Rolling R&B Thread 2012

considering 90% of what ilm has given a fuck about this year that's practically a recommendation at this point

for serious she was talking about ilm?

in truth i want to hear the k. michelle mixtape - perennially an artist where my failure to fall head over heels in love feels like a problem with me rather than a problem with the music.

what?

everything i read on the internet atm makes me want to hear no music ever again and talk about nothing that i'm actually listening to

i dare you

http://i.imgur.com/MWVTy.png

So K. Michelle definitely picked the wrong day to release her mixtape. Ah well.

i saw her video about masturbating on MTV Jams today

of the three r&b things released this week that i listened to today, the wynter gordon ep was the best. bit more straightforward than "stimela" would have had you expecting but still pretty good.

the k michelle one has me a bit worried about her tbh, it has its high points but overall has this vibe of someone who missed her moment. what is she doing in a reality tv show and naked on the cover and talking about her ass somuch :(

still better than frank ocean, mind.

K Michelle is autotune hell

(at least on the first track)

please don't listen to this if it's your introduction to her!!!!!

her mixtape from a couple of years back, what's the 911, is AMAZING

this is just odds and ends of someone who has no idea what she should be doing

though dan should def hear wynter gordon's "stimela"

http://soundcloud.com/wynter-gordon-doleo/stimela

I want to go back to K Michelle but my first impression is "imagine if Keyshia Cole wasn't completely terrible and could sing"

okay "Stimela" is great

even if it does sounds like it's named after an STD

it sounds like an outtake from So

these are my top 5 k michelle joints

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH21KcQzI1M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlCMetckhu8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi1mhFQjhu8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1exXltbeIW4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRF6inHDMlc

"stimela" is the zulu word for locomotive

if she would holler less and sing more, she wouldn't be so flat at the end of that performance of "Where They Do That At"

I like her voice a lot, tho

Yeah, there's a just-fucking around quality to a lot of this mixtape, and at 24 tracks it is scattered by nature—definitely a mixtape, not an album—but there are a lot of gems throughout and I'm constantly in awe of her voice and her confidence. I think "Irrelevant" holds its own with most of the tracks Lex posted above, too

yeah i like "irrelevant" - it was on a previous mixtape tho

That Wynter Gordon song is like listening to Dolores O'Riordan from The Cranberries try to sing Drakewave. Ugh.

am I more out of touch than I thought or does that comment make absolutely no sense

I mean, I do admit part of me was thinking "lol Wynter's backing track is a little like sped-up Frank Ocean" but how do you get any type of Cranberries vibe off of her

I'd say Shakira.

The track's good.

xp yeah, wtf.

I didn't realize her EP was out tho. Gotta check that. "Stimela" is one of my favorite songs this year.

Could go Cranberries or Shakira, since they both since in half-yodeled Alanis Morissettisms. I went with Cranberries, because I like Cranberries less

by that logic you could say Jordin Sparks sounded like Dolores O'Riordan on "No Air"

which no one would actually say because it would be super stupid

nice

It's a lot closer to Dawn than Drake anyways.

Yeah but even the Dawn EP is closer to Drake than some ppl here want to admit

Guys did you know that everything in this thread is R&B and Drake is R&B ==== you are all listening to DRAKE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ajKytShi_c

can we least get the correct case study up?

xp Oh come on; is that seriously what you thought I was suggesting? Do I really have to post side-by-side embeds of "Faith" and "Take Care"? Obviously the two acts share a fair amount of common influences, especially when they are both in their downtempo modes, which is often lately

Surely the real damning comparison is that Wynter sounds like Y Kant Tori Read (e.g. "Cool on your Island").

But I generally approve of this sound being revived.

but "cool on your island" is amazing

Who here hates "Take Care" for its music / general structure?

AFAIK most people dislike Drake for his voice, then his lyrics, then maybe the really really wishy-washy sonics of stuff like "Marvin's Room" (but that is the smallest group of Drake haters).

So invoking Drake as the boogeyman because an R&B tune is all emoto-house seems like missing the point of Drake hate.

but "cool on your island" is amazing

yeah sorry "damning" was meant to be in scare quotes. I agree!

anyway even a novice like me can hear the afropop foundations of "stimela", from its name to the rhythms and the ululating. this is the track it was based on, it seems

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4Bb7p9gggc

and yeah a lot of the rest of the EP is weirdly 90s female singer-songwriter alt-rock which is a GOOD THING, if surprising

plenty of actual drake tracks can be made pretty good, even great, by the simple step of Removing Drake, tim otm. not that he's a particularly useful comparison for dawn (especially not "faith"! that's far more in line with that kelis rave album) or wynter (at any point really)

I wasn't trying to use Drake as a pejorative. Armor On just always seemed to me like Dawn's (often smarter, deeper) spin on the same chilly sounds. There's a lot of Kanye West in there, too. She was working from a foundation that those two really popularized.

I don't mind the rest of the Wynter Gordon release—that track rtc posted is ok—"Stimela" just lays on the shrillness and Lion King mysticism way too thick for me

chilly electronics in r&b hardly began with drake and kanye though

I know. But for better or worse they've led the current zeitgeist

i hear tons of '808s & heartbreaks' in dawn's record but then again i don't think that's a bad thing

drake, less so

i was also rather unimpressed w/ that wynter gordon song

yeah 'giving in' is my fave track on the thing i must confess

can see where the cranners comparisons come from but that one reminds me most of when britney does it on her album cuts and i luv those

i think it's readily evident and hardly a controversial assertion that we play in a larger, greyer area than the shrillest weekend/drakephobes ever care to admit