Who loves the ballads?

I was about to reply to this, then I realized I was listing my favorite ballads. How fucking embarrassing. But Britney Spears' "Sometimes" was a really good Old Navy commercial, and I like the song too. And "Only God Knows Why" started to sound really great somewhere around the 70th time I heard it.

In areas like pop & r&b the ballad just lags behind in terms of creativity and a sense of "nowness". If much of the r&b/pop world could be described as post-Timbaland, the ballad aspect is largely still post-Babyface. My favourite ballads therefore tend to be the ones that buck this trend, that sound strange, alien, futuristic or genuinely sexy:

Aaliyah - One In A Million

Britney Spears - Born To Make You Happy

Destiny's Child - Say My Name

Backstreet Boys - Shape Of My Heart

Missy Elliot - Friendly Skies

Craig David - Rendezvous

Pink - Let Me Let You Know

1. When did 'ballad' stop meaning 'narrative in song' (as it did as late as early Dylan), and start meaning 'slow pop song'?

2. What is a 'slow jam'?

1) It's ALWAYS meant slow pop song. It has a double meaning. I mean you can't very well say that Beatles' early ballads are "narratives in song" in the Dylanesque sense.

2) How do you even explain this? Lorrrrd. Wouldn't the mention of Al Green tell you what a slow jam is?

Anyhow, I actually tend to really, really hate ballads with all the force of my being. They are just...too slow for me. They're only good if you're drunk and they are really sad and histrionic. I did think Only God Knows Why started sounding good after about a 100 listens, but that 100th listen was in a bar, so I was drunk - there's my theory proved. I just don't really care for slow slow songs. They bore me. I can't explain why, and it's not a critic's prejudice - it's just that I hate things that are slow. The worst is if you're stuck in a long car ride with some jackass who insists on playing whole tapes full of slow ass songs. Long car rides are boring enough as it is, can't you play something peppy and fun and not mind- bogglingly depressing and slow?

I am very affected by things like that though - if it sounds slow or quiet, it starts making me feel bored. It's just a mental tic. I suppose there are a few I like from the past 5 years, Frozen, Small Black Flowers that Grow in the Sky, Sometimes, My Love Is Your Love, Gone Til November. I forget if these are all actually from the past 5 years. But anyhow, there you go.

1. 'ALWAYS'? I'm not sure about this. I have in mind the ballad as a very venerable form indeed - going back to the Renaissance and Middle Ages. A track like 'The Ballad of Hollis Brown' seems to continue that sense of balladry, where a track like 'I Will Always Love You' doesn't.

2. No, afraid I still don't know what a 'slow jam' is. Doesn't matter, I'm sure I don't need to know and probably wouldn't like it if I did know.

So perhaps I should've said "ALWAYS since the dawn of pop music as we know it" - though from my studies the ballads you speak of from the Middle Ages were SLOW SONGS. My point still stands unrefuted - as early as there was rock music, there were slow songs referred to as "ballads", which makes it a bit asinine to claim the way ballad is referred to here is improper. It's a double-meaning word.

Call 'em ballads, call 'em slow jams. D'Angelo's got them. Not one, not two, but five great ballads on Voodoo, his last album: The Line, Send It On, One Mo' Gin, The Root and Untitled (How Does It Feel). The rest isn't very fast, either...

You're right that it's a double meaning word, Ally, but you're wrong in suggestign that the PineFox said it was being used incorrectly. In fact, the Fox just asked a question, which for me is an interesting one: when did the word start meaning any slow song?

It's possible (I don't know) that ballads were slow songs in the main, but I'm sure your studies have left you with the clear knowledge that a ballad in the medieval sense was specifically a song (or poem? again I'm not 100% sure) which told a story.

Old funk albums are especially terrible that way - the harder and funkier the music, the more jarring the inevitable lame sentimental slow ones in the middle are gonna be. They always stop the record dead, and they always sound like they came from a different band.

It may be unfair to make Al Green comparisons, but when you listen to his records, the fast and slow stuff is so much better integrated, so that I don't even notice which is which. With current pop and r&b it's usually insert-slow-jam-here, and they're sore thumbs. R. Kelly is one of the few current artists who's good at this sort of thing, and even he records way too many slow ones.

Slow jams, Pinefox, are the VERY slow tempo R&B songs that were made for making love, and often give the singer a chance to stretch out vocally & put a bit more personality (for good or ill) into the song.

I was hoping for a more spirited defense of the ballad here. Isn't it safe to say that 50% of chart-leaning pop albums are ballads? Record companies are too smart to weight CDs like that unless there is a market for it. I have the impression that this market does non consist of the kind of obsessive pop fans that haunt ILM. Which is interesting. So when an idie-rock type says "Only idiots listen to Backstreet Boys" what he should be saying is, "Only idiots listen to the Backstreet Boys ballads. The uptempo pop songs, on the other hand, are genius, and worthy of my esteem."

Just joking around, of course, but I am interested: Why so many ballads if nobody likes them?

Historically there was a huge cultural divide – the slow ones being popular with the core black audience and less popular with the white audience. I suffer from this blindness and I know it’s affected the way I assess the careers of performers like Mary J Blige (for me her peak is her Method Man collaboration and I know I simply cannot judge her albums properly).

Mark’s absolutely spot on - boybands (Westlife especially) are building careers based on the ballad so maybe there is a shift going on. Perhaps the R&B slow song is finally finding a wide audience. Whether I can shift a lifetime of prejudice in myself is a moot point though.

Guy, maybe it's not prejudice or blindness. Maybe it's just taste. Good taste, even.

One very important factor here is the adult-contemporary/easy- listening audience, which I suspect accounts for a much bigger share of boy-band/teen-pop sales than many would expect, and is probably larger in size if not sales than the r&b, hip hop and guitar-rock audiences put together.

What I would like to know is why the concentration is on chart ballads. I would say the ratio of ballads to faster songs is about the same in most categories of music, stuff like punk excepted. Is it assumed that non-chart slow songs are somehow of more worth? Just curious...

last ballad i liked 'the unquiet grave'.

out on the border we is stoned immaculate

Mark: I don't think that's the kind of 'R'n'B' that I know.

Nicole -- good point. I do wonder, though, if the chart pop albums don't have a higher percentage of wlos stuff than other pop records. (I am getting mired in definitions and I'm sure I have an out.) But the main thing is that I think R&B & chart pop ballads share a certain sound and lyrical focus, and maybe that's what I was thinking of. Like the Velvet Underground's "Candy Says" is a ballad, but has a different vibe.

I love ballads. Mainly as hangover music, which is a special genre for me which I care a great deal about.

1) Wowee, this is the first forum I've ever been on where someone berk hasn't pointed out ballads are a) music for gurls b) slow songs for boys to put the moves on said gurls during - which is terrific, cause otherwise I'd have to whump some arse.

2) re: Medieval and folk meaning of word "ballad" - wow, isn't it great that our mongrel language of English that words mean whatever we say they mean. Hooray for living language!

3) I don't think I've liked a ballad since before the "Heavy Metal Power Ballad" of the 80s killed them for me.

Whether or not words 'mean whatever we say they mean' is debatable. Language is not private but social - a matter of contract and consensus, not merely whim. It changes in large-scale and complex ways. Lewis Carroll, Raymond Williams and Stanley Fish, among others, would probably be relevant sources here.

Taste is nearly always about prejudice, but methinks we have had this discussion before.

I think a lot of what I'm about to say may be repeating other people's points but this is important to I wanted to clarify it for myself as much as anything.

Why don't critics like ballads? Because the critical discourse which has grown up around recent pop and r'n'b has been based on the production and sonic innovation (I think someone else has made this point). Quality of production made it 'OK' for critics to approach these genres again. The emotional content - or effect - of pop was off the spectum, or dismissable.

Ballads in general don't have the sonic thrills, they work direct on the heart (or groin). Probably because of this they're also very very difficult to do well, in any genre - a good indie ballad is as rare as a good r'n'b ballad.

I got into ballads through the 'bedroom soul' of the mid-70s, and through especially Chic's ballads, and then the 'Sugar And Poison' comp that David Toop put out in '96 or '97, which cleverly made claims of hipster exoticism for ballads so that cowardly sonic- texture types like me would buy them and be seduced.

I'm still far from enamoured of most ballads - the style has many more misses than hits - but I'm liking more and more, across all genres, from 50s torch songs to 70s AOR to 90s/00s teenpop - "Shape Of My Heart" and "I Want It That Way" are two terrific examples: Max Martin seems to give his best slow songs to men and his best fast ones to women.

Another problem with ballads in soul music right now is that as uptempo numbers get more agressive and brittle and 'clubby' the transition to the ballad-style becomes more disjunctive: this, rather than the presence of the ballads, was the big problem with the last Destiny's Child album as an album-shaped unitary thing.

This is the thread I was after - what do people who weren't here in super-old-skool ILM days think of this one?

A co-worker (from an earlier generation than mine) asked me to let her know when I returned the Eminem CD I borrowed from the library where we both work, since she wanted to listen to it. She commented on how primitive it was melodically and harmonically and even rhythmically (although I think I least agree with the last), though she admitted it was kind of catchy. I wanted to make some sort of comment about the way Eminem listeners would probably be very interested in the "sonic" side of it, but didn't bother. While I like Dr. Dre's production on this CD, I am often underwhelmed by the "sonic innovation" in R&B. Destiny's Child doesn't impress me at all and while I can see what people like about Missy E. I'm not that blown away by the sound.

This is a roundabout way of approaching the thread topic here. I think I like a fair number of ballads, but then, I am not that impressed with the sonic texture of contemporary R&B, so maybe it's some sort of trade off. At any rate, no, I can't think of any ballads from the past five years that I like. The most recent might be some Anita Baker songs. I've gotten to like some boleros, which are basically a type of ballad, quite a bit, but not all of them, by any means.

But I am more confused by the enthusiasm for modern R&B's sonic textures than I am by what people might find attractive in ballads, as such. It's not that I am uninterested in sound as such either. I just don't find these sounds that exciting. The sound aspect of this music doesn't make up for what else I typically find wanting in it. It could just be that my expectations are fixed and my taste is not aging gracefully.

My synapses have crust on them.