How good is 'American Boy' by Estelle?

i mean this is all vintage material, but totally irrelevant.

xp to Bmore: I don't think the point is Kanye's voice so much as its signifier of a hiphop/r&b context rather than a dahnce context.

fwiw, I love all of Amerie's albums, just some moreso than others

I'm hoping Lil Jon takes this up a la "The Anthem" and just goes head first into a house/crunk movement

seriously what's better than "The Anthem" answer nothing

stfu

sorry, i love music

there are sort of two trends going on right now in r&B - snap-type stuff (e.g. "touch my body"), and totally synthed-out, house/trance-type stuff (" love in this club," " killa" , anything produced by the runners & ryan leslie, all the songs I mentioned upthread..)

As much as I love Pitbull, it kinda saddens me to see "The Anthem" doing better than "Calabria 2007" (which, soz Preview, is much better) on the US charts.

clusterfuck thread about r&b music>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>clusterfuck thread about estelle's race

i didn't believe my brother the other night when he told me that that pitbull joint isn't a mashup

uh it's not about her race.

xpost

great post

both are pretty good imo but i like 'calabria' better

It seems that, "The Way I Are" aside, there's actually kind of a weird divide between the 4x4-beat house stuff and trance-synth stuff, which seems to go more for a slow, opulent, crunk-based half-beat feel.

Lil Jon's "verse" on "The Anthem" is like the greatest most hilariously amazing thing I've ever heard in my life. It's glorious.

and yeah "Calabria" blah blah but you're post above about r&pop signifiers is so OTM for this conversation i almost want to quote you against yourself

I guess "Low" might be a faster exception, but the beat is still crunk-based, rather than house-based. xp to myself

Oh, and add Charlie Wilson's "Let It Go" to the list of 4x4 r&b singles.

yeah you're probably right, "love in this club" is more crunk than house

gap band charlie wilson? lol

yea the two styles have different points of influence or whatever, I think the new usher, all that new synthy shit is taking its cues from euro trance and slowing it way down, like borrowing the sound of the synths and even sampling them (wiz khalifa) but the other side is more of an early 80s dance/pop/r&b influence

but yeah I totally agree that there are two parallel trends that might not really have much to do with each other

i think the 4x4 angle is getting a little overplayed, esp. as far as singles go-- i mean what are the biggest r&b songs on the radio right now? "with you", "bleeding love", "like you'll never see me again", "no air"? none of these are really breaking any ground

xxp: that's him, I posted it in rolling r&b if you want to hear. It's alright, not great.

the biggest are "i remember," "falsetto," "sexy can i","love in the club" and "like you'll never see me"

love in this club and like that new mario song don't seem that out of the ordinary or that much like crunk to me-- just good r&bish songs but nothing worthy of trendwatching as far as polow goes

"falsetto" and "love in this club" being the on-trend ones, "like you'll never see me again" and "i remember" = pretty standard ballads.

sarge: Well, of course. There are always going to be vanilla ballads on r&b radio, but that's not really a trend so much as a fact of life.

What's "I Remember"?

do any of the ones just mentioned fit into the "Please don't stop the music" 4x4 trend? isn't "with you" like chris brown's country song ???

keyshia cole

and the way i are and don't stop the music aren't r&b songs and it's kinda stupid for people to treat them as such imo just because they are done by vaguely r&B artists

nope, none fit the 4/4 trend... but you should check out "ditch that" by the-dream if you haven't heard it

yeah some of the album tracks on love/hate and that new ne-yo song are more of where i see the 4x4 trend

love that song

xp house pretty much is r&b though

Sarge: they aren't really, but their certainly being listened to and absorbed by r&b audiences and more importantly, r&b artists. Also, "Sexyback" is the true starting point of this trend.

"My Love" !!!!

for both trends maybe

sarge how are they not R&B

of those two i could only buy the way i are as r&b because of tim's past and cuz keri hilson is on it, 'please don't stop the music' isn't that far away from 's.o.s.' or 'break it off' or other stuff that rihanna has done

"My Love" = starting point of the trance-synth side of the coin, but "Sexyback" for the 4x4 beat. (Then Timbo got the great idea to combine the two for "The Way I Are".)

yeah "my love" was kind of the start of this whole trance&b thing no?

I can see why sarge wouldn't consider DSTM R&B, since Rihanna is pretty much a pure pop singer

yo americans, if you're so big up on this house r&b stuff, you guys should check out some of the biggest R&B singles in the UK: Kelly Rowland - Work (Freemasons Remix) and Taio Cruz - Come On Girl

as for what rev says about r&b people consuming those songs-- if youre talking about radio i think that's only because urban top 40 and pop radio have some type of overlap, i mean the station here that plays ruben studdard and gerald levert would never play don't stop the music or the way i are where as the stations that play flo rida and miley cyrus play those two all day

love in this club is basically a rip of my love imo-- the way the synths are so layered in the first 5 seconds of both, its almost identical

Okay, so where do things like "Sensual Seduction" and "I'm So High/"She's So Fly" fit into this picture?

well the station that plays reuben studard and gerald levert is like.. urban ac.. which isn't really the go-to format for cutting edge music... but "Way I Are" got played on Ryhthmic/R&B and Urban stations.. as well as top 40/pop.

i think both are great though xp

as for tim-- i've noticed more of like, i don't even know what you'd call it ( i always think of the way he stutters the drums), but like on "ayo technology" or "ice box" or "anonymous" or "elevator". those are the songs i think of when i think of tim's style/trend of the past few years, not really "sexy back" or even the furtado stuff

xp tot he rev: that shit's all coming from Miami

(maybe not geographically but that whole Miami sound which can probably be associated with what we're calling trance/crunk whatever)

"i'm so high" has a sort of electro thing going on, but I guess sonically it would fit with the trance&b type stuff

I would buy the whole "My Love" thing except that it's almost twice as FAST as all the other shit in the trance-crunk trend...

fwiw, the r&b radio station here would never in a million years play Studdard or Levert (or Cyrus), but they certainly have played the hell out of "The Way I Are", and to a lesser extent, "Don't Stop the Music".

Also, "Love in the Club" is totally influenced by other things that have come out since "My Love". There's more than a year's worth of influence cycles left out of that equation.