Top artists help reinvent R&B for a new generation
Performers such as Childish Gambino and Monae help reinvent genre for new audience
LOS ANGELES R&B has been riding a roller-coaster over the past few decades, swooping from its commercial and esthetic peak in the late 1960s and early ’70s to a low point about 10 years ago, when it was little more than a melodic appendage to rap’s rhythms and rhymes. What was once a cultural signpost — a sound that helped define black life, love, culture and protest — had become a sidebar due to the reign of hip hop.
But thanks to hip hop’s dominance on the radio, a cross-fertilization has taken place and the genre has found renewed life by mixing with both rap and alternative music, vaulting out of “adult contemporary” territory via a new wave of diverse, distinctive soul singers such as 2019 Grammy winner Childish Gambino (a.k.a. singer-actor Donald Glover), Janelle Monae, Khalid, Solange and SZA, and such newcomers as H.E.R. — who had two Grammy wins, including best R&B album — Ella Mai, Daniel Caesar and Jorja Smith.
“R&B may have fallen out of fashion because it became too predictable, with nothing to surprise us,” says Peter Edge, chairman and CEO of RCA Records, home to Gambino, SZA and Khalid, as well as genre matriarch Alicia Keys, H.E.R. and Normani. “Our artists now don’t quite fit in what was previously considered R&B — we have less of a tendency of putting artists in specific boxes or genres.”
Although Edge, one of the executives most familiar with the U.S. R&B terrain, is British, his history in hip hop and R&B reaches back to the mid-1980s when he founded the Cooltempo Records label and later Warner Bros. in the U.S., where he worked with Meshell Ndegeocello and the Jungle Brothers. So “we’re not turned off by our new artists walking untested grounds” at RCA, he says.
Indeed, the Sony Music-owned label is leading the charge on a crop of singers whose influences span genres and generations, combining music the artists were raised on with the possibilities available with streaming services. To wit: Smith, 21, has a sound that plays like a fusion of Amy Winehouse, Sade and early Erykah Badu. She cites Nina Simone and Nasas the soundtrack to her childhood. The same can be said of Khalid, who “grew up online and took advantage of that, but with a mother who sang classic R&B,” says Tunji Balogun, RCA’s executive vice-president of A&R.
Khalid, who performed on five top 20 singles before reaching his 21st birthday, says he signed with the major because RCA “understood my vision and could help me find ways to amplify it. It was important that I was given the freedom to be myself creatively.”
That creativity is reaching more ears: Together, R&B and hip hop claimed 31 per cent of total album-equivalent (or sales and streaming) volume for the first half of 2018, surpassing rock, the second-biggest genre at 23 per cent, Nielsen Music says. On the radio, among people 18-49, the average quarter-hour audience share (people who listen for at least five consecutive minutes in 15 minutes of a radio program) of urban contemporary stations has increased by 15 per cent in the past four years. In fact, African-American listeners make up 13.5 per cent of the total national radio audience and listenership among African-Americans is up five per cent in the past half-decade.
Perhaps the best proof of its peak in the past couple years is the number of artists the Grammys recognize for advancing the medium — and they were not only nominated for R&B and urban contemporary awards. Gambino, Monae, H.E.R., Smith and last year’s multi-nominee SZA (four nominations this year) all earned nods in the awards’ big four categories.
So what brought R&B back? The calibre of the artists, contends Derrick (DC) Corbett, program director at Philadelphia iHeartRadio R&B stations Power 99 and WDAS. “Last year, we saw with Bruno Mars, H.E.R., Ella Mai, Jacquees and Daniel Caesar that the younger audience is more accepting of this art form because the quality of the music is simply better,” Corbett says. Mai’s Boo’d Up was one of the biggest singles of the summer. “It’s not melodic hip hop or trap soul or some of the monikers that have been passed down to avoid the R&B title,” Corbett continues. “This new stuff is just good R&B music that happens to lean on (1990s-era) forefathers like D’Angelo, Usher, Alicia, Mary J. Blige and Babyface in its styling.”
One of those predecessors, Angie Stone, witnessed firsthand how hip hop diluted R&B. Stone started her career as part of hip-hop trio The Sequence, worked with D’Angelo and then went solo as an R&B artist in 1999. “At the beginning, I felt like Madonna as (label executives) catered to me as an R&B artist, concentrating on my craft while everything from my hair and wardrobe was handled for me,” she says.
But Stone believes the merging of pop and hip-hop superstars — particularly “Jennifer Lopez hooking up with Puff (Sean Combs)” — placed focus on looks and marketability. “After that, in came Beyoncé, Christina (Aguilera), Alicia Keys and Justin Timberlake. From there, R&B only stayed relevant if it was connected to hip hop,” says Stone. “That’s how hip hop became what it is now. It had to gather elements of the mainstream to get, and stay, on the radio. R&B got smothered loaning itself to hip hop.”
Terrence (Punch) Henderson, president of Top Dawg Entertainment, home to Lamar and SZA, is about as influential in hip hop as they come. He too sees the melding of the two genres as a way to gain greater exposure. “What attracted me to SZA initially was the distinct nature of her voice,” he says. “When I paid attention to the lyrics, she approaches ideas as a rapper would, and what she was saying was raw and honest. Everybody on a global scale can relate to that.”