Rolling R&B Thread 2009

hmm i seem to have daybreak already, but it calls itself the oscillations: sine

corneille is cool btw. saw him at a showcase the other day. struck me as a bit hamilton-lite (no bad thing), will have to dig out the music again though. i guess the back story will get him a ton of press

What's the backstory?

it's kinda harrowing - his entire family was killed in the rwandan genocide when he was a teenager (slaughtered in front of him iirc, he only escaped by hiding), he fled on foot to the congo and was taken in by some german friends of the family

friend of mine saw muhsinah live on sunday - apparently she dropped the mix and it became apparent she was miming :(

*mic

Weird. I saw her open for Teedra Moses a couple weeks ago and thought she stole the show (only because Teedra played almost the same set as she did 2 years ago and the sound was fucked for the first half).

am i the only one who feels like Keri's "Make Love" is going to be a cover of 4 non blondes' "what's up" when it comes on?

richgirl's '24s' sounds ill at ease to me. rich should not be having a label imo.

i should not be having opinions imo.

haha, i'll have to listen to that later. "24s" is definitely flawed and dated (sounds like it could've come off the same beat tape as "Soldier"), but i mean how high are we raising the imaginary bar producers/artists/etc. to define as "should be having a label"? everyone who can make a couple hits gets an imprint, either they make shit work or they don't and it usually doesn't have a lot to do with their actual level of talent or clout.

also is that a typo or are we bringing "ain" back? what up cold mountain!

well i meant it more like that rich has been in something of a rut to me for a while now post-amerie (even during really, towards the end) and so the last thing he should be doing artistically is needlessly boxing himself in further by betting all his chips on a signature sound or whatever - especially since he's never been the kinda hollerin-ass fool to qualify as a big name cachet guy and has always been a classic producer's producer. (you only have to look at nu-polow floundering under the weight of his selfstyled rep, doing panic clunking 'bangers' from memory just to keep his head above water.)

up until this one song (which tbh i'm just going wooooo over in this moment, dust might even settle on that too for all i know) i'd have loved to have seen rich duck out of the game and quietly do random outside the box shit and remixes and stuff, salaam remi style - it wouldve like, stretched him artistically.

i dunno...i mean before the Rich Girl stuff he basically hadn't had anything out on a major label in almost 3 years AFAIK, is that not ducking out enough? for all we know he was doing random outside the box shit but as far as official releases it's been radio silence. still kinda want to hear the stuff he was supposed to do for Before I Self Destruct that i'm sure got cut 8 release dates ago.

well, yeah sure he mightve done, how do you want me to answer that? i just meant ducking out like not being a name producer anymore and having the freedom to fuck around getting mark ronson money here random olde england or doing soundtracks or hanging with reggae dudes, whatever! (i am implying of course that i think he in particular may be very suited to that.)

ur right about the datedness of 24s anyway (though some of it, like the synth at the end is pure class) - the xylophone is quite lil jonnish as well. (and wasn't soldier already pretty stale idea-wise when it first came out or am i misremembering?) but above all i wodner if the richgirl sanging mode is just too unfashionable now to get any sort of a foothold these days. (guess at least theyll be able to tell their grandkids they were a baziliion times better than cherish though.)

i dunno, i never particularly liked "Soldier," but more that it sounded it kind of flat and brittle compared to his breakbeat stuff than that it felt like it was chasing or trailing behind any dominant trend/idea. the xylophones always bring "Triggerman" to mind more than Lil Jon or anything else. i am curious what RH has been up to since 2006, like if he just kept pitching tracks to big artists until they stopped returning his calls or has been trying to get this group off the ground for the longest time and finally did or what. either way, i don't know if i could ever see him woodshedding and actually changing his style up significantly.

all the Rich Girls sound like Beyonce/Kelly/Solange to me, and at least some of them still have careers so i dunno if that's too unfashionable.

i too have gotten my hands on the actual! final! fantasy ride. it's good, of course, but nowhere near as good as it could have been. leaving off "echo" is just fucking inexplicable and i'll leave it at that. i really like the two Dream songs, particularly "lover's thing". neither missy on "work" or CB on "turntables" really add anything to the songs, which were just fine without them. "like a surgeon" is just retarded; it's like if 77 tried to write ciara a song lyric-wise and, as i believe lex said somewhere, is pretty hookless.
one major flaw i can pick out with this overall is the lack of a real cohesive feel. it could be due in part to the fact that we've been jamming most of these songs for the last five or six months, so they lack freshness. mostly for me, it's just that the timberlake song sounds, well, like a timberlake song, the dream songs sound like the-dream songs, and there are too many superfluous guest spots, as mentioned above, to make this feel like ciara's shit. one of the many great things about sasha fierce was its lack of guest spots, which allowed B to put her awesome personality at the fore.

i mean all that said this is still pretty good, it's still got "ciara to the stage", "love and sex and magic", "never ever", "work", "high price" and "lover's thing", all of which are jams. and of course i'll be sucked into buying the deluxe edition so i can have "echo" as well

one major flaw i can pick out with this overall is the lack of a real cohesive feel.

this is possibly bcuz it's three "mini-albums" crammed onto one disc?

that sentence was a bit vague wrt my eventual point, if you kept reading

i did, i'm just saying

K3vin OTM. that said, it's still probably one of my favourite albums of the year.

"Echo" is nice and all but I don't really the cult it's got

love that "Never Ever" has continued to rise up the R&B charts and become a sturdy little hit after they called Timberlake and left it for dead

kind of love that that's happened in my head - really love 'never ever' now

i think fantasy ride has more of a cohesive feel than i was expecting, though maybe that says more about my trepidation w/r/t total botchpotch. in a way i'd have liked them to keep the three-cd thing.

kind of love that that's happened in my head - really love 'never ever' now

YES! Somehow it has transformed from this insubstantial faux-Promise thing into a massive world conquering sea of regret. (in my head at least)

I still haven't found any good reason to care about the Ciara album.

http://i650.photobucket.com/albums/uu226/mariahfan/BROOKEITUNES600-1.jpg

kind of lol but mostly sad that 4 years after her debut B Valentine finally managed to squeak out an indie 'mixtape album' for the follow-up. "Gold Diggin" is pretty dope, though.

bad photoshop there.
Chrisette Michele's soundcheck was pretty tight.

"Slow Jukin'" is kind of awesome.

anyone else listen to the whole chrisette yet? it's pretty good, if a little toothless. the songs are so ne-yoesque (and lol gender neutral) i have a hard time not imagining him doing them better. "epiphany" and "notebook" are obv good, "blame it on me" is a pretty well-done heartstring tugger, and "porcelain doll" is as close as you're gonna get to swag with her

Ya Kid Shaffer wrote "Epiphany" and possibly other stuff, so...

the brooke valentine cover makes me a bit sad

ditto

this should've been on fantasy ride

somehow your choice of words that pic of brooke valentine in her underwears made me feel something other than sad.

― Alex in Baltimore, Tuesday, July 24, 2007 11:47 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

nice on the ciara!

feelin this new lemarvin "too many patrons"

too many "pay-trons" or too many "puhtrohns"?

did electrik red get released then?

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8xBx7ApEPCY/SN7EeWEuZbI/AAAAAAAAEHM/iYg_VSvtOdA/s320/nicole1.jpg

yeah man, end of last year as a semi-official mixtape

Gets released in 6 days according to amazon, etc.

can listen to the whole thing here fyi

http://www.myspace.com/electrikred

i thought i wouldn’t really give a fuck / but now a bitch all in loooove

otm

rip nicole wray miss u boo ;_;

hey i saw Teairra Marí on tv today, if she can crawl out of the 2005 wormhole anybody can

ER album of the year so far quite easily

I fucking love Binkie OMG. "I'm not a freak I'm not a nasty ho.... well I'm lyin but I'm classy tho"

i mean, the-dream still exists, y'know, but so far, this definitely kills keri and ciara.

nah this is better than lvm

"P Is For Power" shit yes

Y is for YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS... Vanilla. If U wanna try, boy u gotta buy.