Back in the 1990s and 2000s, R&B was hailed as the most popular genre in music. It hit its peak when Usher sold 1.1 million in the first week with Confessions, spawned four #1 songs and the album eventually went diamond. Recently, though, R&B doesn’t seem to be in the same place. That could be attributed to a few things, but the biggest reasons are because not many people create traditional R&B music anymore. Now, Hip-hop and rap is the new hybrid of rap and R&B.
When most people think of traditional R&B, they think of New Edition, Boyz II Men, R. Kelly, and vintage Usher. Nowadays, though, when people think of R&B, the biggest R&B artists in the world are The Weeknd, Bryson Tiller, Rihanna and Beyonce. The difference between them and traditional R&B music is the lyrical content and sound. Old-school R&B had more of a love filled, censored, sensual type of vibe with songs like “Real Love” by Mary J. Blige, “If I Ain’t Got You” by Alicia Keys, “I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston and a slew of others. Even the breakup songs like “Confessions Pt. 2” by Usher weren’t all that explicit if at all. It was around the late 2000s when R&B started to see a change. Although, there had been songs before it, one of the most popular songs in 2008 was Usher’s “Love in this Club,” which was an R&B sound which featured a hip-hop beat for ass appeal. This laid the foundation for auto-tuned engineered tracks songs like T-Pain’s “Buy U A Drank,” Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop,” and Kanye West’s “Heartless,” which officially ushered in a new era in for R&B, where newer artists like Drake and Wiz Khalifa essentially created a sub genre dubbed “Rap&B.”
R&B itself wasn’t as popular anymore at that point, until The Weeknd created House of Balloons alongside Drake’s Take Care. There had hardly ever been R&B songs before that were as explicit and heartfelt as Drake’s “Marvins Room” and The Weeknd’s “Wicked Games.” Both of those songs reached the Billboard Hot 100, so people heard the music. After those projects released, Bryson Tiller, PartyNextDoor, Tory Lanez and a large amount of other R&B artists garnered that sound, citing Drake and/or The Weeknd as direct inspirations. Even more successful artists were influenced by the sound. You could tell that Beyonce was influenced by Drake in her self-titled album, she even had the song “Mine” with him. But essentially, that “Toronto Sound” was a big part of the change of R&B music. Not only that, but people themselves seemed to go from more of a love filled vibe to a sort of an openly unapologetic vibe which can be interpreted as a stream of consciousness.
Aside from just R&B changing, though, another big reason for R&Bs decline is the fact that today’s rap is basically a hybrid version of R&B. Drake was one of the biggest influences in implementing R&B into rap music, but there are plenty of other artists who sing-rap as well. There’s Travis Scott, Future, Quavo, Swae Lee, and plenty of other hip-hop artists that sing as much as they rap. A lot of that came from the influence of people like Drake, Wayne, and Kanye. We even see former R&B artists basically sing-rapping too, like Chris Brown on “Loyal,” Usher on “No Limit,” R. Kelly on “My Story,” and Rihanna on “Needed Me.”
It’s not necessarily that R&B itself is dying as much as it’s basically one in one with hip-hop at this point. Very few people are making the R&B music that was dominant in the 1990s and 2000s and even fewer are getting too popular. The last traditional song that was older R&B based was John Legend’s “All Of Me” back in 2013. All music is subject to change eventually, though, and R&B was always going to shift. At least we can still enjoy the old R&B while being excited for what the genre has in store next for us.
Intresting, will come back here once in a while.