8 Reasons Why R&B Has Died In The Black Community

[Bruce LeRoy]

Rap and RnB need a complete separation from each other. Over 2 decades of the same old bullshyt hybrid love song/simp anthem with rappers and RnB singers.

All of the 'vintage' RnB styled artist like Bruno Mars comes off as a parody of those earlier artist. Same with all of these 'blue eyed soul' singers that the critics go apeshyt for, all they are doing is rehashing older RnB sounds that these people havn't heard before or are too young to know about.

 

[Jemmy]

R&B was taking too much Pop money at one point. Saw it coming when a lot of the major labels disbanded their "Urban Music" imprints. A lot of important black ppl lost jobs and r&b became a non factor after awhile.

 

[Wild self]

Evolving is yalls favorite word,no matter how horrible shyt gets....is the production evolving?is the singing evolving,is the music evolving?is anything evolving for the better?if not stop using the word evolve simply to mean changing,instead of just saying its going to hell in a hand basket

That's code language for "stop hating and get short term money" while making shortcuts and manipulation techniques to remove talent. Post 2002, cats were figuring out how to make more money off of least tslent. No more Boyz II Men, no more old school Mariah Carey, and not even an early 90s version of Whitney Houston. No more pushing your natural vocals and using your voice as an instrument, just make short term catchy vulgar music.

 

[Wild self]

Other than musicians the other problem might be a lack of song writers. Every nikka wants to sing, but what the Hell happened to the great songwriters? Some of the best R&B singers were actually song writers. Ashford & Simpson, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Prince, McFadden and Whitehead, etc. Hell Tupac and even Dolly Parton were really good songwriters. Don't laugh Dolly Parton wrote Whitney Houston's biggest hit. What the Hell happened to all of the clever lyrics and thought proving wording?

The incentive ain't there no more. Cats got too business minded and forgot about the soul of the music and quality itself.

 

[DeVanteSwing]

nobodys going to church

lack of support for arts in America compared to Eurocacs...why all actors and soul singers pop up from there

 

[Lucky_Lefty]

Terrible, click-bait, fear mongering article. Authors chatting shyt. Beyonce, Drake, Frank Ocean, Breezy, Usher, Weeknd, Bryson Tiller, Miguel, Jeremih, Anderson. Paak move units and are highly influential.

And out of all these nikkas you've named, Anderson may be the most authentic and talented of them all. Outside of a couple of songs, I will never get the Frank Ocean hype

 

[Jemmy]

nobodys going to church

lack of support for arts in America compared to Eurocacs...why all actors and soul singers pop up from there

This is another reason too. Tiller isn't by any means the best singer but he came up in the church. I can't knock that guys pen game. He wants to write for Jazmine Sullivan too. Jacquees another one came up in the church I believe.

I think black music needs its own base. Country music has Nashville. We need our own system and our own Nashville. Only place that looks similar to what Nashville is doing is Atlanta.

 

[Biscayne]

RnB is harder than it's ever been. It's basically Trap-N-B. It's undergoing the same makeover Hip-Hop did NWA cameout with "Reality Raps". R&B is so much harder than it was back in the day. Artist like Tiller, Weeknd, Tory Lanze, PND, August Alsina would be too hard for mainstream RnB back in the day. Bhris Brown, and even Trey(in his later years) set the trend for this hard RnB. You got artist literally singing and crooning about the same subject matter rappers rap about.

 

[Biscayne]

Honestly, back in the day you wouldn't have a singer throwing up gang-signs and being affiliated with a set, and having beef with other artist. That was stuff that was relegated to the rapper. Now we got the singer/crooner doing stuff like this. That's the trend of R&B. The lines between R&B and Gangster/Trap/Hip-Hop have been blurred beyond recognition..........in the mainstream at least.

 

[Biscayne]

Man stop. They were talkin about fukkin even back in the day.

They're literally singing about trapping, taking drugs, smashing multiple women, and fighting folks in today's R&B. It's way less subtle nowadays. These Hoes Ain't Loyal(from a the title to the subject) could've been an NWA or 2LiveCrew track back in the day, rather than a song by one of R&B's most popular crooners. Sure they had songs about infidelity and sex back then, but they were so much more subtle than "These Hoes ain't loyal". "When a rich nikka want'cha" you couldn't even say "nikka" in an R&B song back in the day. It's WAAAY different. Those are things we don't even think about because it's so normalized today.

 

[Biscayne]

"Sex me" n "stroke u up" aint eat a bytch ass nd the extra explicit shyt nggas come up wit nowadays

"nikka", "bytch", "Hoe" you couldn't even say those words in R&B Music back then, and if you did, you had to do it VERY sparingly.... Jodeci, and R.Kelly were as hard as it got when it came to RnB back then. Today, they wouldn't be viewed as risque in the least compared to what he have now. The Weeknd openly sings about drugs. Sure, we had groups in the 70's that would sing about drugs from a social commentary standpoint, and in the 80's you had subtle songs like "Candy" by Cameo. But RnB today is straight to the chase when it comes to subject matter. They're straight up with it nowadays. As raunchy as Jodeci and R.Kelly were, they weren't crooning about Lean, Pills, and Strippers like singers are nowadays. THAT's the main difference IMHO. And I'm not even saying it's a good or bad thing per se. Just an observation.

 

[Wild self]

"nikka", "bytch", "Hoe" you couldn't even say those words in R&B Music back then, and if you did, you had to do it VERY sparingly.... Jodeci, and R.Kelly were as hard as it got when it came to RnB back then. Today, they wouldn't be viewed as risque in the least compared to what he have now. The Weeknd openly sings about drugs. Sure, we had groups in the 70's that would sing about drugs from a social commentary standpoint, and in the 80's you had subtle songs like "Candy" by Cameo. But RnB today is straight to the chase when it comes to subject matter. They're straight up with it nowadays. As raunchy as Jodeci and R.Kelly were, they weren't crooning about Lean, Pills, and Strippers like singers are nowadays. THAT's the main difference IMHO. And I'm not even saying it's a good or bad thing per se. Just an observation.

Yep. You can't even play these new RnB songs in front of your parents anymore

Too vulgar like mainstream rap.

 

[DatNkkaCutty]

We deal with this in Hip-Hop with Eminem & now with McLemore, where the music industry lets White people be more complex and have more leeway, while forcing Black people in to cookie cutter boxes. Adel, Timberlake, Robin Thick, and all these people are doing the type of Black music that we did for 50 fukking years

Rap and RnB need a complete separation from each other. Over 2 decades of the same old bullshyt hybrid love song/simp anthem with rappers and RnB singers.

All of the 'vintage' RnB styled artist like Bruno Mars comes off as a parody of those earlier artist. Same with all of these 'blue eyed soul' singers that the critics go apeshyt for, all they are doing is rehashing older RnB sounds that these people havn't heard before or are too young to know about.

Both those points dead on. Cacs dismantled black r&b frm the top (because it starts w/ them) nd put the entire machine behind rap. 2 birds one stone. Dey got filthy rich off the genre while simaltaneously promotin ignorance tenfold. I really jus started noticin cacs like bieber nd adele aint doin nothin but singin repackaged black r&b. Young cacs actin like its somethin new under the sun. Once the game got infiltrated by Justin T nd Em nd white ppl seen that lane...that was all she wrote. The popularity of trey songz nd breezy further contributed to its downfall since they werent pushin traditional r&b nd doin hybrid r&b rap shyt

 

[The_Sheff]

2 major problems. First none of these artists can actually play or write music themselves outside of middle school piano chord progressions so they either get hand me down music from the same pool of producers and musicians that get much larger checks from white artists or they sing songs that are way too wordy over basic ass chord progressions. It used to be that you could take the vocals completely off a song and it would still bang. Take the vocals off r&b now and you got some shyt that comes stock on a $50 Casio.

2nd there isn't even an outlet for it on the radio. Urban radio is just silly right now. It's nothing but junkie music. We have 4 urban stations in Atlanta now and they all playing bullshyt. We need a legit r&b station. Somehow Birmingham has managed to keep a pure R&B station but the larger cities I visit are in the same boat as Atlanta.

 

[Sauanaffe Tustunnagee]

pretty good article, nothing but facts



8 Reasons Why R&B Has Died in the Black Community - Atlanta Black Star

here's the list

1. The Whitewash
2. Too Much Focus on Physical Attributes, Not Enough on Talent
3. Producer-Focused
4. Too Much Sex
5. Artists Too Limited
6. Nobody Is Buying Music Anymore
7. R&B and Hip-Hop Have Coalesced Into a Single Genre
8. Computerized Production

i don't listen to the radio much anymore considering i can just youtube songs i like online but when i do i tends to be the urban radio stations which plays nothing but quite storm and classic RnB so while the status of urban black music(especially Rnb) has been on a decline i never thought it would get this bad...number 1. 7 , and 8 are the main problems imo..cacs emerging s the the mainstream faces of the genre made black artist expendable, corny RnB thugs/ wannabe gangsta rappers took the soul out the music and auto tune gave a platform for the least talented of vocalist in the art form to shine...all these what i assume were fads have become to define the music and ultimately killed one of music's most beautiful artforms