Rolling R&B Thread 2007

Who would you say it is, Al? (Note: I don't necessarily think its Ciara and haven't really thought about this much, but she's as good an answer as anyone helse.)

'and i' was never a single in the uk.

it's a bizarre choice, if they wanted a slower single off goodies why not 'next to you'? that was gorgeous.

I dunno, Reverend. As much as I hate to say it, though, maybe Beyonce, if only because her last album had like 8 singles and I liked most of them. Or Ne-Yo? Or someone much less popular who's only had a couple singles in the past 2 years but were both very good, I guess.

al, i think simple statistics fall by the wayside when there's very creative, very individual game-changing (do not pull me up on gamechanging kthnxbye) classics out of the blue like 'goodies', 'oh' and 'promise' in the reckoning. beyonce sure does churn out the hits, but it feels kinda more about the wider rnb machine with her too - the hint of ciara's auteurism is what people are responding to here. *and having favourites is a part of pop music too, after all* ding ding bleh

(ooh see , that last line is almost teenpop-crit level condescension! and since i'm here and all-

Unlike Tim F, I don't think there will be anything "secretly" good about this whatsoever. Cindy Mayweather cannot fail, any more than an adorable android child could go crazy and try to cut mommy's hair while she's sleepi--uh oh. (MyTropolis)

-- dabug, Monday, May 21, 2007 10:01 PM (2 days ago)

SCREW YOU AND YOUR MEALY MOUTHED KOGANEERING DUDE)

(i love a good turfwar!)

anyhoo i don't think i can really endorse this brave new pixelpop genre i'm charged with creating; its curatorial desperation seems reynoldsian at best, frankly, and one finds little evidence to support it. more importantly there's no real cognitive pleasure in using it! cos most of the songs brought up sound to me like only the results of the most gentle and glacially natural of evolutions of various rnb trends spanning the last decade - the tim&bob fad was just the re-lukewarming of vague old timbaland easternisms, surely (proof positive is in the sheer second-rungness of the artists involved, because fake tim is and seemingly always will be the first refuge of the budding rnb scoundrel) - and it seems unremarkable to separate something so well woven in by now. no?

having said that, noting that more and more people expect FX to validate moaning n groaning and zero actual songwriting is fair game. it's pretty much my whole beef with bobby v.

also 'wreck' was cool, how comes that didnt make the cut

lol "koganeering"

kath mcphee has loads of danja beats on her album - 'love story' is the next single i think, and takes the unlikely form of a ronson-soul bosher for some reason. also i might be wrong but keri hilson is or has been part of this clutch lot?

frank fauxgan is also up 4 grabs deej

oh yeah and that meg rochell/r-les really is nice - see now, New Sweet Amateurism on the other hand is something i can get behind!

my decision regarding the raging toes/heels furore is as follows (as if i gave the slightest toss originally, but hey if i must be taken seriously) - OPEN TOES because i am less interested in keri's use of shoe as vector into relationship issues and more taken with kath's delightfully bland ruminations on the day to day of lady life:

I'm lovin' these sling-back shoes
I like the way they stay loose
I could wear them all day
And listen to the click-clack
Shoes like this make me hate flats.

no doubt!

Yeah, point taken about Ciara's auteurism and all (even if it generally translates to = bogging down her album with fucking monologues). My inner pedant is still very tempted to challenge the definition of "Goodies" as a "game-changing classic(s) out of the blue" though, shit sounded exactly like "Freek-A-Leek" which sounded exactly like "Yeah!" I have to give Ciara credit, I did not expect her to become a multi-platinum franchise on the back of Lil Jon's hit parade, and she definitely succeeded (commercially) where, say, Brooke Valentine and Nivea failed with similiar attempts. But that song was gonna happen with or without her. "Promise," on the other hand, yes, classic, and I hate "Oh" but it's unique enough that I'll give it a pass.

no yeah i do forget that i was fairly ambivalent to goodies at the time too (and still am really, cos i dont reckon ive heard it again since tbh) - maddeningly, stiflingly static in the same way as natasha's 'so sick' i guess, lex's manful extolling of which i still like to resist - but the way it totally purified what u rightly pointed to as its incremental forebearers in one fell swoop is kinda the essence of ciara's popstar/singles artist power.

in a way it's like the classic poptimist strategy of waiting for madonnna or whoever to neatly distill whatever trends are in the air in one go - except that largely ciara's trends in her singles are her own invented ones, like 'promise' and 'oh' (which i kinda love you for being nutty enough to hate), or ones she's laid full claim to herself like the '1,2 get up' thing. and there's the dancing too obv, which no one else is doing. so it all creates this clear, decisive brand that intoxicates people so.

blah blah.

so

- who will make a case for chris brown's single

- mario & neyo together again for 'how do i breathe' = am i suckered again, apparently so!

- also kinda love mario's 'kryptonite' w/ rich boy just for literally jacking all of 2007 in one mouthful

- am about to listen to carl thomas' album, i think it will be good! anyone heard tank's?

SCREW YOU AND YOUR MEALY MOUTHED KOGANEERING DUDE

No, Kogan is the Koganeer. I'm more of a Koganette.

Anyway, that wasn't condescending at all! I'm just excited about it and thought if I posted that here someone might tell me to fuck off. Which is what happened. Mostly I just think "Metropolis" is cool! Almost as good as "AI."

(And I know y'all aren't going to let the teenpop thread have that new Rihanna album...even tho it's probably closer to teenpop than R&B.)

(Don't mind me being idiotic...R&B and teenpop != mutually exclusive. Shouldn't really be much of a turf war!)

- mario & neyo together again for 'how do i breathe' = am i suckered again, apparently so!

Actually, apparently it's just Stargate but not Ne-Yo, Mario co-wrote the tune with some other cat I can't remember the name of. Baltimore radio's had the song since like the middle of last year, I guess cause he's from here and all, but it never seemed to take off, and once he started leaking other songs like "Kryptonite" and "Crying Out For Me" I figured he'd moved on from that song. So I was kinda surprised in the past few weeks to see that "How Do I Breathe" was going for adds and getting a video after all and I'm kinda reassessing. Still feels like a weak retread of "Let Me Love Youth" but it has its charms nonetheless. I kinda wish he'd go back to the exciteable uptempo vibe of "C'mon" and "Just A Friend 2002," though.

haha is 'let me love youth' some r kelly b-side i missed

lol

"He didn't really come with anything for me in the direction we were going in. We got that 'How Do I Breathe' song, which is more like the style of writing that you would hear from Ne-Yo," Mario told SOHH exclusively.

this guy doesnt just look retarded huh

ouch!

I went to the Scream Tour when it came here a few months ago, and Mario was billed to perform, but instead he came out at the beginning of the show to announce that he wouldn't be performing. Ever since then I've regarded him as an enigma.

i quite liked his brief artistic struggle trying to decide whether he should become 'mario barrett'!

also hold on, i've got this mario song here called "what is it gonna be" and nonwithstanding the obv stargate beat the opening line is

"i think prince might have said it best / when he said the beautiful ones, they hurt you every time"

and if that isnt neyo's corny-ass handiwork then i will eat every hat i've ever laid eyes on. oh well.

anyway yeah i had thought 'how do i breathe' only sounded familiar cos it's a total rip-off, but if theyve been holding it back then it's probly been timed just right nostalgia-wise. everything else i've heard apart from 'kryptonite' has been rubbish. especially the neptunes one where it seems like pharrell's trying to corrupt him like he did omarion on 'touch'.

"Touch" is the best thing Omarion's done.

Reading todays posts on this thread makes me realize I'm like a month behind everyone else.

Re: "Touch": All middle eight & pillow talk + cool progression = awesome

The fact that "Anonymous" has become a hit and "Wonder Woman" hasn't is fucking criminal.

I don't really think either is much of a hit yet, they both still seem to be climbing the charts. "Anonymous" is higher now but I've heard "Wonder Woman" a lot more, for some reason. I still can't get my head around "Wonder Woman," it seems like kind of a mess.

Agreed on "Touch," though. I despised it at first and then grew to love it.

Fantasia's "When I See U" might've just become my favorite R&B single of the year so far.

"having said that, noting that more and more people expect FX to validate moaning n groaning and zero actual songwriting is fair game. it's pretty much my whole beef with bobby v."

Yeah this is what I meant. What I like about "Rearview (riding)" is that it's the first Bobby song apart from the three big singles on the first album to do fx X songwriting properly.

rtc you're probably right about the desperation involved in championing this stuff. In my defence I've always loved this style even before it was a style as such. It's def. not a radical new thing.

Hmmm. "Anonymous" is getting quite a bit of airplay here, whereas I haven't heard "Wonder Woman" out at all. I think some of the messiness is what I like about it. There's a lot going on.

Anyone else liking T-Pain & Akon's "Bartender"? I'm actually looking forward to the T-Pain album, (which I haven't really heard anything about) amazingly enough.

ahh fantasia's album is another one i kept meaning to get around to - i suspect it's been totally underrated. (dunno what i've based that on tbh)

'touch' worked in reverse 4 me; seduced at first, but it's just a nasty little song really! pharrell at his sleazy worst.

t-pain i think about a lot. it's easy (too easy) to clown an ugly little electro-squealing piggy, and he sure knows it, so it makes for an interesting relationship. can't be bovd to go any deeper than that now. 'bartender' should feel cuter than it does tho, wdnt u say.

http://g-ec2.images-amazon.com/images/I/515X7zuzq5L._AA240_.jpg

or should i say FANTASIA JAXX

yeah even though I don't really care for his solo singles, I might check out T-Pain's album just on the strength of loving his increasingly weird remix cameos. if his label lets him wild out a little on the deep cuts he could end up with a really interesting album.

did you ever hear his first? i havent revisited for a while, but i liked it a lot. i guess my thing with him is you get the impression he's thinking ok he's ugly, ok his voice is serviceable at best, ok he'll never be anyone's star, but maybe if he makes a leering ass out of himself, ramps up the vocoder and KEEPS THOSE SHADES ON someone will get round to feeling his lovely songcraft and admirable production skills one day. it's almost touching that he ended up finding akon.

yeah, T-Pain totally has an insecure, self-deprecating thing going on, I really felt for the guy when he did that interview with MTV about the song with Bow Wow: "For him to be calling me, he could have called anybody. He could have called Akon! But he called the dude that everybody says looks like the neighborhood weed man. Everybody is dissing me, they don't like my music, they don't like how I look, 'he can't sing,' and Bow called that person? You can't imagine how that feels." poor sad T-Panda :(

haha wow i never imagined he was that depressed!! i dont even make music and i still have to send bow wow to voicemail.

also if you look at the way the singles have dropped - 'in luv with a stripper' pretty much only runs with the same loserish thing 'i'm sprung' had, and now 'bartender' follows 'buy u a drank'. say what u want about canny marketing, but there's so much more to t-pain on that album for him to be reducing himself to a gimmick all the time. like even bloody 'dance floor', the biggest fruitiest one note sell-out track ever (erm i think catchdubs likened it to fatboy slim) and he's trying to say it's an album track? no way was it an album track when he was making it in the studio.

i can't fathom why he hasnt done any outside productions. maybe yeah, no one's asking him :(

this deserved a bit of shine last year too i think

New Keyshia Cole single, samples Mtume, features Missy and Lil Kim:

http://www.zshare.net/audio/196836570fe3a4/

I dunno what I think of it yet...

RTC thank you so much for recommending the Polow Da Don remix of "Get Up" BTW.

thought you might find it handy for wanderlust pt2 innit!

seriously, if it hadntve appeared randomly in january, billed as a remix to a single everyone knew, then people would be going ape. they ought to have been anyway - truly, it is a stupendous thing.

polow-wise kelly r's 'like this' remains beyond brilliant. wake up world! you gotta rep for kelly, always:

http://www.teenhollywood.com/d.asp?r=149842

Singer Kelly Rowland is harbouring a crush on Pirates Of The Caribbean star Orlando Bloom.

The former Destiny's Child singer is a big fan of the blockbuster movie franchise but insists she prefers Bloom over his hunky co-star Johnny Depp.

She says, "I think Orlando Bloom is the most beautiful man in the world! In Pirates Of The Caribbean, with that dirt on his face... that's hot."

the crazy bitch!!

Yeah, the "Get Up" remix really is an amazing track, I still hear it now and again on the late night slow jam radio sets. I think it got overshadowed by the "Promise" remix coming out at almost the exact same time.

oh also check out the random new mix of 'green light' as well, a poor man's 'fallen rmx'! but with young buck on the amen break! i especially like how it seems to ramp up the blatant amerie-baiting of the original just that bit further.

-- r|t|c, Wednesday, April 18, 2007 2:10 AM

this is still worth bothering to hear, as remixes go.

I think what gives Polow the edge with this stuff is how heavy (almost clunky) his beats are in spite of swaddling them in tearjerking synth cumulus. It makes it all very much more emotional, like, the stakes become really high or something! Who would have thought "Get Up" would sound so wracked and bittersweet (big kudos to Ciara here too, she sounds great)? Distant distant relative of the old Trackmasters remixes I guess, although it's not just the name that makes me think of Paul Poli as well.

(conversely, the precise problem with a lot of the candyfluff timbaland/tim & bob style stuff is that the stakes don't seem high enough, the utopian glint of the music and the vocals (cos they're all perfect loverboy vocals) feels too easily attained and thus not worth much. Sometimes you gotta work hard for it. Interesting then to work out why, of the recent stuff, what does work works - "Rearview (Ridin)" is slow and dark in the vein of "Tell Me", but i have no idea with Lloyd's "You", it's just too too good I guess)

Alright, more thoughts on "Wonder Woman" vs "Anonymous".

I think "Wonder Woman" has what you're talking about, Tim. It's very dark and unhappy-sounding. Forboding, almost, a bit less slick than the other (more popular) recent Timbo+R&B dude singles of late. Trey completely tries to oversell it; there's no reason "Wonder Woman" should be menacing, but he has to bring out this unnecessarily masculine tone (which surprised me. The stuff I'd heard from him before had him sounding very thin) that doesn't really fit the song. But that actually ends up working in his favor, as the voice ends up adding to the general darkness, and thus ups the stakes.

"Anonymous" on the other hand, has Valentino acting like a big, giant puss, and Timbo's production does nothing to toughen him up. Maybe, unlike Trey, Bobby has nothing to react against, no instigator to tell him to be a man, no stakes. Also, no tune, but that's a seperate problem.

Moving along, "Get Up" remix pwns all, we hold these truths to be self-evident, etc.

And WTF is this? Some song that jacks "Stand By Me" and replaces Ben E. King with some Fakon dude, (he even mentions that he went to jail!) who sounds like he's just singing through his nose to sound African or whatever, singing the word "suicidal" over and over. Oh, fuck! You who he sounds like? The "Fuck You, I Don't Want You Back" guy. Disgusting. Anyway, this is easily the worst thing on the radio right now.

You got me suicidal... suicidal... SUICIDALLLLLL

ok so i don't really have anything to say, or rather can be bovd to think anything thru, it's just that all the other threads on this fuckass board make my eyes bleed. someone talk.

eamon! hating on eamon is 4bidden, for "i love them hoes" is an alltime classic. it takes too much effort to hate on sean kingston - this is how you know you love it really, you slags.

(i seriously didnt think the world could manage a more disgusting white dude than scotty storch, but jr rotem take a bow! also at least with storch you feel he could make a good beat if he wanted to)

well done lance bass for making a new career for himself as part of the runners though.

is it just 'so sick' you hate rtc, or 'hey hey hey' as well?

well first of all i should say, people always be taking my hate so literal. there are only three songs i definitely, unquestionably HAAAATE this year and they are: 'give it to me', 'girlfriend', and 'we taking over'. and mainly i say that cos those are songs that people really really like, so an opinion is all too necessary. everything else is not worth the effort to feel strongly about and so therefore are also up 4 grabs for future changing of mind. they also come in handy for poking fun at other people as and when, obv.

sooo anyway let's listen to natasha's oeuvre again. not like i'm gonna hear them on the radio or anything. 'so sick', here we go

beat not bad in itself, but a bit passe these days. needs someone exciti- guhhhh hello the clipse. wack by default. and now AHHH LORD WHAT A HIDEOUS SOUND NATASHA MAKES. chorus is ok tho, and i like the scratches and why-why-why stutters, and the smooth breakdown - maximal nods making the minimal more severe. so it seems to have a certitide that it knows what its doing, yet not enough so that you find out by yrself like kelly r's 'like this'. this is a writer's record, nonexistent without some sort of championing, a revealing. this is what's playing when nails are getting did at the critical salon. harsh right?

'hey hey hey' i've come to ummm not like, but lets say value for its blahzay inconsequential vibe - not many tunes around have this as standard. perhaps this is it being bubblegum, or whatever.