Delivering Justice on Heaven's Behalf

So. A big sample of R&B ballads from the 80's to early 90's. By no means complete.

It's worth noting that R&B would eventually break into several branches - "Adult contemporary" would later get relabeled "Soul" or rolled into "Soft Jazz", "New Jack Swing" would become the raunchy R&B of the 90's which inherited the "R&B" title today, and "R&B" as a general term would later relabel into simple pop music.

That last bit is pretty interesting, because what we clearly see as pop - say, Janet Jackson or Paula Abdul, at the time was labeled R&B as the shorthand for "black music", also keeping them from competing on the same charts as mainstream music and in some cases, limiting which stations would play them.

On the flipside, the white boy bands of the 90's who were all clearly modeled after The Boys, Gap Band, Guy, New Edition, or Boyz 2 Men were labeled pop, even though they were basically angling the same music direction.

While hiphop gets its props for influencing current music, it's really interesting to see how little the mainstream recognizes how much R&B had a hand in things. While hiphop wasn't getting direct radio play, R&B started opening the door by having songs with rappers getting a verse in on the side, and later, with folks like Mary J Blige, kicking open the door by tossing in a full hiphop beat to their R&B.

( HELLA YOUTUBE Videos )

The further in the 90's you go, the less ballads show up. Part of it was the dominance of raunchy R&B as the sound of choice for men, and the R&B/hiphop mix for women, but I think the biggest impact was the combination of white boy bands and the reduction of black radio stations.

Since the internet wasn't a viable radio option at that point, radio play was key - instead of trying to compete on the ballad against a highly promoted boy band, most R&B instead went with the raunchy or dance beat cuts that would stand out and still get play on a mainstream station.

One of the cool homeys I met at the 2009 APIA Spoken Word Summit. Aside from being one of the folks who came straight hiphop from get go, she was asking insightful questions about intersectionality, particularly around the issues of the APIA community and outreach/cutting off from other POC communities.

Her first album is nice, and listening to this, I figure the next will be a tight evolution beyond it:

Man, Breath of Life's Everybody loves the Sunshine mix is really worth checking out. I just discovered N'dambi:

Hey Sparkymonster... I think you'll dig this one.



Better audio here.

( Lyrics here )

A little bit of kali stickwork in this video. Also "We're the reason they made the 4 pound go blaow" - I wonder how many folks will catch that reference to the origin of the .45 caliber bullet?

Bambu: Slow Down (with Prometheus Brown of Blue Scholars) from Beatrock Music on Vimeo.

Fie on commercialized romance, but a good excuse to throw some serious soul and r&b? I'll take that up anyday. As you can see, my saptasticness sticks mostly in the 90s.























ETA: Did I forget the Janet Jackson?!? SLIPPING.

Ah youtube, always showing me stuff I didn't know about. Today it's artists doing covers.