I downloaded the new free iTunes song tonight. It’s called If U Leave and it’s by a singer named Musiq Soulchild. It also features Mary J. Blige. So, yeah, I haven’t really been listening to R & B since…well, since I was a kid really. I grew up listening to Motown on the radio and random LP’s – things like The Fifth Dimension and The Supremes Greatest Hits. Yes, I listened to vinyl as a kid, I’ve just dated myself. I have always loved Rhythm and Blues and Soul, ever since first hearing artists like Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin and Martha and The Vandellas at the age of six or seven. So hearing all of that incredible music left this indelible mark on my brain.
That was R&B to me – the classics. I never sought it out, it was kind of always there in the background, the soundtrack of my life. And I drifted through my phases of music. In junior high it was stuff like Heart, The Police, Pink Floyd. In high school I really got into Bob Marley and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and even Pearl Jam during the whole grunge explosion. In college I got way out there – art school will do that for you – and listened to Einsturzende Neubauten (New Exploding Buildings), more electronic stuff and really odd obscure things that I could find dirt cheap in the used racks at Amoeba Records in Berkeley. By the time I turned 21 I had heard and digested everything from A-ha to Frank Zappa. I hadn’t forgotten about R & B. It was still there, still being flipped to life when I dropped my quarters into the jukebox at my local diner. Still in the background of the city where I lived – but all of the current stuff stayed there because to me it was totally lacking in that quality that made it so amazing back when I was a kid.
I’d heard more of the vintage stuff along the way – working in record shops was a real treat – and I got to listen to early American blues, hits from the Chess Records vault and lots of the Stax collection. The more I heard of the classic Rhythm and Blues the more I was convinced that any of the singers coming up after about 1980 were just being fed into some kind of vast sonic grist mill. Like all major label music most of it was subject to the kind of pre-fabrication usually reserved for houses. It wasn’t that there weren’t good singers, people who had perfect pitch and adequate projection and sustain, it was just that the voices were accompanied by weak, really half-assed backing bands. No Funk Brothers here. No seasoned session players who could work a fretboard the way a great surfer can work a wave. Instead there were a couple of generations of producers and seemingly lazy musicians cranking out syncopated mediocrity. A grand parade of lifeless packaging to borrow from Peter Gabriel.
And hearing If U Leave just confirms my long-nagging suspicion – R&B is officially dead. Maybe it’s me, maybe I just don’t get it. Maybe I’m too old-school, too set in my ways, maybe I’m just too picky.
In college, I once sat through a two-hour class once where really all we did was watch a documentary about John Cage – the composer touted as being a god amongst the avant garde. Really, aside from the fact that John Cage was playful and clearly reaching for something, even with my willingness to try new things, I couldn’t get to like it. It was atonal, it was seemingly without tempo, or even a point. It wasn’t going anywhere, it simply came at you, like the cacophony of rush hour in Times Square that you get the moment you leave a car or bus. Sadly, Times Square has better resonance and melody than John Cage’s music.
And that’s how Rhythm and Blues is, lots of noise, well-produced, but totally without substance or weight. How can you listen to Otis Redding and not relate to what he is singing about? How can you hear Chain of Fools and not want to get on the floor and dance? I listened to If U Leave and thought – the voices are fine, good vocal technique, somewhat engaging, but the music is totally uninspired. Without the instruments to reinforce the vocals, you’d be better off with an a capella composition and in this case you’d wind up with an odd, struggling sort of duet that never really arrives anywhere. There doesn’t seem to be any emotional honesty left in R&B. I’m not saying the singers don’t have emotions, but the delivery is always the same – throw in some wavering phrases and dynamics and that crying out ending to each line in the chorus, make sure they are projecting well and sustaining the notes just so and you’ve got it – damn near every R&B song of the last thirty years.
Don’t get me wrong, Mary J. Blige and Musiq Soulchild are very good singers. So why the hell are they wasting their time lending their voices to tired phrasings and lazy accompaniments? The record labels it seems have given the listeners what they feel like producing and not necessarily what the listener wants to hear and it’s like the people buying the CD’s and digital downloads have just been programmed to think it’s good. There’s that psychological effect whereby you play something enough and eventually people will hum and sing along, it doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be repeated enough times. That isn’t to say there aren’t some outstanding singers out there – people like Jill Scott, Erykah Badu and Ben Harper spring to mind. But by and large from that sea of music, the Jill Scotts and Ben Harpers are like rogue waves and mostly what washes to shore is the becalmed and uneventful ripples of water that’s lacking in salt.
I remember a few years back – I think it was 2003, when I was living up in the Bay Area, I went to visit an associate of mine named “Bill”. Bill was a music producer responsible for some great R&B albums and he’d been in the business since the early seventies. After we finished our meeting I told him I wanted to play something for him because I thought he might like it. So I put on Room For Squares, the John Mayer album. We listened to a couple of songs and here’s the conversation that followed:
Bill: Who is this?
Me: This guy named John Mayer.
Bill: Tyler, I haven’t heard stuff like this in a long time. This is good R&B.
Me: It’s pretty amazing. I first heard him on the radio in Connecticut.
Bill: This guy can play and sing. This reminds me of old Stax songs.
I knew just what Bill meant. Even though you could easily place John Mayer in the pop section, all of his songs have the one quality that made the R&B of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s so timeless:
They have soul.
