Rolling R&B Thread 2007

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cmon bitch

kinda love 'let it go' now too, but then who would ever hate it? so um, i dunno

havent caught the new single yet but i quite liked 'didn't i tell you' ft too short; the runners seriously get more hammer horror everytime i hear them. i think the song is secretly about vampires tbh.

"so now the sun coming up, you wanna chaaange"

Things I was wrong about: "Because of You"; the Robin Thicke album. Both of those are pretty damn great.

that keke palmer vid is AWESOME, thx rtc!

np. everyone else here shd check the brick & lace/kat deluna stuff we got into on the not talking about dancehall 2007 thread btw

there are no incorrect observations whatsoever in andy k's keyshia rvw, yet i cannot back his kindly spun conclusion. the girl is a void in a bad wig.

rtc can you give a rundown of yr take on mary j's career? which albums you dig now, which you were into and have burned out on, or were blah then rediscovered or ... something. what did you think of breakthru? what about that joint w/ method man and diddy? my life vs. whats the 411?

i kind of want to understand if u think keyshia is redundant, or just overly worshipful, or why she doesn't fit in to the whole mary j mythos ... lots of great artists are initially perceived as pale imitations (i.e. the barry white bites isaac hayes! kind of nonsense that no one in their right mind would say today)

(esp cuz they were all biting lou rawls)

yeah, on one listen, the album is just really blank and barely there even by R&B standards. she sings every song the exact same way, the same climactic big note on every song, even the one that could've had a tender/sexy delivery she gives the big blown out heartbreak treatment. if she'd followed the lead of "Last Night"/"Let It Go" for some funky 80's jam aesthetic it could've been cool, but like the review said it's all warmed over 00's Mary J. (which Shareefa's album did better). a shame, because at the Keyshia show I caught over the summer she tore the house down.

and the Anthony Hamilton duet's good but would've been better if he was a co-star and not a 30-second cameo.

so deej did you actually agree or disagree or anything with me on keyshia there or does yr request for 50,000 word mjb guess papers still stand

cos (and this may sound like a cop-out) a big part of me kinda feels the whole thing is secretly predicated on way more superficial lines than str8 compare/contrasting grand narrative arcs - mjb didn't obviously invent anything either, and she's probably played around with the generics in her career as much as keyshia has, but the point is that just her delivery on its own is so uniquely tuned into that kind of necessary burnished realness, and keyshia's kind of isn't really. they could sing the same song at the same time and still mjb would sound like she's had an extra day to reflect on it, for emotions to have sunk in deeper.

on the other hand tho deej you have kinda won (if that wz ur intention) cos i now have to come out and say, yes obv keyshia is not a VOID, because her voice also conveys a different individual persona to an extent; she's way more of a hysterical hothead, she's there right in the moment, watch out dude she's taking a swing at you right now, all of that stuff. it's kinda all over the place. so i'm not sure if the question is whether she doesn't do enough justice to that persona to make it enduring, or whether she does and it's just not as immediately grabby to clamber over some jaded arms-folded first impression. you'd think it should do tho, if she were really that immediate and instinctive. (i've come to like a few of her songs after recently having made myself listen to both albums, but i don't really wanna lose the virtue of my kneejerk reaction either basically. also i often feel like i could grow to love any old tripe if i listen to it long enough, dunno if that's just me.)

even more superficially - the beats! i challenge people to name me great songs sung on terrible beats.

now let's all fucking talk about that alicia keys single. i am real addicted to it! but i'm still not quite sure why!

one is SO SUPER SOLD on it by the time it gets to the wo-oh-oh-oh-ohs but it kinda seems i gotta make the same uphill trudge to get there every time

richjuz is right about that bumptious stevie synth, dunno about the 4/4 house revival though. post-'promise' emocardiograms maybe?

I hated "No One" at first - her voice sounds terribly strained, the lyrics are trite, sub-"Don't Matter", it just sounds so cheap... but that amazing VMA performance changed my mind about it. The bridge is amazing! I see myself getting tired of it quickly, since it gets played like 30 times a day here, but for now it's cool... nowhere near "You Don't Know My Name" or " If I Aint Got You" or "How Come You Don't Call Me? ", but it's good.

"No One" is real wack to me. I want to respect its chunky beat and cheesy synths, but the way she sings it is just so heaving and overdone and the tune goes nowhere. Even Alicia Keys should be able to say more in a chorus than "noone can get in the way of what I'm feeling" over and over and over. She shoulda released the "Freedom '90" cover instead. I miss the sumptuous subtlety of "You Don't Know My Name" and "If I Ain't Got You."

(xpost - maybe I'm just Brainwasher 2 weeks ago here, but I'm kinda hoping I can hold out and keep hating this song)

your criticisms i cannot disprove

but chunky n cheesy is an enticing combo nevertheless

alicia keys feat junior reid - no one (salaam remi rmx)

HO YES

that new cheri dennis / joc / zoe is a jam also

thoughts on 2nd singles:

- the snippet that's out there of Alicia's, "Like You'll Never See Me Again," is really really fucking good, can't wait to hear the whole thing

- warming to Keyshia's after watching the video over and over

- Trey Songz' is damn near unlistenable, dude is officially out of control with the overemoting vibrato

is that trey single 'can't help but wait'? man i feel like such a lame-ass for falling for another cookiecutter stargate job but fuck it, it's a good wallow

haha keysh suddenly looked super cute on the beach for me too but i'm not having it cloud my mind

Yeah, "Can't Help But Wait." I think after that last round of Ne-Yo/Rihanna/Yamin singles Stargate is officially dead to me, but it's mostly that Trey totally overdoes it. It did kind of make me retroactively like "Wonder Woman" by comparison, though.

not sure what i wanna say about this new the dream stuff

it is curious

ughhh that dude. "Just Fine" is the only reason he isn't dead to me too.

reliable!

your keys has arrived btw, not in the mood right now but i'll check it later

anyone heard the angie stone

I really like 'Can't Help But Wait' - the elastic beat and pleasing Rhodes chords changes are what caught my ear.

Beyoncé is planning to switch musical direction on her third solo album.

The singer is reportedly prepared to ditch her usual heavy R'n'B for a more dancefloor-orientated LP.

The former Destiny's Child star has hired Brighton dance act Freemasons to work on some tracks for the record.

Freemasons' James Wiltshire told the Daily Star: "The album is going to be huge.

"It will rival anything the likes of Britney and Rihanna have done recently. Beyoncé and her team can see where mistakes were made on the last album.

"It was very American, very R'n'B and stripped back. They want to go for a more international sound this time."

can't really complain after just listening to an album as desperately flat and laboured with careworn urban zzzzz as the new mya. liberation my arse.

i hope by "international" they mean rip-off euro-cheese shit like off the new rihanna album and not some more shakira collabo bullshit.

well mr sparks, by putting 'freemasons beyonce' into youtube and taking yr pick you will discover that that is indeed what was presumably meant, yes.

or by reading the preceeding sentence :X i shouldn't read from the bottom up anymore.

this predictable-ass chris brown album can go in the bin as well. played right into al's hands alas.

mario's album sorta achieves this quite neat trick of being weirdly compelling for being even more of an anonymous soup of modern ballad production. bewilderingly elusive almost, if i were being kind.

tim finney may or may not be interested to hear that i realised that that 'keep it movin' of keke palmer's i was liking above is very much reminiscent of toya's 'no matta what (party all night)'! in fact the toya sounds very modern indeed right now with all the thedream-inspired candy cockrock guitar flirting that's about.

I will check it. I think mitch/jermaine was always a huge fan of "No Matta What" as well. I was also very partial to the underrated "I Do Pt. 2", which was er futurist in a 2004 sense more than a 2007 sense.

Pleased to hear about the next Beyonce album, sad to hear about the new Mya album (though none of the attempts-at-singles I've heard from her in the past two years have been particularly inspiring. Shame - Moodring was so good!

New Badu:

http://www.zshare.net/audio/4746046da2b183/

none of the attempts-at-singles I've heard from her in the past two years have been particularly inspiring.

Have you heard "Ridin"? That song is awesome, no idea why it hasn't caught on...

Tweet's new single is really great:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Cya6IfOxl2A

aieee clownstep!!!!

What's really good, of late? I know it's boring to love Polow so much, but, well, has he done anything recently?

Nothing really comes to mind from Polow..

Recent stuff that has been constant rotation from me lately:

- Keyshia's Album
- Jill Scott, Chrisette Michele, Ledisi,etc.
- J Valentine "She Worth The Trouble"
- Dear Jayne "Rain"
- Carl Thomas "2 Pieces"
- All of the leaked stuff from Dream's album, particularly "Falestto" which is like top 10 of the year for me.
- Tank
- J. Holiday's record, particularly the new single "Suffocate"
- The new Tweet stuff...

oh and Chaka's album.

sargent said he's into the dream stuff as well. you two should break that down. (pretty much the whole first half of the album's leaked right?)

i'm still on the fence about him - i'm sure he's quite talented, and he's certainly had his moments, but something like 'i love your girl' kinda hints at tugging at the heartstrings and then gets itself ruined by cocky carelessness and waaaay too much of that 'rnb will eat itself' selfawareness. (the supposed album title - 'love me all summer, hate me all winter' - kinda made me smile, but that vein of wry insecure amateurism is so hard to care about when you've already got t-pain. nut the fuck up dudes!) but then perhaps on a lazier navel-gazier day he may end up making sense to me.

like singing "the american dream, and you know what i mean" over glum twinkly intro is probly too cleverclever for its own good, if i do actually know what he means. but when it comes to bulding on the helplessness of "man look at shawty go-ooooooo", and shawty being someone else's girl, he's got nothing to show.

talking of cleverclever, i'm still trying to work out the ways of the clutch - check this nikki flores song, so immediately obviously a clutchwork, but why? i guess they are sometimes just very adept at scripting out little snapshots of complicated teen angst verite, and then wrapping them up in a nice bow of a cute hook or line. pretty good at playing around with their narrators, too.

my fave Clutch work this year is Cristal Q's "Impala Boy". kinda endearing how, 50 years on, teenagers are still singing Chevy love songs! (i don't know shit about cars, i only know what brands are popular with hip hop/r&b dudes & dudettes, so when i was talking once to a car-fiend friend of mine i casually bragged with my newly acquired knowledge: "so, them Impalas... huh?". he gave me this nonplussed look, a la: "what, that american crap?".)

actually, i prefer the earlier version of "Impala Boy" that was doing the rounds at the beginning of '07: more sparse but breezier, prettier, lone late night city street fresh.

wau!

shit makes so much sense it's no wonder i never thought of it before

for very agreeable corny cruisy vintage neptunes fun, new t-pain production for charlie wilson is YOU

also that new snoop song still cracks me up

but not in a bad way all told

Mario's "Crying Out for Me" is quite lovely. I actually really liked "How Do I Breathe" as well but it really didn't seem to go anywhere chart-wise. Sadly, I don't think he's ever gonna get much attention again after "Let Me Love You".

yeah, I still like his voice, am probably gonna pick up the album, but Mario's buzz is pretty low even in his hometown these days.