teach corny indie fuxx how to listen to real R&B

thread for some dude, deej, lex et al to hopefully give insights as to what they like in R&B and why. serious thread. feel like I do listen to a fair share of R&B but only via ILM peeps, and I don't know why I like it. I don't have a proper schooling on this. I liked the albums from the R&B listening club. just wanna have an idea of what you guys privilege, what you guys listen for.

http://www.brotherswithnogame.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ginuwine_the_bachelor-front.jpg
http://images.uulyrics.com/cover/g/ginuwine/album-100-ginuwine.jpg

lol I do actually have that album in my itunes, don't rmemeber the last time I listened to it (100%)

seriously one of my favorite albums ever

dayo did you read this thread POX: Contemporary R&B/Urban/Neo-Soul Albums

well to be clear I'm not really looking for recs although examples used to illustrate points would def be helpful

I'm looking more for a discussion about what is important in R&B, for example if you were gonna teach somebody to listen to rap you'd be like "well, pay attention to the rapper first!" you know?

this is a v loaded thread so i dunno exactly how to respond to it or how much i even should tbh, but in good faith i will try. for starters, these are my top 50 R&B singles of 2000-2009: http://narrowcast.blogspot.com/2010/11/singles-of-00s-part-4-r.html

i think it's worth mentioning that even though we may be on the same 'side' of one particular debate or another and listen to a lot of the same stuff i think how i listen to R&B and how deej listens to R&B and how lex listens to R&B might be totally different matters. like one time i dissed some slow song or another and deej said i don't like ballads, but honestly i'm a fiend for R&B ballads, and when i posted that list deej and i argued about the lack of The-Dream on it, but i just don't like the guy much as a singer, and the unifying quality of nearly all 50 of those songs for me is that they're all really strong vocal performances.

like, i'm a semi-big 'music and sound more important than lyrics and vocals' guy and in hip hop i really privilege production and a lot of my favorite rock bands have kind of lousy singers, and i have no vocal training or a particularly good ear or understanding theory or identifying pitch or harmony structure. but when i enjoy R&B i get very very tuned into the nuances of the vocal performance and savor the tics and dramatic emphasis and the overwhelming beauty of a 4 part harmony and the way a singer will build up from the first chorus to the last. more than other genres R&B can feel very intimate to me, very much like a singer whispering their secrets in my ear.

^^^ thanks some dude, realize it's a bit of a request to ask you to walk out on a limb like this. I mean, yeah, for example somebody mentioned in some thread or other that trey songz has maybe been inducted as the chris brown replacement - and to me it's like, well what role is he filling? could this happen in some other genre? like okay, probably in pop - divas get replaced all the time.

like yeah so far when I've really enjoyed R&B it's always been about the production first - the soundscape as it were, and the vocals are kind of secondary. but there are some vocal performances that I do like. and one of the criticisms lex had on the weeknd thread was that dude was just not a very good singer - but he sounds fine to my ears, how important are vocal chops to R&B?

idk just throwing some stuff out there

yeah like i said for me 'vocal chops' are not a very well defined thing -- i can be opinionated about one singer being great and another being garbage but ultimately i can't break down any Dan Perry science about it, i'm just having a gut reaction to the sound of their voice and how they use it. i love the cracked over the top ululations of Keyshia Cole on "Love" but i have no idea if it's 'good' or 'bad' singing by any logical standard.

i love the grain or texture of R&B singers the same way i might obsess over a guitar tone or the way a snare drum is mixed, sometimes it's just great to have some specific sound on a record to hone in on and obsess over. Slim from 112 sounds otherworldly and reptilian to me, Mario's voice evokes velvet, Anthony Hamilton is gargling gravel and somehow still sounds so smooth yet pained yet commanding. a lot of times these people are singing seemingly interchangeable songs of love and heartbreak but so often it can feel like they're capturing some real specific moment in someone's life, maybe theirs, maybe yours.

"gargling gravel" is perfect, lol

yeah a way to put this is that the questions dayo's asking about are stuff that any R&B thread participants are arguing about all the time -- and id say thats a good thing, that we're helping to define some vague boundaries upon which we agree or have a general overlap, creating an abstract picture of 'R&B' as determined by ilx posters or w/e

i mean i will get into Tim's pop-oriented perspective & Andy K's more wide-ranging perspective, and my own is somewhere in between those two. With Al it's more like sometimes he & i are on the exact same page, and other times we're completely opposed.

yeah idk it feels that with R&B these quantifiers are more nebulous than, say, with hip hop, where you can talk more directly about the quality of the lyrics, the delivery, the flow, the production & the beat. feels very regimented. whereas it'd be harder to divide and parcel up R&B into such separate metrics.

like, even in that weeknd thread, with those of us who disliked weeknd, we were coming at it from different angles and may have had disagreements w/ how each other were attacking it (like i did w/ lex's approach).

yeah - just looking over that weeknd thread again, your criticism seems to be that it just sounds 'generic' or 'anonymous' - why is that? what kind of template do you have for R&B that the weeknd doesn't deviate from?

i don't really know what to say here b/c i listen to and relate to r&b in as wide a variety of ways as i listen to music generally - it's formalist but it's not homogeneous.

re: vocals i think what marks out a "good" r&b voice for me, regardless of whether it's r kelly singing like a greek god or cassie wispily trying to hit the three notes in her range, it's that it sounds "trained" rather than amateur. i don't know if that thought holds up though so don't hold me to it.

otherwise if there's anything that marks out my r&b listening experience it's a sense of surrendering to an emotion.

Stylus - The Bluffer's Guide 80s R&B

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/bluffer/80s-rb.htm

Ask yourself one question: Is what you are listening to called Wheres The Party At by Jagged Edge and if it is not, gtfo

lol

a hoy hoy OTM