one of my favourite things I saw last year was Jazmine Sullivan at the Soul Train Awards. Obviously nobody is doing live shows with crowds and bands so I loved her approach to this - basically, do the two singles as a medley performance and make it into a story. I was very hungover the morning I watched this on catch-up and found it more powerful than I probably should have.
I love her voice. She has this incredible quality where she can do all the vocal runs and hit the big notes but also sound like she's lived inside the experience and the song. She just really understands how to perform. I'm not wild about when r&b singers do performances with full bands and try to pretend they're Stevie Wonder/Prince (I saw Miguel do this live and it was awful, replaced all the woozy textural gauze of his music with funk bass and live drums, absolutely missing the point) but on a technical level the bit where she matches the solo here is really incredible.
truthfully I'm not sure about the recent mini-trend of r&b singers borrowing from afrobeats and a lot of it feels like bandwagon-chasing. But Sevyn is one of my favourite singers of the past few years. She's very obviously a student of 90s/00s r&b, both in how she writes songs and how she performs them, and there's always lots of clever samples and re-interpolations of the past, like this very obvious Sade melody. But she's also another great performer - she intuitively understands how to bend and throw her voice to service the song, and on this she sounds really sweet and alluring.
some songs capture a moment or a feeling but this is really more of a story - she's been hurt, she's gone to stay in the hotel, maybe she's going to fuck the new man, maybe the old man deserves it, maybe it's her own fault. I love the way her voice captures that mess of emotions.
I think this kind of loverman come-to-me posture is really difficult to hit well - it's really easy in r&b tropes for men trying to seduce women to seem insincere, or pathetic, or entitled, or just insistently horny; this hits the balance of earnestness and toughness exactly right.
luka
Well-known member
This is brilliant. Gold star.
What does this mean to you as a listener? Because i feel like this with the trappy style beats that absolutely omnipresent in all forms of pop, hop hop and r&b right now. I should say that i am a dj though, and having songs with tresillo, dembow or w/e rhythms makes it all flow when i am spinning this stuff out, plus i love the sound.
But yeah, someone having afrobeatsy rhythms in an era where you are able to embrace having afrobeatsy rhythms, and the music sounds good, does it matter? if so, why? Would you say that at a party if someone played it?
I think r&b is a genre built on performance and the conviction of it. So whether it's about being sexy or being heartbroken or being loved-up or being angry, the best r&b will take those emotions to their extreme - sexier than sex itself, more tears than the ocean's water, the greatest love any human could feel beyond comprehension, the fury of a thousand demons, etc. I don't believe that authenticity is necessarily the only or best way to conjure an emotional response in a listener, but I believe that in the framework of r&b the idea is to convince the listener - hence, performance. Even when I know it's not real - Beyonce isn't really in the limo, Usher isn't really about to make love to someone in the disabled toilet at the club, etc - it's about believing in the situation, real or otherwise, projecting yourself into the fantasy of that performance.
So when I hear someone make an obvious sidestep into territory where they sound uncomfortable and ill-fitting, it's distracting. When the singer doesn't sound at ease in their performance, when they're in a space that they don't naturally fit, it draws attention to the artificiality of the performance, and diminishes the effect of conviction.
I think about when Nelly Furtardo did that album with Timbaland and Danja and got away with it because she fully committed to the role and everything needed to make that work. I think about when Little Mix tried to pass themselves off as being into reggaeton because everyone else was doing it for a summer and it just sounded like a graft. Those are the extreme examples, in reality it's the kind of thing that marks the mediocre from the good from the exceptional.
So when I hear someone make an obvious sidestep into territory where they sound uncomfortable and ill-fitting, it's distracting. When the singer doesn't sound at ease in their performance, when they're in a space that they don't naturally fit, it draws attention to the artificiality of the performance, and diminishes the effect of conviction.
I think about when Nelly Furtardo did that album with Timbaland and Danja and got away with it because she fully committed to the role and everything needed to make that work. I think about when Little Mix tried to pass themselves off as being into reggaeton because everyone else was doing it for a summer and it just sounded like a graft. Those are the extreme examples, in reality it's the kind of thing that marks the mediocre from the good from the exceptional.
Okay, i can understand and i respect this way of listening to music, though i don't think it really applies to more underground, or lesser known artists tbh. I don't know if i would put Sevyn Streeter at the same level as Beyonce, Usher, Nelly Furtado etc.