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R&B died somewhere around 1996 or so. Most stuff I hear after the 90's is just too silky and fake sounding. Granted I'm not a big fan, I can still tell when a genre goes weak and R&B has gone weak, along with Hip Hop and Country and most radio rock. Music in general is in a slump, R&B is no acception.
I'm trying to get into R&B some more, so what would you guys say was the Golden Age, so to speak, for R&B? Just like for hip-hop it was late 80s to mid 90s, when was R&B at either it's purest and or most creative?
So far, I have to say that I really don't like the new stuff nowadays because of auto tune and since everything is so hip-hop influenced (i.e. all everyone does is talk about clubbing and whatnot) that I cannot even call it R&B anymore. I do, however, really like the 90s stuff (i.e. Boyz II Men, Keith Sweat, older Mariah Carey, etc.), but I've heard some hardcore people say that the 90s was when R&B was starting to fall off and was going towards more trendy hip-hop based stuff. So what do you guys think?
The 60's Soul music gave way to the more "Rhytmic sound" of the 70's that lasted up until (IMO) about 1993. The 70's gave us The Philly sound. Stax gave us that gritty Southern riff. Funk bands appeared all over the place like chicken pox. But the late 70's, into the 80's, saw an explosion of male and female balladeers.....Luther, Teddy, Freddie Jackson, Peabo, MJ, Jeffrey Osborne, Sade, Anita Baker, Phyllis Hyman, Angie Bofill, Melyssa Morgan, Cherelle, Chaka......
The 80's gave us the:
Minneapolis Sound
LaFace
Foster / McElroy
New Jack Swing
The UK Blak Sound (Soul II Soul, Caron Wheeler, Loose Ends etc..)
The 90's was spotty at best. The self-contained bands died out. Mint Condition was the last one. This gave way to more "singing groups" and less black groups that could play and write. P Diddy had a big hand in destroying real R&B for the fast dollar. Computers, and cats like Pharrel, and Timbaland put already created sounds together, instead of creating sounds that never existed before. Using their Casio keyboards..
The 80's decade gave us more QUALITY and variety R&B than any decade.
Last edited by citizenkane2; 08-20-2009 at 09:00 AM..
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