I fundamentally don't understand R&B. I used to think I just didn't like it. Now I can appreciate its qualities, but it still seems to me to be being beamed in from a parallel emotional universe. Metal makes sense to me because it's basically collective/solipsistic - you might experience it listening alone in your bedroom, or as part of a heaving mass in a moshpit, but with the exception of "metal ballads" (almost uniformly terrible) you'd never sing a metal song directly to another person. (An interesting exception here might be Deftones, which is unusually intimate - not for nothing is there a rather good Deftones Sade cover, for instance). R&B is about seduction, praise, remonstration, apology: it's a person-to-person medium. The speaker is always caught up in an intersubjective game - very often the answering voice is included in the song, offering encouragement or retort. I'm fairly terrible at all of those things in real life, and don't really understand what people who are good at them are really doing. R&B seems to me to be about imagining yourself, successfully, as a kind of intersubjective virtuoso: not just a loverman, but a really persuasive loverman, one who believes in himself and wants to be believed by the other person.