Awesome Wells
The Ghost of Jack Tripper
You can tell who listens/listened to real R&B and who doesn't based on which albums they can really speak about with some actual knowledge. Or if they can speak to the impact of the albums or the artists, when they dropped. If you were raised in the 70's or 80's, within a certain culture, chances are, you know R&B ran music for everyone back then. In the 90's, Hip Hop surged and blew up crazy, but the real ones know that R&B was still the shyt during that era too. It's soul, and based in the black experience. So that's not something you can fake or pretend to be down with, if you're not from the community or weren't there for when these albums dropped. Real R&B is hard to find these days, on a larger scale. But back then, it was in the forefront, and it was what you measured true talent against. There was a standard that had to be met.
Younger generations back in the day would go back and dig for those soul classics. You wanted to know what came before, so you could be up on all of the legends and get that experience. We would go dig for records that dropped way before our time because they were essential, especially if you considered yourself a music head or if you were making your own music. You had to be up on what came before and know what those older albums were about. Today, a lot of people don't really respect the past, or older classics or even know about them, at all. They're not going back and listening, and that's why the music is trash and the standard is so low today, lol. They don’t have anything to compare it to. What's going on now with R&B is exactly what happened to Jazz in the 80's. The standard has lowered and people don't respect the art form enough to really dig into it by going back and immersing themselves in all of the timeless joints that came before.
They'll latch on to underground Hip Hop, but swear they hate anything "commercial" or 'mainstream". That's usually done to overcompensate, due to them being from outside of the community. But these same people have a serious lack of knowledge on what the culture's offered over the past 40 years, and won't have any idea about R&B or even the real history of those same Hip Hop records they claim to revere so much. You see it all the time. Especially online.
Younger generations back in the day would go back and dig for those soul classics. You wanted to know what came before, so you could be up on all of the legends and get that experience. We would go dig for records that dropped way before our time because they were essential, especially if you considered yourself a music head or if you were making your own music. You had to be up on what came before and know what those older albums were about. Today, a lot of people don't really respect the past, or older classics or even know about them, at all. They're not going back and listening, and that's why the music is trash and the standard is so low today, lol. They don’t have anything to compare it to. What's going on now with R&B is exactly what happened to Jazz in the 80's. The standard has lowered and people don't respect the art form enough to really dig into it by going back and immersing themselves in all of the timeless joints that came before.
They'll latch on to underground Hip Hop, but swear they hate anything "commercial" or 'mainstream". That's usually done to overcompensate, due to them being from outside of the community. But these same people have a serious lack of knowledge on what the culture's offered over the past 40 years, and won't have any idea about R&B or even the real history of those same Hip Hop records they claim to revere so much. You see it all the time. Especially online.
