R&B you should know and love

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's like if I had to talk dirty to a woman I'd be so awkward about it that I'd say something horrendously OTT.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I have a very special and secrete perspective on rnb cos I never get any action whatsoever. That changes the emotional tenor of songs about shagging. Fills them with a deep melancholy charge. This is probably the same perspective that informed Burial sampling RnB. Compare how UK garage producers in designer clothes popping bubbly on the white house lawn sampled RnB.
 

boxedjoy

Well-known member
I didn't "get" r&b until I was in my 20s because I didn't understand truly the emotions you find in r&b. Like I could tell a song was horny or heartbroken or whatever but I couldn't relate. Well, I don't think relate is the right word - because it's a genre based on performance and demonstration, r&b is all outsize emotions that you can insert yourself into, whether its sexier than sex itself or sadder than sadness itself etc.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
No prizes for guessing where I heard this first, but never heard the full song till today and it lifted my mood straight away
 

boxedjoy

Well-known member
can't believe I forgot about "Sensitivity" it is such a perfect song. Amazing how it manages to be so American yet it has that Soul II Soul UK bounce, smooth like disco but with a light tuffness. Also it's one of those rare songs where a man is trying to be seductive and manages it without being either sleazy or wimpish.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
its sexier than sex itself or sadder than sadness itself etc.

Did you come up with this? It's brilliant.

As I said just up there, for me, the everpure pale incel, RNB is tragically aspirational music that I listen to in much the same spirit as the tragic widower flips puddle-eyed through photos of his late lamented never to be resurrected wife. But more so.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
That's presumably why I once spent a good two hours in a tent at Bestival literally weeping to SWV and Usher songs.

Although in the case of, say, "U Don't Have To Call" it was tears of selfless regret for the universal poignancy of fleeting beauty.

I was doing it for all those youngsters out there in the fields, taking drugs and shagging.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Did you come up with this? It's brilliant.

As I said just up there, for me, the everpure pale incel, RNB is tragically aspirational music that I listen to in much the same spirit as the tragic widower flips puddle-eyed through photos of his late lamented never to be resurrected wife. But more so.

This is only true if you want it to be so.
 

boxedjoy

Well-known member
but that's also kinda the pleasure of r&b, isn't it. It's not meant to be real life, it's the aspirationally relatable.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
That's the pleasure of life: framing random actions and events in a narrative drama. A sign of depression is not being able to do that, a total inability to tolerate or create illusions and aspirations which are both closely related and indispensable. I can see that to somebody in state of depression, R&B could be pure torture. I always go back to how much heartbreak I channeled through Jagged Edge's 'Walked Outta Heaven': it was the perfect song at the right moment, a vehicle for expressing and dramatizing my own emotions. It magnified them, but also stopped them becoming destructive.
 
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