lot of the gloss. Computers could also enable people to create beats that were so mathematically complex that only the most accomplished musicians would be able to play them in person, and it was often cheaper just to eliminate those jobs altogether. Not to mention that the unrealistic sounds that people were strung out on helped usher in a new era of pop.

It wasn’t always that way; when artists like Stevie Wonder and producers like Quincy Jones played with synthesizers they found a way to integrate the sounds in a way that wasn’t as cold and alienating as what we take for granted today. Yet the controversy of that day was the idea that auto tune and other techniques could make artists that could not sing sound good enough to pass. They would have had T-Pain at the stake like witches were hunted in Salem back in the day; stoning him to death with their vicious words typed out at the IBM typewriter. Then again Roger Troutman was around at that time; maybe not so much.

Technology changed the game, but the soul of R&B remained because people were still pouring themselves into the music, whether or not they could sing as well as the Commodores or the O’Jays. It was renamed urban contemporary to reflect the changes, and soul from the idea of what it was back in the 60s was lost forever. Yet it did okay until rap took over in the late 80s.

Purists like to talk about hip-hop, but hip-hop did not have any effect at all on the state of R&B music in the 80s. Those were distinctively different camps that listened to each others music, yet never owned up to it, and most certainly did not want to hear those sounds tied together. Yet the rap artists of the time began to implement actual singing, and melodies, as opposed to anti-pop, more Metallica, less Deftones, and came up with some cool stuff that you weren’t sure what it was or how to categorize it.

Sure it was still rap lyrics, but it was popular enough to seriously consider the possibilities of pushing hip-hop for more mainstream acceptance. Suddenly you had artists like MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice and others who weren’t really serious hip-hop artists at all and were having a great time and selling a ton of records. It didn’t help matters that real hip-hop artists started putting out songs that were easier to appreciate and weren’t challenging the listener the way that they used to.

This opened up the door for groups that featured artists that had a lot of lyrical talent, but weren’t really that interested at all in putting out heavy records, like Naughty By Nature, that had a lot of party anthems but also had the skill to answer their critics if they ever needed to. Yet by this time people were more interested in rap than they were anything else; it was the latest pop music for Blacks, that much was never going to change.

Anyone that wanted to become a successful R&B artist had to have an angle; it wasn’t enough just to sing about relationships anymore you had to position yourself in a way that your fans could relate to what you stood for. Not that artists of the past hadn’t done that before rap was popular, but R&B was beginning to be taken for granted.  A lot of female artists found success in writing songs that helped to empower women as they began to speak of relationships on their own terms and refused to compromise themselves which was what a lot of people needed to hear at the time.

Men on the other hand took a page from the history books and found a way to bring back what was great about the male groups from the past. There was still a lot of whining going on, crying even, but usually in the perspective of some guy had really messed up and was trying to get back into the relationship. Independent production made it possible to have a simple paired down sound that was still timeless and easy to listen to years later. It wasn’t pop music at all and was great to listen to.

Things haven’t changed much since then, R&B is still there when you want great music but do not want to think too seriously about it without the empty pretentiousness and shallowness of most pop music that is out there. Though for a very brief period it seemed as though all of the hit songs were about infidelity for some odd reason.  It isn’t all about the beat, or exclusively about the beat, just good music matched with the right singer for something that is easy to listen to. What is interesting is that all of the older forms of music still exist and are still relevant in this day and age regardless of what has happened with rap. Speaking of which rap itself is going through a reclamation of it’s golden age through hipster rap, though radio is doing absolutely nothing to promote the sub-genre and writers often quickly dismiss the artists are wannabes without really listening to them to see if they have any talent.

For all intensive purposes music died with computer technology anyway. When you have that much power over it and can oversimplify the theory in that way it makes it extremely difficult to truly push it forward. Artists may have to look elsewhere for inspiration, but one thing is certain, someone talking about the pain of a love lost is essentially, all that music has ever really been about anyway …