Itunes, Billboard, and the marginalization of black music and black audiences in America

as much as i love the song, i was surprised to see "love galore" doing as well as it has been at urban radio considering sza is pretty new to the mainstream + a woman. even after it broke at urban i was expecting rhythmic stations to stupidly pass it up, but apparently they started playing it as part of the iheartradio on the verge payola program. unfortunately i expect mainstream pop stations' response to be minimal at best -- the most 'urban' songs my city's top 40 is currently playing are liam payne's imitation of 2014-mustard, halsey's imitation of "needed me" + the traffic ticket lawyer commercial -- but it will be interesting to see how far it goes.

also have my eye on: dej loaf's "no fear", which definitely seems to be aiming right down the middle in terms of its sound and mood and is surprisingly cutesy for her. most illuminating of all, i think, will be cardi b's "bodak yellow", which was well on its way to becoming a streaming smash even before it started breaking at any radio format. given how quickly it's gaining now and how much more room it has to grow at radio, i honestly wouldn't be surprised if it challenges for #1 on the hot 100. maybe pop radio will touch a song by a non-rih black woman if it's a #1 hit?

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-rb-women-20170901-story.html?curator=MusicREDEF

“For some reason, people are consuming male-based entertainment on a much greater scale,” Tinashe said. “You look at the pop charts and there are no black women. And it looks like that on rhythmic and urban charts. Perhaps it's a subject matter issue? Maybe it's the gatekeepers? I can't put my finger on it.”

the gatekeepers have hated women for many years

women being relegated to features plays into this (probably the reason why SZA is on a Maroon 5 song, among the more ?!!!?!?!? developments recently but not *surprising* per se)

i'm glad to see artists in the industry acknowledging the issue for what it really is. industryites are so entrenched in the ways that the industry has organized itself into formats (that are implicitly or sometimes explicitly based on social categories like age/race/gender) that they actually think that these arbitrary categories like 'rhythmic' and 'urban' actually have some objective meaning! it often seems to me so hopeless that anything will actually change until radio and its various formats just crumble and cease to be relevant, and even then i'm not sure that would solve it.

that quote from the exec trying to explain the discrepancies by pointing to 'beauty standards' and whatnot is really awful for so many reasons. (and then to top it up with "it really, always, comes down to the song" is so insulting! that's also the go-to excuse from country radio programmers trying to explain why they play women only like 5% of the time, as if the inability to choose good songs is inherently endemic to women or something.)

broke my heart to see sevyn's quote about being stuck in depression and contemplating suicide :(

And her latest single, doing quite well on adult R&B and even regular R&B stations, is fabulous.

i hope when "bodak yellow" reaches #1, which should be soon, possibly even next week, that writers who comment upon it place it in its proper context as the astonishing achievement that it is

it might get leapfrogged by that logic song

a supertramp cover??

lol

i wish man

writers who comment upon it place it in its proper context as the astonishing achievement that it is

if you're talking about the invention of the wonderful word "arrove" as the past tense of "arrive" i agree but otherwise idgi tbh so i would welcome such comments

i didn't mean astonishing achievement artistically

(altho i like it very much)

I think that song is pretty much perfect.

it... yeah i'm not going to get into it

i guess it's nice that a woman had a hit with a trap by numbers boast too, yay equality

I think that song is just ok?? Don't really understand the adoration. It's obviously tied into ppl's overt identification w her but there are tons of female rappers who had buzz also doing no flocking freestyles, that this is the Kodak freestyle above all others is a neat bit of pr finesse

Iirc that's how anyone knows who Asian Doll is w/in rap, she broke out last year w a million view video of her no flocking freestyle (and I'm pretty sure it was on a now deleted SoundCloud from even earlier)

https://youtu.be/UU2-XKlKoEw

I mean it's a smart move if you're on her team to identify that a lot of female rappers were connecting through these Kodak freestyles but for me at least the awareness of this saviness doesn't help me fall for the song any more

Pr finnesse is a little unfair, she's obviously a star and the song is fine, I like it. but it's not as exciting to me as anything by so many other female artists that no one else covers

if there were so many female rappers, or black women performing music of any genre, garnering the level of attention and success this song has i wouldn't have bothered to make that post. this thread is about the charts as a reflection of what/who's popping and what/who's getting pushed to the back -- so yes, that a black woman whom many had never heard of before this song broke is likely to top the singles chart (w/ her own single, not as a guest) is very noteworthy to me. literally the only black woman to top the hot 100 with her own single has been rihanna going all the way back to two-thousand-freaking-nine! and the only others to even come close in the interim were, like rihanna, also huge stars who'd established themselves during the period when crossover from black radio was still fairly commonplace.

obviously it's not to say that *poof* this song goes #1 and now the tides will turn for black women and women more broadly on the charts. but it's something.

apologies if i accidentally turned this thread into the place where we discuss whether we like this song and feel its success is deserved.

i'm not saying its not noteworthy, im responding to people saying its 'pretty much perfect' and 'an astonishing achievement.' its a fuckin no flocking freestyle, its fine. in the context, conservative music labels taking a chance on a social media star who'd already been minted into celebrity by reality television does not strike me as some bold new moment, i mean its great she has success but to me it just points to how stacked the system is against 99% of female artists

and forgive me if it makes it sound like im 'against' cardi b or something, this is also a professional frustration w people who would never in a million years cover cupcakke/rico nasty/asian doll/cuban doll/molly brazy/bali baby etc etc etc caping for this great victory for women as if it isn't their deference to 'what's buzzing' (after a massive push from a major label w/ great A&R) that reinforces these kinds of Pyrrhic "victories"

d40 otm

The truth is people just want to stand behind shit they "know" will succeed bc they're incapable about going out on a ledge for art on merits beyond scalability, especially when it comes to rap where there's this crisis of authenticity & ppl take "I hear it coming out of cars" as a legit recommendation engine as if lots of generic bullshit doesn't take off all the time

well it's no. 1 now

cupcakke/rico nasty/asian doll/cuban doll/molly brazy/bali baby

Not heard any of these yet but the names and associations behind them alone are fascinating in a marketing sense.

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/black-musicians-on-being-boxed-in-by-randb-and-rap-expectations-we-fit-in-so-many-things/

Moses Sumney, Kami and Dawn Richard...

good article -- dawn's words on the expected trajectory for a black artist (esp black woman artist) are very insightful

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/how-hip-hop-edged-grittier-rb-singers-out-of-the-mainstream-w504678

It's all rap's fault...(well sorta) says writer Elias Light and those interviewed

Why did the doors close for deep and gritty vocalists, who were an important part of R&B's mainstream as the genre progressed through soul, funk, Quiet Storm, disco, Eighties synth fusions, house music and the hip-hop-inflected mutations of the Nineties? More than 20 conversations* with artists, producers, label executives and radio programmers indicate that low-register R&B singers were squeezed on two sides at the turn of the millennium: First, rappers took over the vocal ranges that once belonged to R&B, and then struggling labels abandoned R&B groups, which traditionally supported a wide variety of voices. These shifts were compounded as mainstream radio stopped playing R&B songs, which limited the avenues of exposure for all R&B singers but especially hurt those who favor low, throaty intonations.

Lower register singers still exist in the radio niche known as Urban Adult Contemporary. However, Top 40 stations are accepting very few R&B songs – analyzing Billboard charts shows that in 1996, 26 singles from singers made it from the mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart to the Pop Airplay chart; last year, that number fell to five**.

** The five singers to cross over were Beyoncé, Tory Lanez, the Weeknd, John Legend and PartyNextDoor. Rihanna gets major support at pop radio, so she is not considered an R&B artist for these purposes; Drake is counted as a rapper. Even if you chose to count both those artists as R&B singers, the number of crossover singles from singers has still fallen from 26 to 11.

that is also a very nice article! but i don't think that's the right way to interpret it

It's a bit awkward in its interpretation of rap and r'n'b and how program directors make their choices

Songwriter/producer Warren "Oak" Felder (Alessia Cara, Kehlani) shares a similar story. "There was one particular artist I'm not going to name, but we sat down with their team [in 2011] and they wrote out other genre names to call the music," he remembers. "The names were like, 'soulful noir.' That's how toxic that word had become."

I'm probably wrong, I HOPE I'm wrong, but my first thought was "I really hope that isn't Usher"

also I don't really get the argument here, big voices and raspy voices and low voices are not mutually exclusive.

I am having trouble getting past the conflation of "low" with "rough" right at the beginning of the article.

(I thought I had written "like katherine" in that post, oops.)

Also, Nelly is a terrible example because he doesn't have I would term a "low" voice.

i met meshell ndgeocello--this was maybe 3 years ago, maybe longer--i remember her saying that exact same thesis to me (as the RS article)

I don't think it's an unreasonable thesis but it's not presented very well in that article.

i met meshell ndgeocello--this was maybe 3 years ago, maybe longer--i remember her saying that exact same thesis to me (as the RS article)

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Tuesday, October 17, 2017

yeah she said something similar at EMP a couple years ago

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pop-diva-identity-crisis-1508348017

"In the age of hip-hop, female pop stars are facing an identity crisis.

In July, R&B/hip-hop surpassed rock for the first time to officially become the biggest music genre in America, according to Nielsen Music, which tracks online streams and digital and physical albums. As of Oct. 12, R&B/hip-hop has driven 24% of music consumption in 2017—more than rock’s 21% and double pop’s 12% share."

Imagine if pop radio was open to even more r'n'b. Can't access full WSJ article. Does it propose a new business plan for Taylor Swift?

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/20-best-pop-albums-of-2017-w513516

Am pretty sure that all of the critics who wrote for this like r'n'b and rap (and I like their writing), but the definition of pop used here seems kinda rockist and blue-eyed

I guess Bruno Mars was a late 2016 release, so that's why he wasn't included.

what would you have swapped in that doesn’t?

also have you seen the jingle ball lineups

he was on the 2016 list
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/20-best-pop-albums-of-2016-w455459/bruno-mars-24k-magic-w455593

i mean i understand your point but pop as it is currently staked our in the us is very white (with some latinx tinges). there was no rap or r&b artist on the lineup for the jingle ball i went to sunday in boston and the only mcs on the nationwide bill were logic and g eazy

(and last year there were r&b and hip hop lists too)