How did we get to this point? In 2019 the derivations of R&B spread like a great sycamore tree. However, the prominence and preeminence of R&B is nothing new, nevertheless, the character of it in today’s day and age is something pretty remarkable.
Trace back to the late 70’s with the rise of Disco and you’ll see one of the first times the world of popular music was ensconced in the groove and melody of R&B. The chart-topping singles of the day were made by folks like Donna Summer, Chic, and Bee Gees, all of whom found a way to make electronic dance music the best-selling sound experiment of the 70’s. In its own unique form, Disco was a fusion of 70’s Soul/R&B with Funk as a backbone, while also employing the current trends in electronic technology to produce big, nearly orchestral-sounding songs. Ever since that time the sounds once tarnished with labels like “urban”, “underground”, or even more flagrantly, as “Black music”, have been a vital element of popular music. Artists like Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Mariah Carey, and Whitney Houston elevated R&B beyond popular U.S. music to worldwide smash success. Yet, considering the cosmically big statements of many R&B musicians from the 70’s to present day, we have never seen the music so simply and modestly mellow as it is today.
We come back to the original question of how did we get here…..with this genre. It’s as if R&B is in its prime, much like a great athlete in their late twenties; balancing arrogance and creativity with the calm confidence brought on by years of hard-earned experience. R&B has settled into a groove as a genre, with its many emanations of form trending into new and exciting, albeit laid-back channels. What I love most about the genre is the swagger in simple, lo-fi creations employing the simple technologies of reverb, while mixing with it the sharp and clean production available to so many in our modern world of powerful personal technology.
What this means is R&B has begun to dally into genres of Alternative R&B, Lo-Fi Soul, and Bedroom R&B. The casual beauty of this sound, being created by everyone from a Mexican-American boy from Indiana (Omar Apollo) to a ginger-haired white kid from England (Archy Marshall/King Krule), indicates the level of comfort, as well as dominance, R&B has in popular music. It’s stunning the number of ways all the different genres (Hip-Hop, Electronica, and Lo-Fi Indie Rock) have been incorporated, cross-pollinating to create countless different hybrid species. The sound doesn’t need to scream anymore, doesn’t need to be big and brash and splashy – it’s accepted in every bedroom in America, as low-key as it desires to be.
Most decades have that watershed album that started a cultural shift. In the early 70’s Marvin Gaye showed us we could make a complete album with powerful thoughts and controversial statements when he released What’s Going On (1971). Pink Floyd’s 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon taught us the pinnacle of Psychedelia was in big production and stunningly simple imagery. Michael Jackson’s 1982 album Thriller and Prince’s 1984 album Purple Rain showed us visual art and sonically-centric cinema could catapult music into new spheres of commercial success. Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991) unleashed an entire decade of Grunge and Post-Grunge Rock.
The power of just one album to inspire and incite over a decade of future music is nothing to roll your eyes about, in fact, it’s resoundingly true, and has happened many times before. So I posit the genesis of the current Lo-Fi Soul boom in popular music started with Frank Ocean’s 2012 masterpiece Channel Orange. The album’s intimate, downturned and melancholy base sprouted a whole new generation of ambitious and confident R&B artists who realized a bit of grainy nostalgia and shimmering reverb could be embraced by music-at-large in the 21st Century. What’s more, Frank Ocean’s keen blending of so many different genres in the gravitational field of R&B, including Electronica, Neo-Soul, and Hip-Hop, influenced a great many future artists to take it a step further and to formally incorporate Indie Rock, Jazz, House, Trip-Hop, and other genres under the umbrella of R&B into their own personal style of music.
What you get can be called a lot of things (as mentioned above – Bedroom Soul, Alternative R&B, Indie Soul, etc etc), but I’ll just stick with my favorite tag – Lo-Fi Soul. It’s a thrilling time to be listening and celebrating R&B in the sphere of both Pop and Indie music, as it’s all mingling and regenerating as strange and alluring creations interwoven into popular culture and becoming increasingly intoxicating through the tastemaking playlists of Spotify and Apple Music. I made my own humble effort at a playlist for this elusive genre-bender. The first edition playlist, “Tunnelgazing” (I hope more come, there’s never a shortage of great songs released every day). Here is a quick recap on its contents:
TUNNELGAZING (VOL.01)
I had to start-off with a track by Steve Lacy, who is emerging as one of the most impactful musicians and producers in R&B. Incredibly, he’s only 21, and in 2017, at the ripe old age of 18, released Steve Lacy’s Demo. It’s an EP with a meager run-time of 13:13, but leaves an impression belying the length. This small hint of brilliance is gold – there isn’t a single track that isn’t short yet fantastic. I hope he continues to contribute as part of the band The Internet, which is basically a supergroup now. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if he focuses more on his individual records as well as becoming a premier producer (having already done work with Ravyn Lanae, Goldlink, Kali Uchis, and even Vampire Weekend). His first LP, Apollo XXI, is a masterpiece, and is the subject of another post where I dedicate more words of praise.
The next track, “Giving In”, by Club Kuru strays more towards Psychedelic Rock, yet still feels linked to the Lo-Fi Soul movement with the vocals and Funk-driven rhythm. More importantly, the sound is akin to one of my favorite modern musicians, the underrated Nick Hakim. Club Kuru’s music doesn’t need to rest on just this song, as they’ve released several solid LPs, but this track stands out as bigger and stronger than most and served well in the track 02 spot to propel the mix out into deeper waters towards the middle of the mix. “Nothing in Return” by Monsune, is another sterling example of the outreach Pop-Soul has achieved. Scott Zhang, a young Canadian of Asian heritage, dropped this as his first single on Bandcamp in 2017. He calls his music “Plunderphonics” for its creative use of Soul samples, and this style serves him well as backing to what is really impressive vocal stylings reminding me of another one of my favorite musicians of this “genre”, Omar Apollo, a topic of previous discussion.
Next is the track “Antidote” by Orion Sun. Look out for Orion Sun, as this is a one woman act with a lot of potential. She’s a Philadelphia-based soul singer and multi-instrumentalist who clearly knows how to produce a deeply personal, nostalgic, and emotive form of Bedroom Soul. However, you can tell she has a penchant for production by the way she layers warm Soul over very complicated instrumentals. Just take a listen to this other gem off of her album A Collection of Fleeting Moments and Daydreams (2017), which is great as an entire piece.
The next track, “Goodie Bag” is from another one-person act. Still Woozy is the work of Oakland-based Sven Gamsky, who for some reason I thought was a British musician – probably attributable to the vocals that on some tracks can sound downright English. Still Woozy has been popping up all over my Spotify and it would seem is emerging as a very popular indie act along the American circuit. Now for someone who is actually British, we go to the aforementioned Archy Marshall, performing as King Krule on this one. He had to have a place on this mix, and I chose a track from his amazing album Six Feet Beneath the Moon (2013). If you listen to this album, or his sophomore one The Ooz (2017), it’s clear to be pretty near impossible to peg him. His music, his vocals, his look, everything about him, is strange and unique. When he performs under his real name, Archy Marshall, he often leans more towards late night Electronica with moody Soul undertones. His voice is instantly distinguishable and so is his sound, which may be evasive, but is certainly some form of Lo-Fi hybrid art.
Another young and talented British musician is Cosmo Pyke, who often receives comparisons to King Krule. And much like Archy Marshall, the music often defies categorization, but is certainly a hybrid of many. Reggae, Hip-Hop, Jazz, and Soul all feature heavily in his sound. I would also say he takes liberties with sampling, especially old radio clips, far more than his contemporaries. I went with the track “Chronic Sunshine”, off the EP of the same name, as it paired well with King Krule’s “Borderline”. Similar to Monsune, Yeek is another dynamic artist with Asian heritage who seamlessly blends Hip-Hop and Soul. I saw him open for Yellow Days last year and was immediately intrigued by his ability to ballad like Usher on one track, and then play guitar-based Bedroom Pop the next, with all the reverb-washed guitars that remind me of an Indie Rocker. His album Sebastian (2017) is a fun one that screams of DIY-production yet aspires to have a bigger sound. What is there to say about the artist of the next track on the mix, “Roller Skates”, that I haven’t already said before? Nick Hakim and his album Green Twins (2017) is easily a Top 10 most listened to album for me, from this decade. Putting a track on this mix from him, and from that album, was a foregone conclusion.
A standout Spotify track I flagged comes next, called “She Said”, from Hablot Brown. I don’t know much about this group, other than they are three white guys who describe themselves as “fresh Neo-Soul/R&B band with a unique sonic polish”. Sounds like an apt description, as it was certainly the polish of the singing and production contrasting with the echo-laden keys and guitars that drew me in. An essential group to have on this mix was Vansire, which released an incredible album in 2018 called Angel Youth. The sound flirts more with downtempo Electronica, and the vocals are more of a lounge croon than emanating from R&B. The sound could even be related to Trip-Hop, yet seemed vital to place on the mix for the genre-blending that seems to come natural to the Minnesota crew. That upper Midwest origin comes out in some of the bleak, barely pulsating tunes, which eek out like faint rays of winter the region experiences. The fusion of Hip-Hop, Pop, Soul, and Electronica is the perfect example of the longer limbs R&B has grown in recent years.
The next two songs are collaborations I used as a palette-cleanser of sorts. Both are uplifting and brimming with good energy – a departure from the moodier late-night aesthetic that was being carved out in the previous handful of tracks. “The Times I’m Not There”, a sanguine mingling of two dissimilar Chicago-based artists (singer-songwriter Jamila Woods and Indie Rockers Ne-Hi) and “Today” by Omar Apollo feat. Teo Halm ride on similar themes of lilting guitars with rugged edges. However, Jamila’s voice is a confident clarion call, whereas Omar’s vocals are raspy and plaintive. I thought the tracks worked very well together back-to-back. Mk.Gee’s funky Electro-Soul track “You” was employed as an instrumental interlude to divide the mix into two halves. The Los Angeles-based producer-instrumentalist reminds me of Bibio and the complex mix of instrumental tracks, stray vocal outbursts, and cut and paste clip creations. “Drip”, a collab song between another LA act in The Marias and New Yorkers Triathalon kicks-off the second part of the mix with the sweet and sultry. Both groups are style-driven, and do a great job of weaving Electronica and Soul into a sonic dreamscape of washed production and swaggering rhythm. Both “Fangs” by Matt Champion (part of the huge music collective BROCKHAMPTON out of Texas) and “Wings” by our dearly departed Mac Miller, lean heavily on Rap and Hip-Hop for the lyrics and vocals, yet sonically rely on both modern and classic R&B to create unique new hybrid sounds.
The next track is from Michigan-based songwriter/rapper/producer Choker, who is as evasive as he is eclectic. “Juno” is an awe-inspiring bit of mash-up music that sounds as much like a medley as Paul McCartney’s “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” as it does a scattered sound collage. You can instantly hear the parallels to Frank Ocean in his voice, and the liberty in songwriting and expression was no doubt forged in the fire of Ocean’s Channel Orange. I also thought it segued nicely from the more Hip-Hop based tracks by Matt Champion and Mac Miller to the downtempo R&B tracks of Arlo Parks’ “Cola” and Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s gorgeously burnished Lo-Fi gem “Honeybee”. Back to London born Arlo Parks and her track “Cola”; what stood out to me about this one was of course the bass-heavy guitar work adding a noir style to the sound, but more importantly, those haunting lyrics. After “Cola” and “Honeybee” we change directions and go with a more accessible/pop-friendly penultimate track with “Delilah”. Aeris Roves is also a brilliant British (Yorkshire) singer-songwriter, much like Arlo Parks, and is equally as important to watch out for with future work. What I loved about “Delilah”, apart from the effortlessly genius lyrics, was the ease in which he constructed the track. The way the acoustic opening unfurls into a full-fledged Soul/R&B track, picking up tempo and driving purpose, is incredibly powerful. Indeed, the track was a departure, but a necessarily epic one to transition into Yellow Days’ (guess what, another British artist) “Nothing’s Gonna Keep Me Down”. George van den Broek has one of those strong caterwauling vocal styles that is instantly recognizable, and absolutely essential for this mix. There is nothing traditional, or conventional, about his vocals, yet you cannot deny for some inexplicable reason that his music is Soul music. You would rarely think about R&B and Soul with that unique voice – cracking and grappling and stomping throughout- but it’s got the Soul spirit nonetheless. I could’ve gone with many other Yellow Days tracks, as there are so many good ones, but this one just works perfectly as the final track on a mix.
Hope this first entry in “Tunnelgazing” is a volume that proves my point, and I hope it is enjoyable. Wow, I put a lot of British artists on this one….so I suppose I should say….. Cheers!
