Post-R'n'B: when did indie folks start playing up R'n'B as an influence?
Have you noticed the creeping trend of Aaliyah being mentioned as a major influence and Timbaland as a production benchmark by indie-ish acts?
Obviously the Rolling Stones had R&B influences but when did this make a come back? Should we blame land-fill indie or has that world simply been more inventive? Was it chillwave 'slow-jamz' becoming something else or did it happen a while back before the xx and James Blake?
Does post-r&b really exist? is it less annoying and a tad more 'on it' than post-dubstep as a genre name?
Some thoughts on the topic from Rory (dis-intergration) http://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4141892-subliminal-transmissions-06--r-n-bass
- Relevant artist taggings:
- James Blake »[x]
- This Week's Singles 24.9.12: Dan Croll, Trimbal & Harmonimix, Jesse Boykins III, Umberto
- armchair dancefloor 037: Keysound/Dusk + Blackdown, Artifact, James Blake, NeferTT, Pangaea, Oneohtr
- Green Man Festival Preview – Part Two: What To See
- DiS in 2011: Stats, Most Read, Top Threads and Editor's Picks
- James Blake - Enough Thunder
- PJ Harvey favourite to win second Mercury Prize
- Playing records with Neil Hamburger
- James Blake announces new EP release
Thread not appearing correctly? Click here to rebuild | Report this
Twitter
Facebook
Last.fm
SoundCloud
MySpace
Friendster
RSS
First Destiny's Child record
I'd have thought a lot of it is simply to do with the fact that R'n'b has been the most dominant form of mainstream music over the last decade
and thus the twenty-somethings of today might be pretty hard pressed not to be influenced by it in some way, hardwired as it is into their musical conciousness by years of (if only passive) exposure since a tender age
well, that in addition to the usual 'internet changed everything' argument
i.e. it might be fair to say that different channels of coming into contact with music and interacting with / discussing it etc. means a lot of music fans are far less 'tribal' and more musically cosmopolitan than they used to be... thus old barriers and stigmas re: dabbling in considerably different genres of music have faded somewhat
i haven't heard anyone sum things up quite so succinctly. thank you. i always like to think of the web making our tastes more fluid, removing all the rigid preconceptions of the past that defined who you were and weren't if you liked something. I don't really get why I supposedly can't love both Richard Skelton and Paramore, if both things connect with me.
Its always been a big thing in dance music
taking R&B and putting it to more stright up dance beats be it samples or house divas. So I guess it was a natural progression for people to keep playing with those ideas. Burial is prob a big part of its takeover of the uk bass scene a lot was made of is cheeky chopped up sampeling, loads of people do simular or try to.
Then you have people that really enjoy R&B and like to mess with its sound pallet in their own stuff. We prob have a generation of people making music right now that grew up with prime time Timberland and Neptunes all over the radio, I know I did. At one point you couldn't listen to radio one without every other tune being from one of those guys and it was all pretty fun and interesting music. I think modern stuff is pretty inspiring right now too. You cant go far in electronic circles withought hearing a dirty south-esq drum machine, its all over witch house lol and bass music. UK dance geeks have been falling for Drake... not too sure why... Lil Wayne, Gucci Mane and The-Dream big time this last few years at least.
That seems to be seeping into indie music as well now, I'm not sure I hear it that much in The xx but lots of others seem to, then you have Hype Williams and How To Dress Well who are on the fringes of both electronic and indie worlds who are messing about with it.
It'll all prob piss off trad-R&B fans in some cases, I know I've seen some grumble about it in How To Dress Well they see it as a cheesey rip off and a slight when its prob just a re-contextulisation and play about with a sound the guys likes. They're just being grumpy.
Dunno I just spaffed all that out, hope it made some sorta sence with no spelling or gramma mistakes.
I'd agree with all that but just point out that
Burial's unashamedly taking his cues from El B (note the blatant Aaliyah sample in Stone Cold), Todd Edwards, MK, et al. It's always been a massive part of dance music.
Beyond the vocal sampling the most obvious recent influence from r'n'b has been the machine gun snares that happen in the build up to drops (Girl Unit's 'Wut' being an obvious example).
So yeah, it's not a particularly new thing, and labels like Claude Von Stroke's Dirtybird have basically based their whole sound around merging a more traditional house sound with 'ghetto tech', 'booty bass' and r'n'b.
yeah of course
EL-B is a massive influence on Burial but Bruial just got bigger, his influence spread like wildfire and touched a load more people.
Garage and R&B/pop have always been massivly connected, so dubstep which came out of that has connections too. Less so in some parts obviously but its there. More so more than ever really. Girl Unit pretyy much sounds like R&B/Hip-hop instos on steroids with extra bass and faster tempos so does Joker, Guido and Ikonika in a lot of ways.
Dance has massive connections to R&B from early disco and house to booty bass, juke, everything really... Its just a big thread running thru it all. Its pretty prominent in the bass scene at the moment.
What? This isn't a recent thing.
This has been the case at least as far back as the emergence of the likes of Timberland and The Neptunes - when everything they did sounded exciting and thrilling compared to other shite that was clogging up the charts at the time (i.e. nu-metal, kiddie emo, 'New Acoustic Movement,' and chill-out stuff)
You didn't know many indie fans then.
Or if you did, they were the ones still listening to Oasis and the like.
Who do you think packed out nights like Optimo and Trash, and bought albums like 2ManyDJs?
Well, there was a certain amount of disdain for the R Kelly-type R'n'B that
kinda predated the emergence of Timbaland et al. There probably weren't many indie fans - at the time - that would admit to liking 'I Believe I Can Fly,' but when the hyper-staccato minimal, twitchy sound came in, it became something more of a shared currency.
Don't forget that (just prior to the New Music Revolution) the NME went crazy for this kind of stuff, putting Missy and Aaliyah on the front cover.
the last USP for hip bands got a bit stale
shoerave?
noisestep
lovestep
bleepwitch
chillgrave
weak-wave
Shoerave Is Dead
[sadface]
:(
Shoerave will always be in our hearts
did music kill shoerave?
noisestep wore the sole through
To much stomping
:(
Hang on
"Obviously the Rolling Stones had R&B influences..."
As tautological as this will sound, R&B and r'n'b aren't the same thing.
i tried looking into this
and couldn't find a definitive explanation. more than happy to be patronized for the sake of clarity...
in fact
it'd probably be great as an article on DiS!
Essentially it's two unrelated genres that happen to share a name
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R&B#British_rhythm_and_blues
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_R%26B
Garage Rock & UK Garage I think he meant
UK Garage and US Garage are connect though yuuuurrrrrrrrrrp
I had always assumed.
R&B - Rhythm and Blues
R'N'B - Rhythm and Beats
Well, honestly i think it first happened around the time of the beta band's hot shots 2.
Sean. Wikipedia is your friend and spells things out reasonably clearly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythm_and_blues
indeed
http://thepopstory.com/2011/01/the-great-lost-indie-rnb-revolution-of-the-00s/
Drake
The amount of times I've seen otherwise sane bass loving dance fans go dip shit for Drake and hardly anything else is insane. Its like he's a buzz word for being down with the kids and ecclectic. I'm sure a load of them like him though but whatever. He's a bit too emo for me.
maybe
people genuinely like it. just a thought.
I like all those things
I don't care if it makes me look like a dingbat-tryhard. Lil Wayne and The-Dream are mint, Gucci has his moments. I'm getting into Cassie and Ciara at the moment too cos they're cool aparently. They have some ace tracks. Aaliyah and Timberland are just a given I mean they where everywhere when I was younger. I can never be arsed to dig that deep into R&B though but I'll hapily mooch about when the mood takes me. <<<dingbat-tryhard
indeed
don't get me wrong, i wasn't saying the love wasn't genuine. just pointing out that there's an absence of names like pixies, kraftwerk, velvet underground and radiohead, which was in nearly everything we used to get sent, is quite noticeable.
Well 'post' is probably the key word, isn't it?
R&B as we're describing it had to develop into a recognisable entity before other people could start nicking things from it in large numbers.
And I think the fact it was the dominant form of popular music in the States when a lot of late 20s/early 30s US indie musicians grew up clearly had an impact...
But you know, if funk, disco et al were the precursors of R&B then you really only have to look at people like Talking Heads and Orange Juice to see that there's an argument for a 30 year cycle type thing to be made.
By coincidence, I was listening to the new Scritti Politti Best Of today... I'm not even really sure what I'd categorise them AS, but their 80s stuff still sounds more overtly R&B than the average Vampire Weekend song.
And I think finally, with some of that 90s stuff, it probably does take a bit of distance for people to have really embraced it, or embrace part of it. The personas and vocal styles of R&B are vastly different to the indie artists influenced by them... 'Stillness Is The Move' is about the only indie song I can think of that approximates a pop-R&B vocal... it's almost exclusively the music that people are nicking.
well
it's obvious in bitte orca and MPP from 2k9, and while there was loads of cross over in the 80's/90's (talking heads), the key has been the last few years. P4K has started loving up Kanye & Big Boi, coachella and lollapolooza have booked more hip hop acts in recent times, and collabs have been at a high.
never thought of mpp as having an R&B influence
I don't think I can hear it to be honest. Can you argue it? Bitte Orca does though yeah. MPP has more of a electronic loop based almost dance music thing going on but I don't see the R&B. The band prob like a whole bunch of that stuff... I dunno but I don't hear it in the music without a good explination.
Was apparently influenced by the production of new amerykah by erykah badu especially the bass
and they got the producer because he produced Crazy by Gnarls Barkley. I don't see any of the influences as that explicit but if you listen for them you can hear them.
indeed
but i also think maybe the xx have sped things up a bit?
When indie folks finally lost their virginity.
You're not going to get laid listening to The Decemberists.
Is it maybe a sort of reaction to the wrong-headed "real music" separatism
that used to plague indie types? I hope that kind of fucking dour guitar bollocks never comes back.
An aside: Looking back on the last decade of my life, the years when I was getting drunk at house parties when friends' parents were away and copping off with girls to a soundtrack of MJ Cole, Artful Dodger and Brandy & Monica were about twenty times more fun than "the indie dickhead years" that came later when we all tried to become super hip US indie knowledge banks. And now most of the new stuff I like sounds like a natural extension of the fun years.
When I was a young 'un, Smash Hits they had an established joke,
based on bands claiming that 'there's always been a dance element to our sound'. That was 20+ years ago at the height of indie-dance, when it was still slightly novel for a band of one genre to dabble in other stuff, but common enough for a publication like Smash Hits to pick up on the theme of plenty of luddite bands trying to jump on the bandwagon.
But things have moved on from that line of thinking (they always had, for most sane people over the age of 9).
Tim Burgess (and there are few more 'indie-fop' at first glance than he or his band) has had a long-standing affection for hip-hop since the early/mid-90s. Might not be discernible as a direct influence on their sound, but you only have to fast forward to Noel Gallagher's crap about Jay-Z to see how backward some portions of the indie world still were/are in comparison even 15 years after.
See also: all this talk about 'real music' by Brother, or whatever shit they've been coming out with (I've not been paying attention to them, but it kinda unavoidably permeates your consciousness), as they're trying to ressurect some kind of mods v rockers or disco v punk* thing. That just ain't gonna happen, though. *NB: on the face of it, disco and punk aren't obvious bedfellows, but scratch the surface, and the Pistols' Glen Matlock was nabbing ABBA basslines.
Basically, this outside influences by popular charty stuff thing has been going on forever, and r'n'b is what's been in the charts during the current crop of bands' formative years.
rory seems to be talking about bass music than indieish acts.
it's not just the beat the beat that is becoming more american, the barking type vocals are becoming more prevalent, like on the mensah mix of superisk and the asa n kahn remix of royal t side effect.