popmatters.com/music/feat...andb.shtml
AlterNet
July 8, 2005
Rhythm and Bullshit? The Slow Decline of R&B
By Mark Anthony Neal, PopMatters.com
Yeah, I'm nostalgic: When Mary J. Blige first uttered
the opening lines to "You Remind Me," it was about
making sure that hip-hop remembered that R&B came from
the same streets where crackheads roamed and the same
tenement vestibules where drama went down on the
regular.
But as I listen to Mario's "Let Me Love You" for the
727th time, it is perhaps easy to suggest that R&B has
lost its Soul, or that Clear Channel, Radio One (luv
ya, Cathy!), AOL Time Warner and Viacom -- a neo-
plantation cabal if ever there was one -- ripped its
heart out.
Hip-hop may have sold out, but at least it has sold out
on its own terms. R&B, on the other hand, has sold out
on somebody else's, on a pop-chart paper chase.
Truth be told, U(r)sher was nothing more than a soon-
past-his-peak R&B singer before John Smith laced him
with some crunk junk; Ray J could have sang the hook on
"Yeah!" and topped the pop charts. And now, 10 million
units later, we want to act like Mr. Raymond is the
second coming of Michael Jackson? I ain't willing to
grant him the second coming of Bobby Brown. And it is
not like we even knew Mr. Legend (in his own mind) and
Ms. Queen of Crunk n' B were in the room, until some
hip-hop act sanctioned their presence.
But what ails contemporary R&B is not just a matter of
the commercial success of John Legend -- and Amerie and
Ciara and Mario. The current state of R&B comes not
from a sudden decline, but a process more than 30 years
in the making.
This story begins in 1972, when a few enterprising
master's students at the Harvard Business School
prepared a study, commissioned by one of Columbia's
execs, detailing how the Columbia Records Group could
better integrate the then largely independent black
music industry into the mix.
The now infamous Harvard Report -- officially known as
"A Study of the Soul Music Environment" -- has often
been referred to as a sinister blueprint aimed at
arming a litany of "culture bandits" with the
theoretical tools to return black culture to a neo-
colonial state.
There's no denying that this is exactly the situation
we're staring at now, but it has nothing to do with the
Harvard Report. What those MBA students articulated was
a no-brainer marketing plan, informed by the commercial
success of Motown and the cynical (though not mistaken)
view that the Civil Rights "revolution" likely had more
to do with the realities that black folk had disposable
income and white folk consumed a hell of a lot of black
popular culture than anything to do with real
structural change in American society.
In response to those expecting more sinister designs in
the Harvard Report, David Sanjek rhetorically chimes,
"why did [Columbia] feel the need to document what they
should have already known?" (Rhythm and Business, 62).
What Sanjek suggests is that eventually somebody in the
music industry would have come up with their own
version of the Harvard Report -- say, Clive Davis, who
incidentally was a president at Columbia at the time
that the report was commissioned. The point is, with or
without the Harvard Report, the takeover was well
underway.
Black music has always had a complicated relationship
with big business. That this relationship has typically
had little to do with actual music perhaps explains the
often unbalanced quality of this thing we've come to
call R&B. This complicated relationship also partly
explains what exactly R&B is.
The term R&B is essentially a shortened version of
"Rhythm & Blues," but as a novice might discern, that
which is called R&B bears little resemblance to the
musical landscape created by Ruth Brown, Louis Jordan,
Laverne Baker, Charles Brown and the Coasters. And
perhaps that was the point. Musical innovations aside,
R&B was essentially a marketing ploy that finally
gained a significant foothold during the late 1970s.
R&B was born out of competing logics -- record
companies tried to negotiate the realities of black
culture and identity within the history of race
relations in America while trying at the same time to
reach a wider audience of black consumers and white
record buyers. As black radio needed mainstream
advertisers to court the emerging black middle class
(as much an ideology as a measurement of economic and
social status) and mainstream record labels became
fixated on crossing over black artists to white
consumers, terms like "Soul" and "Rhythm and Blues"
quickly became too black.
The same terminology turnover occurred during the late
1970s when urban began to stand for radio stations that
essentially programmed black music. As Nelson George
explains, "Urban was supposedly a multicolored
programming style tuned to the rhythms of America's
crossfertilized big cities.... But more often, urban
was black radio in disguise." (The Death of Rhythm and
Blues, 159).
According to the Harvard Report, black radio was
strategically important to record companies because it
provided "access to large and growing record buying
public, namely, the Black consumer." The report is
oblivious to the fact that the very birth of what was
called "race music" in the 1930s was premised on
selling goods and services to a uniquely defined
audience, namely African-Americans constrained by Jim
Crow segregation -- an audience that might even buy a
record or two, in the process of buying furniture,
cleaning supplies and an insurance policy.
Nevertheless, the report is cognizant of the growth of
an emerging black middle class, one that would prove
attractive not just to record companies but also
advertisers eager to fuel black desires to consume the
fetishes of a post-Civil Rights world.
In the aftermath of centuries of struggle, exploitation
and violence, some members of the black middle class
often viewed their ability to consume widely throughout
mainstream society as an emblem of the "freedoms" won
during the Civil Rights struggle.
To get a sense of what this urbane blackness would look
and feel like, think of the immensely popular early
1980s Colt 45 commercials featuring Billy Dee Williams.
Twenty years later, no one really blinked an eye when
poet Sonia Sanchez and Eric Benet used "smooth" R&B to
hawk for an automobile maker.
As R&B began to be viewed as the quintessence of
upscale blackness, the more gritter aspects of black
popular music --that which was, as Houston Baker Jr.
describes it, "too blackly public" (as in embarrassing,
like black folk eating watermelon in public) -- began
to disappear from the program list of some urban radio
outlets in the late 1970s.
So-called Southern Soul -- the ZZ Hills, Denise
LaSalles and Betty Wrights of the world -- was an
example of the kind of music that vanished from urban
radio. Though Southern Soul didn't disappear -- labels
like Malaco and Ichiban continue to promote Southern
Soul artists to this day -- the more bluesier aspects
of its sound and its references to black southern
culture were the very antithesis of the post-Civil
Rights worldviews of many African-Americans. The
popped-over P-Funk of Rick James -- one of the best
selling black artists at the beginning of the post-Soul
era --was emblematic of the brave new world of R&B. The
challenge for record labels at this point was to come
up with product to feed the R&B machine.
The Harvard Report was adamant that the Columbia
Records Group should not attempt to purchase any of the
prominent Soul labels (Motown, Atlantic, Stax) or poach
from them any of their established artists. (CRG
eventually purchased Stax, but only after the label was
in serious decline.)
What the report did advise was that CRG cultivate
relationships with small independent labels, as was the
case when CRG began a relationship with Kenny Gamble
and Leon Huff. The product was Philadelphia
International Records (PIR), and the impact of this
groundbreaking relationship continues to reverberate 33
years later.
As some critics -- notably John A. Jackson in A House
on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul -- have
observed, many of the Harvard Report's suggestions were
already in play at Columbia, and the relationship with
PIR is one such example.
This brings us back to Clive Davis, the point-person on
both the PIR and Stax deals. Dismissed from Columbia is
1973 for financial irregularities (some have linked his
dismissal to our jumble word for the day: alopya),
Davis had nonetheless instigated the distribution and
creative-resource relationship with PIR that would
become the defining model for relationships between
large corporate labels and black music, making Davis
himself arguably the most prominent figure in the story
of R&B.
The language that the Harvard Report uses to describe
the value of indie Soul labels is undisputable: "These
small independents could provide a source of product,
in the form of 'hot masters;' talent which could have
national potential; experienced personnel...in the
areas of promotion and production; and serve as a
source of captive independent producers."
Davis has claimed that he never read the Harvard
Report, though it's clear that he would have been one
of key figures that the authors of the report would
have interviewed, and Davis may well have provided them
with substantive info regarding the importance of indie
labels. Regardless of the source, what the report
details is the blueprint for the black boutique label
-- essentially based on a model of neo-colonialism,
where an imperialist power exploits the raw materials
and talents of its satellites under the pretense that
such satellites are autonomous.
As Norman Kelley observes, "In classic colonialism,
products were produced in raw periphery and sent back
to the imperial motherland to be manufactured into
commodities, then sold in metropolitan centers or back
to the colonies. The outcome for the colony was stunted
economic growth, as it was stripped of its ability to
manufacture products for its own needs" (Rhythm and
Business, 10).
Looked at within the context of artistic production,
the colonial model creates a context where black
artistic production is mediated by a commodity culture
more interested in "moving product" than cultivating
art or developing artists, and then sold back to the
masses as "art," in the process stunting creative
development. The irony is that which could be defined
as organic artistic expression is seen illegitimate by
the masses, who have been programmed to accept
corporate packaging as the real.
Clive Davis is probably less a sinister figure in the
rise and fall of R&B and more the embodiment of the
corporate hustler. But there's no denying that the very
blueprint he outlined at Columbia became the most
bankable strategy for R&B especially as he ascended to
the leadership of Arista. For example, the most
significant and successful black "boutique" labels of
the 1990s, LaFace and Bad Boy Entertainment, were
developed in Clive Davis's house.
Despite the negative impact that the corporate co-
opting of black culture has on black creativity, we're
still left with the brilliance of the boutique model,
as witnessed by the success of PIR. It all began with
the production: the simple elegance of Billy Paul's "Me
and Mrs. Jones" or Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes' "If
You Don't Know Me By Now" or the glossy funk of The
O'Jay's "I Love Music". The "Philly sound" (include
Thom Bell and Mighty Three Publishing in this mix)
became the soundtrack for an upscale blackness as far
removed from the plantations of the South as it was
from the factories of the Midwest.
Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff were the real deal, and
although they were not the sole innovators of this
sound -- think of the symphonic landscapes of Gene Page
or the string arrangements of Paul Riser -- the
promotional and distribution muscle of Columbia allowed
the duo to nationalize what was essentially a regional
sound. By the end of the 1970s strains of the PIR could
be heard in virtually every popular R&B song.
The boutique model was not necessarily about crossing
R&B over to the mainstream, but rather positioning the
larger corporate labels to better control the R&B
market. As such, R&B artists were less compelled to
compete with so-called pop artists.
Although this meant that R&B artists had less access to
resources -- particularly as the record industry went
through a financial slump in the late 1970s -- it also
created conditions where the R&B sound could develop
without the additional pressure of attracting a wider
audience. Very few soul artists made the transition to
the R&B world. Notable examples are figures like Bobby
Womack, whose Poet (1981) and Poet II (1984)
represented the best work of his career and Diana Ross,
whose Diana (1980), produced by Nile Rodgers and
Bernard Edwards, represents the apex of her solo
career.
And then there's the case of Michael Jackson, who
remade himself into an R&B artist on his groundbreaking
Off the Wall (1979), three years after he sat at the
feet of Gamble and Huff, who produced the Jackson's
first CRG album after the Jackson 5's departure from
Motown in 1975. Often lost in conversations about
Jackson's emergence as the "King of Pop" is that he was
cultivated in the R&B world -- along with such other
singular black pop crossovers of the 1980s as Whitney
Houston and Lionel Ritchie.
If there was one figure who defined the genius of R&B
it was Luther Vandross, who with the release of his
eponymous debut in 1981 became the genre's dominant
artist. By coyly distancing himself from the black
gospel vocal tradition, which grounded so much of the
soul music of the 1960s and 1970s, Vandross cemented
his appeal as the quintessential R&B singer.
Specifically, Vandross was trying to distinguish
himself from generations of "shouters" such as gospel
artists Joe Ligon (lead vocalist of the Mighty Clouds
of Joy) and the late Archie Brownlee (of the Five Blind
Boys of Mississippi) or soul vocalists like Wilson
Pickett, the late Otis Redding and James Brown.
As Jason King and others have suggested, Vandross was a
student of various music traditions, notably black
female vocalists of the 1960s (Dionne Warwick, The
Bluebelles, Aretha Franklin), the Burt Bacharach and
Hal David songbook, and the background-vocal stylings
of the Sweet Inspirations. In addition, the lush
orchestrations that figured so prominently in Vandross
ballads -- he is the definitive balladeer of the last
generation of popular singers -- suggested that he too
was a fan of Gamble and Huff and Gene Page.
Still others such as Stephanie Mills, Frankie Beverly
and Maze, Jeffrey Osborne, Anita Baker, Peobo Bryson,
Atlantic Starr, Kashif, Loose Ends, Alexander O'Neal,
The Whispers, Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds, and Chaka Khan
(post Rufus) helped give R&B a cohesive sound in the
early 1980s. As R&B was about attracting upscale
"urban" audiences -- whether legitimate members of the
black middle class or working class strivers -- it was
by definition a genre targeted to mature audiences.
As the 1980s progressed, R&B was increasingly out of
touch with a generation of black youth consumers, who
felt little need to distance themselves from the
realities of the Jim Crow era, especially as they faced
down the venomous edge of the Reagan era. In real terms
the R&B world was being challenged by the embryonic
sounds of hip-hop for the attention (and disposable
income) of "urban" audiences.
A telling sign was the success of Chaka Khan's remake
of Prince's "I Feel for You" (1984), which featured an
opening rap by Melle Mel (technically the first hip-hop
and R&B collaboration, though in my mind Jody Whatley's
"Friends", which was blessed by Rakim, is more
significant.) The song remains Khan's best-selling
single. Khan's version of "I Feel for You" began a
tenuous relationship between R&B and hip-hop, one which
would finally earn hip-hop validation from the black
mainstream and ultimately render R&B irrelevant.
------------------------------
Mark Anthony Neal is a staff writer at PopMatters.com.
Parts 2 and 3 of this series can be found at
PopMatters.com.
AlterNet
July 8, 2005
Rhythm and Bullshit? The Slow Decline of R&B
By Mark Anthony Neal, PopMatters.com
Yeah, I'm nostalgic: When Mary J. Blige first uttered
the opening lines to "You Remind Me," it was about
making sure that hip-hop remembered that R&B came from
the same streets where crackheads roamed and the same
tenement vestibules where drama went down on the
regular.
But as I listen to Mario's "Let Me Love You" for the
727th time, it is perhaps easy to suggest that R&B has
lost its Soul, or that Clear Channel, Radio One (luv
ya, Cathy!), AOL Time Warner and Viacom -- a neo-
plantation cabal if ever there was one -- ripped its
heart out.
Hip-hop may have sold out, but at least it has sold out
on its own terms. R&B, on the other hand, has sold out
on somebody else's, on a pop-chart paper chase.
Truth be told, U(r)sher was nothing more than a soon-
past-his-peak R&B singer before John Smith laced him
with some crunk junk; Ray J could have sang the hook on
"Yeah!" and topped the pop charts. And now, 10 million
units later, we want to act like Mr. Raymond is the
second coming of Michael Jackson? I ain't willing to
grant him the second coming of Bobby Brown. And it is
not like we even knew Mr. Legend (in his own mind) and
Ms. Queen of Crunk n' B were in the room, until some
hip-hop act sanctioned their presence.
But what ails contemporary R&B is not just a matter of
the commercial success of John Legend -- and Amerie and
Ciara and Mario. The current state of R&B comes not
from a sudden decline, but a process more than 30 years
in the making.
This story begins in 1972, when a few enterprising
master's students at the Harvard Business School
prepared a study, commissioned by one of Columbia's
execs, detailing how the Columbia Records Group could
better integrate the then largely independent black
music industry into the mix.
The now infamous Harvard Report -- officially known as
"A Study of the Soul Music Environment" -- has often
been referred to as a sinister blueprint aimed at
arming a litany of "culture bandits" with the
theoretical tools to return black culture to a neo-
colonial state.
There's no denying that this is exactly the situation
we're staring at now, but it has nothing to do with the
Harvard Report. What those MBA students articulated was
a no-brainer marketing plan, informed by the commercial
success of Motown and the cynical (though not mistaken)
view that the Civil Rights "revolution" likely had more
to do with the realities that black folk had disposable
income and white folk consumed a hell of a lot of black
popular culture than anything to do with real
structural change in American society.
In response to those expecting more sinister designs in
the Harvard Report, David Sanjek rhetorically chimes,
"why did [Columbia] feel the need to document what they
should have already known?" (Rhythm and Business, 62).
What Sanjek suggests is that eventually somebody in the
music industry would have come up with their own
version of the Harvard Report -- say, Clive Davis, who
incidentally was a president at Columbia at the time
that the report was commissioned. The point is, with or
without the Harvard Report, the takeover was well
underway.
Black music has always had a complicated relationship
with big business. That this relationship has typically
had little to do with actual music perhaps explains the
often unbalanced quality of this thing we've come to
call R&B. This complicated relationship also partly
explains what exactly R&B is.
The term R&B is essentially a shortened version of
"Rhythm & Blues," but as a novice might discern, that
which is called R&B bears little resemblance to the
musical landscape created by Ruth Brown, Louis Jordan,
Laverne Baker, Charles Brown and the Coasters. And
perhaps that was the point. Musical innovations aside,
R&B was essentially a marketing ploy that finally
gained a significant foothold during the late 1970s.
R&B was born out of competing logics -- record
companies tried to negotiate the realities of black
culture and identity within the history of race
relations in America while trying at the same time to
reach a wider audience of black consumers and white
record buyers. As black radio needed mainstream
advertisers to court the emerging black middle class
(as much an ideology as a measurement of economic and
social status) and mainstream record labels became
fixated on crossing over black artists to white
consumers, terms like "Soul" and "Rhythm and Blues"
quickly became too black.
The same terminology turnover occurred during the late
1970s when urban began to stand for radio stations that
essentially programmed black music. As Nelson George
explains, "Urban was supposedly a multicolored
programming style tuned to the rhythms of America's
crossfertilized big cities.... But more often, urban
was black radio in disguise." (The Death of Rhythm and
Blues, 159).
According to the Harvard Report, black radio was
strategically important to record companies because it
provided "access to large and growing record buying
public, namely, the Black consumer." The report is
oblivious to the fact that the very birth of what was
called "race music" in the 1930s was premised on
selling goods and services to a uniquely defined
audience, namely African-Americans constrained by Jim
Crow segregation -- an audience that might even buy a
record or two, in the process of buying furniture,
cleaning supplies and an insurance policy.
Nevertheless, the report is cognizant of the growth of
an emerging black middle class, one that would prove
attractive not just to record companies but also
advertisers eager to fuel black desires to consume the
fetishes of a post-Civil Rights world.
In the aftermath of centuries of struggle, exploitation
and violence, some members of the black middle class
often viewed their ability to consume widely throughout
mainstream society as an emblem of the "freedoms" won
during the Civil Rights struggle.
To get a sense of what this urbane blackness would look
and feel like, think of the immensely popular early
1980s Colt 45 commercials featuring Billy Dee Williams.
Twenty years later, no one really blinked an eye when
poet Sonia Sanchez and Eric Benet used "smooth" R&B to
hawk for an automobile maker.
As R&B began to be viewed as the quintessence of
upscale blackness, the more gritter aspects of black
popular music --that which was, as Houston Baker Jr.
describes it, "too blackly public" (as in embarrassing,
like black folk eating watermelon in public) -- began
to disappear from the program list of some urban radio
outlets in the late 1970s.
So-called Southern Soul -- the ZZ Hills, Denise
LaSalles and Betty Wrights of the world -- was an
example of the kind of music that vanished from urban
radio. Though Southern Soul didn't disappear -- labels
like Malaco and Ichiban continue to promote Southern
Soul artists to this day -- the more bluesier aspects
of its sound and its references to black southern
culture were the very antithesis of the post-Civil
Rights worldviews of many African-Americans. The
popped-over P-Funk of Rick James -- one of the best
selling black artists at the beginning of the post-Soul
era --was emblematic of the brave new world of R&B. The
challenge for record labels at this point was to come
up with product to feed the R&B machine.
The Harvard Report was adamant that the Columbia
Records Group should not attempt to purchase any of the
prominent Soul labels (Motown, Atlantic, Stax) or poach
from them any of their established artists. (CRG
eventually purchased Stax, but only after the label was
in serious decline.)
What the report did advise was that CRG cultivate
relationships with small independent labels, as was the
case when CRG began a relationship with Kenny Gamble
and Leon Huff. The product was Philadelphia
International Records (PIR), and the impact of this
groundbreaking relationship continues to reverberate 33
years later.
As some critics -- notably John A. Jackson in A House
on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul -- have
observed, many of the Harvard Report's suggestions were
already in play at Columbia, and the relationship with
PIR is one such example.
This brings us back to Clive Davis, the point-person on
both the PIR and Stax deals. Dismissed from Columbia is
1973 for financial irregularities (some have linked his
dismissal to our jumble word for the day: alopya),
Davis had nonetheless instigated the distribution and
creative-resource relationship with PIR that would
become the defining model for relationships between
large corporate labels and black music, making Davis
himself arguably the most prominent figure in the story
of R&B.
The language that the Harvard Report uses to describe
the value of indie Soul labels is undisputable: "These
small independents could provide a source of product,
in the form of 'hot masters;' talent which could have
national potential; experienced personnel...in the
areas of promotion and production; and serve as a
source of captive independent producers."
Davis has claimed that he never read the Harvard
Report, though it's clear that he would have been one
of key figures that the authors of the report would
have interviewed, and Davis may well have provided them
with substantive info regarding the importance of indie
labels. Regardless of the source, what the report
details is the blueprint for the black boutique label
-- essentially based on a model of neo-colonialism,
where an imperialist power exploits the raw materials
and talents of its satellites under the pretense that
such satellites are autonomous.
As Norman Kelley observes, "In classic colonialism,
products were produced in raw periphery and sent back
to the imperial motherland to be manufactured into
commodities, then sold in metropolitan centers or back
to the colonies. The outcome for the colony was stunted
economic growth, as it was stripped of its ability to
manufacture products for its own needs" (Rhythm and
Business, 10).
Looked at within the context of artistic production,
the colonial model creates a context where black
artistic production is mediated by a commodity culture
more interested in "moving product" than cultivating
art or developing artists, and then sold back to the
masses as "art," in the process stunting creative
development. The irony is that which could be defined
as organic artistic expression is seen illegitimate by
the masses, who have been programmed to accept
corporate packaging as the real.
Clive Davis is probably less a sinister figure in the
rise and fall of R&B and more the embodiment of the
corporate hustler. But there's no denying that the very
blueprint he outlined at Columbia became the most
bankable strategy for R&B especially as he ascended to
the leadership of Arista. For example, the most
significant and successful black "boutique" labels of
the 1990s, LaFace and Bad Boy Entertainment, were
developed in Clive Davis's house.
Despite the negative impact that the corporate co-
opting of black culture has on black creativity, we're
still left with the brilliance of the boutique model,
as witnessed by the success of PIR. It all began with
the production: the simple elegance of Billy Paul's "Me
and Mrs. Jones" or Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes' "If
You Don't Know Me By Now" or the glossy funk of The
O'Jay's "I Love Music". The "Philly sound" (include
Thom Bell and Mighty Three Publishing in this mix)
became the soundtrack for an upscale blackness as far
removed from the plantations of the South as it was
from the factories of the Midwest.
Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff were the real deal, and
although they were not the sole innovators of this
sound -- think of the symphonic landscapes of Gene Page
or the string arrangements of Paul Riser -- the
promotional and distribution muscle of Columbia allowed
the duo to nationalize what was essentially a regional
sound. By the end of the 1970s strains of the PIR could
be heard in virtually every popular R&B song.
The boutique model was not necessarily about crossing
R&B over to the mainstream, but rather positioning the
larger corporate labels to better control the R&B
market. As such, R&B artists were less compelled to
compete with so-called pop artists.
Although this meant that R&B artists had less access to
resources -- particularly as the record industry went
through a financial slump in the late 1970s -- it also
created conditions where the R&B sound could develop
without the additional pressure of attracting a wider
audience. Very few soul artists made the transition to
the R&B world. Notable examples are figures like Bobby
Womack, whose Poet (1981) and Poet II (1984)
represented the best work of his career and Diana Ross,
whose Diana (1980), produced by Nile Rodgers and
Bernard Edwards, represents the apex of her solo
career.
And then there's the case of Michael Jackson, who
remade himself into an R&B artist on his groundbreaking
Off the Wall (1979), three years after he sat at the
feet of Gamble and Huff, who produced the Jackson's
first CRG album after the Jackson 5's departure from
Motown in 1975. Often lost in conversations about
Jackson's emergence as the "King of Pop" is that he was
cultivated in the R&B world -- along with such other
singular black pop crossovers of the 1980s as Whitney
Houston and Lionel Ritchie.
If there was one figure who defined the genius of R&B
it was Luther Vandross, who with the release of his
eponymous debut in 1981 became the genre's dominant
artist. By coyly distancing himself from the black
gospel vocal tradition, which grounded so much of the
soul music of the 1960s and 1970s, Vandross cemented
his appeal as the quintessential R&B singer.
Specifically, Vandross was trying to distinguish
himself from generations of "shouters" such as gospel
artists Joe Ligon (lead vocalist of the Mighty Clouds
of Joy) and the late Archie Brownlee (of the Five Blind
Boys of Mississippi) or soul vocalists like Wilson
Pickett, the late Otis Redding and James Brown.
As Jason King and others have suggested, Vandross was a
student of various music traditions, notably black
female vocalists of the 1960s (Dionne Warwick, The
Bluebelles, Aretha Franklin), the Burt Bacharach and
Hal David songbook, and the background-vocal stylings
of the Sweet Inspirations. In addition, the lush
orchestrations that figured so prominently in Vandross
ballads -- he is the definitive balladeer of the last
generation of popular singers -- suggested that he too
was a fan of Gamble and Huff and Gene Page.
Still others such as Stephanie Mills, Frankie Beverly
and Maze, Jeffrey Osborne, Anita Baker, Peobo Bryson,
Atlantic Starr, Kashif, Loose Ends, Alexander O'Neal,
The Whispers, Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds, and Chaka Khan
(post Rufus) helped give R&B a cohesive sound in the
early 1980s. As R&B was about attracting upscale
"urban" audiences -- whether legitimate members of the
black middle class or working class strivers -- it was
by definition a genre targeted to mature audiences.
As the 1980s progressed, R&B was increasingly out of
touch with a generation of black youth consumers, who
felt little need to distance themselves from the
realities of the Jim Crow era, especially as they faced
down the venomous edge of the Reagan era. In real terms
the R&B world was being challenged by the embryonic
sounds of hip-hop for the attention (and disposable
income) of "urban" audiences.
A telling sign was the success of Chaka Khan's remake
of Prince's "I Feel for You" (1984), which featured an
opening rap by Melle Mel (technically the first hip-hop
and R&B collaboration, though in my mind Jody Whatley's
"Friends", which was blessed by Rakim, is more
significant.) The song remains Khan's best-selling
single. Khan's version of "I Feel for You" began a
tenuous relationship between R&B and hip-hop, one which
would finally earn hip-hop validation from the black
mainstream and ultimately render R&B irrelevant.
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Mark Anthony Neal is a staff writer at PopMatters.com.
Parts 2 and 3 of this series can be found at
PopMatters.com.
