Rolling R&B Thread 2007

this bint, joy denelane & black buddafly = ficht nicht mit german rnb canon

so did any of yall make good your resolutions to check out t-pain's album? i don't think it's v good really, but this seems beside the point when 10 minutes into an album of freaky tales and various degrees of tipsy antics you come across t-pain's utterly terrifying "turns out i got hiv so now i'm gonna get drunk and kill myself" giant wailing setpiece LIKE WHAT WERE YOU THINKING MAN?!?!?!

the new adina howard lp private show is good stuff. 40 minutes short, and unfussily all about sex as usual, but with nice nonstop consistently competent 3rd party production throughout; by 3rd party i'm meaning the kind of modern but pleasingly indistinct dancey beats you found on, say, hilary duff's latest album, except adina has this experienced lady control over everything that stops you getting impatient like you do with younger fancies. in fact yeah, it's pretty much a teenpop album for the grown & sexy! i liked it.

really it's a classic example of the kind of generic-ass album i secretly love more than any other - the kind where i couldnt name you one cut from that you should make the effort to check, but when it comes to sticking a cd on for the duration you'll always pick over a demanding, peaks & troughsy major label big name one. this is not an easy skill tho! mariah probly managed it, but otherwise i'd reckon it's usually the preserve of random midrange latino urban stragglers like natalie / baby bash / rob g / frankie j / play n skillz / javier / cynthia lissette / jeannie ortega / paula deanda / happy perez, you name it. i love all those unassuming fuckers.

like, could you fuck with a whole album of stuff like this? hell yeah u could!

javier's one was just a great album full stop. al should check it, i get the feeling he's got a soft spot for this shit too. stuff like 'wassup' and 'is this love' are a way better bet than that new musiq soulchild or whatever.

and the frankie j with mannie fresh from last year, that was good too

lol @ the Amazon customer review titled "'Left Of Center' is Right Of Mediocrity!"

Baby Bash's "Suga Suga" is secretly the best song of the past ten years, but nobody knows this except for me and this one Mexican dude I went to high school with who had it coming out of his headphones for the entirety of senior year.

Oh yeah, and that Frankie J/Mannie Fresh is good, too.

Rob I want that Anita Howard album!

Freaky middle-aged Hillary beats!

I WAS THE ONLY ONE ON HERE REPPIN BABY BASH OR FRANKIE J, everyone laughed at meeeeeee

Okay to be fair I never liked Baby Bash. I mean, just on a visual level or something. Also anonymous R&B is good but I kind of draw the line at anonymous R&B with endless amounts of latin guitar. Next y'all be telling me that I should have bought Dante Thomas's album.

(girls always think "Miss California" is the best thing, it's always pandemonium on the floor)

Baby Bash looks like some kind of weird plush doll, and his album titles (Tha Smokin' Nephew, Super Saucy, Ronnie Ray All Day) make him seem even more surreal. "Suga Suga" was definitely a weirdly under-the-radar hit. It went top 10, but like The Reverend said, I know like one person who actually knew it and was into it. I was never crazy about it, but "That Girl" was one of my favorite R&B singles of last year. Mannie should do more R&B.

Actually "That Girl" by Maxi Priest is also kinda relevant here.

i kind of like boring mid-tempo latin-lite r&b, but only so much

suga suga how you get so flyyyy! badboy tune. and spanish guitar is always good. baby bash is also, on occasion, an excellent proof of the #1 IRON LAW OF MUSIC that even the weakest bone thugs biter >>>>>> yr fave rapper

(and i only heard crucial conflict's 'hay' for the first time last month, what have i been doing with my life? deej?)

tim i oughta admit that adina's probly isnt anywhere near as motorbooty as duff's, but the vibe is the same to me! btw if yr looking for some more randy old madams then syleena johnson's last alb springs vaguely to mind. filth! or maybe that was just the one tune called 'phone sex', i can't remember.

The best shit is when Chingo Bling and Baby Bash get together, that is some true Tejican smoked-out surreality for sure. I am actually counting the days until They Can't Deport Us All drops.

i see the teenpop thread is hamfistedly fumbling its way around paula deanda as well

'doin too much' = super classic realness

yeah see now chingo bling is the line i won't cross

well, Paula is kind of hamfisted and fumbling herself, don't you think? that guy The DEY on "Walk Away" is hilarious, "Sometimes I hug her, wish that it was you that I'm huggin'/ And I realize how much I'm buggin."

well you can stay on your side of the line then r t c but I guarantee it's a lot more fun over here

ha yeah but paula's in love and teenpop 2k7 only wishes it was

also, they will never realize how much they're buggin'.

just going back to the state of male rnb - i guess the one loophole i kinda missed in terms of drab loverboys & the 90s (and also tying into deep neyo-ian genre fetish as well) is... pretty ricky? they are also the silliest group of all time however. (westwood radio freestyle: "i eat that thang with the legs on / something something then i blow it in your bum" :O )

not to mention their effect on the youth.

(hysterics)

Fuck Pretty Ricky. They are getting a DtI thread.

"Suga Suga" sounds way more Texan than any of that Screwston bullsh. Bash sounds like he's about to saddle up a horse and ride off into the sunset on that shit.

be like me and listen to good-sized clipettes of kelly r's album here

so i'm a lil wary of being a serial repper of the (uh oh) generic now, but this... i dunno, i think it's got something. a sort of quiet, deliberate confidence to it. something you could grow to love. there's a good couple moments in those clips ('flashback' particularly, cos it's been like a year since that leaked and i'm still no nearer to finding a resolution on it) where i thought, well now if this was teedra singing, man i'd be feeling this, but then that's just it with kelly innit; the kinda civil sensitivity that keeps its alarm-ringing and dish-breaking indoors. and considering some were already seeming to struggle with 'like this' not smashing them over the head, you wonder if people are gonna be willing to invest enough to get into this. interesting.

after yesterday i guess you could say this is might be the grown n sexy version of cassie's album.

maybe that's going too far.

I haven't heard anything from Kelly R. that convinces me she should be a solo artist, but I haven't tried that hard, either.

Any hangups I had going into the Amerie album were completely misguided. It is yoga fucking flambe.

I'm liking that new Eve single, "Tambourine"

Yeah, I only heard it a couple times but remember it being awesome.

Kelly Clarkson will sell a fucking shitload of copies, but Amerie's record is the one I'm even looking more forward to.

i was on the fence about 'tambourine', but the stefani-esque video tipped me firmly into the LOVE IT side.

yeah, stefani-esque is almost too kind! esp when she goes straight from the 'what you waiting for' garden into 'sweet escape' goldworld.

after the intro sean paul 'get busy'-isms it runs out of steam way fast imo.

b-b-but it's like a slightly caffeinated 'like this'! (which has totally grown on me in the past week)

:[

i'll get back to you on that.

nahhhh sod it. not having it! they have like, vague go-go elements in common i suppose (although i tend to hear more of a elegant bollywood swank in 'like this' - innnnteresting how similar they can sound eh, zzzzzz), and eve duh, but that's all i hear.

my opinion of "Tambourine" has improved slightly since I first heard it (the goofy video helped), but it still feels to me like a very lightweight version of what Swizz did on Remy Ma's "Whuteva."

have u heard ny's mixtape lex? she seems to be the only rng chick to date with any kind of media push, but what i've heard don't seem too special. and yet again the rng defeat of people's most regular rnb sounding stuff being the hits applies re: 'willow', which i was surprised to hear on daytime kiss fm.

it's also produced by ukg geezer duncan powell, so double slap in the face there i guess!

i think the go-go elements are well to the fore on both ‘tambourine’ and ‘like this’! not just y’know the samples and so on, but the way the beats trip over themselves in this delightfully relaxed way, and both kelly and eve are really carefree…the way they handle the tempo changes as well. i do hear a bit of ‘whuteva’ in ‘tambourine’ but it actually took me a couple of listens to even notice those crunk slabs…’whuteva’ itself always seemed to be a rather leaden-footed take on ebony eyez’ ‘in ya face’.

have had ny recommended to me loads, i checked out her myspazz last night and was a bit underwhelmed, it’s a bit…nu-soul? reminded me slightly of that amazing amel larrieux track from last year but not as good, but it might grow on me. tanya is still the r&g girl du jour for me. though has sadie ama done anything since her single stiffed?

x-post

That Chris Brown "Cinderella" remix of/with Rihanna "Umbrella" is all over dc and Baltimore radio. It's just ok.

I don't hear a bit of Go-Go in "Tambourine." It's much too fast, for starters.

Man just when I started to get used to "Umbrella" to the point that I could leave the station on when it came on the radio, they put fucking demon child CHRIS BROWN on it. For a couple days I kept catching that remix at the very end and I was like who the fuck is hooting ad libs over the outro?

havent seen much of sadie. was 'let me take you away' ever a proper single? it certainly feels as established an rng tune as there's been in the last few years.

'willow' is vaguely folksy, yeah. crispy leaves and all that. which amel larrieux track do you mean though? i quite liked 'magic', but it was no stunna or anything - she'll always be a 1 hit wonder to me. she had a dull album of jazz standards this year as well.

that tanya's ok, in a uk charity case kinda way. the rng way! do you like lauren mason? i hear she's blonde.

haha yeah i think the go-goness of 'tambourine' is entirely in some completely wrongheaqded subconscious old soul man vibe you get from the sample. also tambourines, they use tambourines in go-go right? WE DON'T EVEN KNOW

yeah the chorus sample is kind of a Chuck Brown-ish old man voice (where's that sample from, anyway?). I guess tambourines would have to be one of the 80 different percussion instruments every Go-Go band has, but at the moment I'm trying to think of a prominent use of tambourine in a Go-Go song and I'm not really hearing it. D.C radio definitely LOVES the overt Go-Go vibe in "Like This," though.

"Blow Your Whistle" by Chuck Brown & The Soul Searchers

says the internet. u were correct.

haha yeah i think the go-goness of 'tambourine' is entirely in some completely wrongheaqded subconscious old soul man vibe you get from the sample.

aguilera to thread, obv - though for all the actual musical parallels 'tambourine' still has a v different feel to something like 'candyman'.

re larrieux - 'gills and tails'! so so sultry - "i feel my skin...growing...scales..." i bought the album off the back of that but nothing else grabbed me, though it was all pleasant enough.

hmm! i'll put that on l8r. 'get up' is the one i remember her for.

since amel larrieux & rng are likely to never darken a convo together ever again, i will relate this shitty story for no one's benefit. so one time we heard cameo play this rng number by IMP BATCH (who were awesome at the time with gype riddim u may recall) (where are they now!) and the beat was totally great and for once, for once it had a proper song to it. impressed! later though it came to light thru nerdery that these milton keynes teens had somehow got ahold of some random larrieux accapella, stuck it on top and tried to get away with it. i guess they must have just typed pella into limewire, but it was fun to imagine them being massive nu-soul herbs. and it was still a good beat.

THAT'S the story. now i can live my life.

btw have you guys heard the new Chuck Brown album? made a dent on the the Billboard R&B chart and Go-Go-dude-turned-Mary J./Faith Evans producer Chucky Thompson did tracks on it, so I'd say it's fair game to discuss here. the single I heard was kind of a goofy thing with programmed drums and a little kid rapping on it, though, so it seems more like a weird misbegotten crossover attempt than the regular old Go-Go I'd rather hear.

that was a good story rtc! it amused me anyway.