thread of miguel

Love the chain.

I like 'Use Me' but it seems kinda out of place on the album to me. Like a Depeche Mode cover slapped bang in the middle of an r n b album.

i don't think of "Use Me" as being an outlier in that way at all! if anything "Don't Look Back" sticks out more as not very R&B.

the D.C. grown folks R&B station, which usually only plays the occasional new joint by Maxwell or whoever amongst 70s and 80s stuff, has picked up on "Adorn"

Funny how "Adorn" actually makes more sense on grown-folks R&B formats

I'm actually starting to think I might like 'Use Me' more than 'Adorn'

I do.

me too

At least a third of the album is as much stadium rock as r&b and Use Me is especially so, but it doesn't seem particularly out of place.

I'll never be able to hear another bit of Coldplay style anthemic falsetto bluster without imagining how much better Miguel would be able to make it sound though.

When he goes for "stadium rock", he goes for stadium rock in the Purple Rain sense tho, tightly wrapped up in r&b. It's not like he's trying to be Coldplay or their ilk.

he makes stadium rock feel really intimate

like, just you & him in a massive stadium

ha otm!

When he goes for "stadium rock", he goes for stadium rock in the Purple Rain sense tho, tightly wrapped up in r&b

Oh yeah totally. The Coldplay thing was more of an aside really, like it suddenly occurred to me that Miguel would probably be the single artist most likely to take some drippy Coldplay type stadium ballad and make it amazing.

like, just you & him in a massive stadium

― lex pretend, Thursday, October 11, 2012

omg

Purple Rain was Prince's attempt at writing a Bob Seger song.

true story

i ain't judgin, if you do decide that you might be fuckin tonight
more power to you if you do decide that you might be fuckin tonight

^ this lyric is kinda radical

+ rap/r&b station here is finally playing "Adorn" in regular rotation

- it's the Wiz remix :(

wtf is wrong with the west coast man

not as many black folk as points farther east, is what it boils down to basically

i guess maybe! what's the station called?

kube 93

rube 93

lol

You do have to consider tho, that black people here aren't the largest group, or even the second biggest group, but the *FOURTH*, so if you have a station that only appeals to black listeners, it's not going to be successful. This wasn't a problem when rap & r&b were at the center of the pop consciousness, but now unfortunately your average white listener isn't interested in hearing a straight-up r&b song like "Adorn" and it's a victory that they're playing it at all. This is the first Miguel song they've picked up on, whereas Wiz has been a familiar presence on the station for the past couple years. I think they even gave "Say Yeah" some spins when it came out.

And it's like...Kube's top-40 sister station (also owned by Clear Channel) has gotten so whitewashed that literally their most-played song by a black artist right now ("Pound The Alarm") is number twenty-fucking-five on their playlist. So they've pretty much ceded the territory of even straight-up pop by black artists to Kube 93. Shit is depressing.

come to the east coast

east coast can suck my ass thru a straw westside 4 lyfe, fool

we have HOT97

def don't move to the east coast but i would say maybe leave seattle

I kind of consider this place home and perhaps quality of radio isn't exactly my number-one determinant of where I choose to live.

I've really never had any interest in living outside the SF-Vancouver coastal region tbh.

oh

bay area sounds alright

Bay area's great, so is Seattle. Portland and Vancouver a bit less so. I think the terrain/landscape/whatever is the number-one reason I love this region though. Even having grown up here, the beauty of the water/forest/mountains that are everywhere, even in the cities, never ceases to impress me. There are things I find frustrating about Seattle but they are relatively secondary concerns. Also my family and friends are super-important to me and very close (literally, my whole extended fam lives in my hometown of 100,000) I can't imagine living so far away that I can't see them on a whim.

How did this thread devolve into telling me where to live?

Also, the fresh air is something I absolutely could not live without. I did actually very briefly consider moving to Chicago once, until I found out it smells like onions.

blame dayo always

yeah in my first month or two of living here i felt like i couldn't breathe

lol calm down rev did I hit a sensitive spot

ha, possibly

was p awful for me last year living half an hour from detroit and even car radios had trouble picking up rap/r&b stations, wth america

Really? I live 45 mins north of Seattle and can not only pick up most stations from Seattle fine but most stations from Vancouver, which is 2+ hours away.

it always weirds me out that there are places in lower 48 where you can't hear much rap/R&B on the radio. i lived in friggin delaware for most of the '90s and could pick up a pretty good R&B station.

yeah it was weird - the detroit stations were maybe underpowered?

xp power 99 is my fav philly station

yeah, that's possible. kube's signal is so powerful that when someone tried to start a rap/r&b station in vancouver (which was actually really really good, cancon problems aside) they only lasted a couple years because all their potential listeners stuck with kube, whose signal reached all the way up there.

do canadian rap stations just satisfy cancon requirements by playing the same amount of drake as u.s. stations now?

ha, no idea. this station existed circa 2002-04 and I am thus possibly the most knowledgeable person about early 2000s can-hop in america

btw listening to "Adorn" today and trying to think of how rare it is that you hear a big R&B hit that was pretty much entirely performed, written and produced by one person (like, even The-Dream's big hits all had co-producers).

what about Kells tho? (not to disprove you, but another example)

no yeah that's a good point, i was trying to think of someone with semi-recent hits who'd be relevenat to that discussion and that's totally who was on the tip of my tongue (although i've never been clear on whether R. is super hands on w/ the beat-making or always has co-producers in the mix)

Marsha Ambrosius self-wrote and -produced a few tracks on her last album but they weren't the hits.

from what I understand, Kells usually produces completely by himself but will occasionally have coproducers and for a couple projects has farmed out most of the production

I guess his only albums where he's done that are Untitled and to a lesser extent R.