The Slow Decline of R&B, Part One:
Rhythm & Business, Cultural Imperialism and the Harvard Report
by Mark Anthony Neal
Part One | Part Two | Part Three
Yeah, I'm nostalgic: When Mary J. Blige
first uttered the opening lines to "You Remind Me," it was about
making sure that hip-hop remembered that R&B came from the same streets
where crackheads roamed and the same tenement
vestibules where drama went down on the regular. But as I listen to Mario's
"Let Me Love You" for the 727th time, it is perhaps easy to suggest
that R&B has lost its Soul, or that Clear Channel, Radio One (luv ya, Cathy!), AOL-Time Warner
and Viacom -- a neo-plantation cabal if ever there was one -- ripped its heart
out. Hip-hop may have sold out, but at least it has sold out on its own terms.
R&B, on the other hand, has sold out on somebody else's, on a pop-chart
paper chase. Truth be told, U(r)sher was nothing more
than a soon-past-his-peak R&B singer before John Smith laced him with some crunk junk; Ray J could have sang the hook on
"Yeah" and topped the pop charts. And now, 10 million units later, we
want to act like Mr. Raymond is the second coming of Michael Jackson? I ain't
willing to grant him the second coming of Bobby Brown. And it is not like we
even knew Mr. Legend (in his own mind) and Ms. Queen of Crunk
n' B were in the room, until some hip-hop act sanctioned their presence. But
what ails contemporary R&B is not just a matter of the commercial success
of John Legend -- and Amerie and Ciara
and Mario. The current state of R&B comes not from a sudden decline, but a
process more than 30 years in the making.
Does the soulless sound of contemporary R&B really have
its roots in a controversial Harvard study from 1972, an alleged blueprint for
the corporate theft of black culture's heritage? Or was it all Clive Davis's
idea? The first of a three-part examination of how R&B
became big business on the way to becoming irrelevant.
This story begins in 1972, when a few enterprising master's students at the
Black music has always had a complicated relationship with
big business. That this relationship has typically had little to do with actual
music perhaps explains the often unbalanced quality of this thing we've come to
call R&B. This complicated relationship also partly explains what exactly
R&B is. The term R&B is essentially a
shortened version of "Rhythm & Blues", but as a novice might
discern, that which is called R&B bears little resemblance to the musical
landscape created by Ruth Brown, Louis Jordan, Laverne Baker, Charles Brown and
the Coasters. And perhaps that was the point. Musical innovations aside,
R&B was essentially a marketing ploy that finally gained a significant
foothold during the late 1970s. R&B was born out of competing logics --
record companies tried to negotiate the realities of black culture and identity
within the history of race relations in
According to the "Harvard Report" black radio was
strategically important to record companies because it provided "access to
large and growing record buying public, namely, the Black consumer." The
report is oblivious to the fact that the very birth of what was called
"race music" in the 1930s was premised on selling goods and services
to a uniquely defined audience, namely African-Americans constrained by Jim
Crow segregation-an audience that might even buy a record or two, in the
process of buying furniture, cleaning supplies and an insurance policy.
Nevertheless, the report is cognizant of the growth of an emerging black middle
class, one that would prove attractive not just to record companies but also
advertisers eager to fuel black desires to consume the fetishes of a post-Civil
Rights world. In the aftermath of centuries of struggle, exploitation and
violence, some members of the black middle class often viewed their ability to
consume widely throughout mainstream society as an emblem of the
"freedoms" won during the Civil Rights struggle.
To get a sense of what this urbane blackness would look and
feel like, think of the immensely popular early 1980s Colt 45 commercials
featuring Billy Dee Williams. Twenty years later, no one really blinked an eye
when poet Sonia Sanchez and Eric Benet used
"smooth" R&B to hawk for an automobile maker. As R&B began to
be viewed as the quintessence of upscale blackness, the more gritter aspects of black popular music --that which was, as
Houston Baker Jr. describes it, "too blackly public" (as in
embarrassing, like black folk eating watermelon in public) -- began to
disappear from the program list of some urban radio outlets in the late 1970s.
So-called Southern Soul -- the ZZ Hills, Denise LaSalles
and Betty Wrights of the world -- was an example of the kind of music that
vanished from urban radio. Though Southern Soul didn't disappear -- labels like
Malaco and Ichiban continue to promote Southern Soul
artists to this day -- the more bluesier
aspects of its sound and its references to black southern culture were the very
antithesis of the post-Civil Rights worldviews of many African-Americans. The
popped-over P-Funk of Rick James -- one of the best selling black artists at the
beginning of the post-Soul era --was emblematic of the brave new world of
R&B. The challenge for record labels at this point was to come up with
product to feed the R&B machine.
The Harvard Report was adamant that the Columbia Records
Group should not attempt to purchase any of the prominent Soul labels (Motown,
The language that the Harvard Report uses to describe the
value of indie Soul labels is undisputable:
"These small independents could provide a source of product, in the form
of 'hot masters;' talent which could have national potential; experienced
personnel…in the areas of promotion and production; and serve as a source of
captive independent producers."
Clive Davis is probably less a sinister figure in the rise
and fall of R&B and more the embodiment of the corporate hustler. But
there's no denying that the very blueprint he outlined at
The boutique model was not necessarily about crossing
R&B over to the mainstream, but rather positioning the larger corporate
labels to better control the R&B market. As such, R&B artists were less
compelled to compete with so-called pop artists. Although this meant that
R&B artists had less access to resources -- particularly as the record
industry went through a financial slump in the late 1970s -- it also created
conditions where the R&B sound could develop without the additional
pressure of attracting a wider audience. Very few soul artists made the
transition to the R&B world. Notable examples are figures like Bobby
Womack, whose Poet (1981) and Poet II (1984)
represented the best work of his career and Diana Ross, whose Diana (1980),
produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, represents the apex of her solo
career. And then there's the case of Michael Jackson, who remade himself into
an R&B artist on his groundbreaking Off the Wall (1979), three years after
he sat at the feet of Gamble and Huff, who produced the Jackson's first CRG
album after the Jackson 5's departure from Motown in 1975. Often
lost in conversations about
If there was one figure who defined the genius of R&B it
was Luther Vandross, who with the release of his
eponymous debut in 1981 became the genre's dominant artist. By coyly distancing
himself from the black gospel vocal tradition, which grounded so much of the
soul music of the 1960s and 1970s, Vandross cemented
his appeal as the quintessential R&B singer. Specifically Vandross was trying to distinguish himself from generations
of "shouters" such as gospel artists Joe Ligon
(lead vocalist of the Mighty Clouds of Joy) and the late Archie Brownlee (of
the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi) or soul vocalists like Wilson Pickett, the
late Otis Redding and James Brown. As Jason King and others have suggested, Vandross was a student of various music traditions, notably
black female vocalists of the 1960s (Dionne Warwick, The Bluebelles,
Aretha Franklin), the Burt Bacharach and Hal David songbook, and the
background-vocal stylings of the Sweet Inspirations.
In addition, the lush orchestrations that figured so prominently in Vandross ballads -- he is the definitive balladeer of the
last generation of popular singers -- suggested that he too was a fan of Gamble
and Huff and Gene Page.
Still others such as Stephanie Mills, Frankie Beverly and
Maze, Jeffrey Osborne, Anita Baker, Peobo Bryson,
Atlantic Starr, Kashif, Loose Ends, Alexander O'Neal,
The Whispers, Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds, and
Chaka Khan (post Rufus) helped give R&B a cohesive sound in the early
1980s. As R&B was about attracting upscale "urban" audiences --
whether legitimate members of the black middle class or working class strivers
-- it was by definition a genre targeted to mature audiences. As the 1980s
progressed R&B was increasingly out of touch with a generation of black
youth consumers, who felt little need to distance themselves from the realities
of the Jim Crow era, especially as they faced down the venomous edge of the
Reagan era. In real terms the R&B world was being challenged by the
embryonic sounds of hip-hop for the attention (and disposable income) of
"urban" audiences. A telling sign was the success of Chaka Khan's
remake of Prince's "I Feel for You" (1984), which featured an opening
rap by Melle Mel (technically the first hip-hop and
R&B collaboration, though in my mind Jody Whatley's "Friends",
which was blessed by Rakim, is more significant.) The song remains Khan's best-selling single. Khan's version
of "I Feel for You" began a tenuous relationship between R&B and
hip-hop, one which would finally earn hip-hop validation from the black
mainstream and ultimately render R&B irrelevant.
Part II
As ubiquitous as it is today, as recently
as 15 years ago hip-hop faced a real battle just to be heard on urban radio.
Like Soul and Rhythm and Blues before it, hip-hop was too publicly black for
advertisers, and when it found its way on the playlists
of big market urban radio it was often after-hours on the weekend. There were a
few exceptions -- Whodini, for example, doesn't get
enough credit for their melding of hip-hop and R&B (courtesy of Larry
Smith) on tracks like "Friends", "Funky Beat" and in particular
"One Love", a strategy that Heavy D and the Boyz
later exploited to become a radio-friendly favorite. The success of Jody
Whatley's collaboration with Rakim,
"Friends" (1989), made some R&B artists and labels more willing
to rent-a-rapper for some street credibility, but at the same time, it was
still common practice for labels to deliver to radio versions of R&B
singles in "rap" and "no rap" mixes to maximize radio
airplay. Ultimately it took the sound christened the "new jack swing"
to bring record labels and urban radio on board with the changing dynamics of
R&B.
Teddy Riley is generally recognized as the genius behind new
jack swing, a sound that married the old-school harmonies of the black church
with a hard rhythmic edge. Riley's group Guy (originally featuring Aaron Hall
and Timmy Gatling) was the primary vehicle for his
production, but he also produced Johnny Kemp ("Just Got Paid"), Keith
Sweat ("I Want Her"), James Ingram ("I'm Real"), Boy George
("Don't Take My Mind on a Trip"), the Winans
("It's Time") and Michael Jackson ("Remember the Time").
The range of artists that Riley worked with gives some indication of new jack
swing's impact on the recording industry.
Riley might have been the true innovator of the swing, but
Bobby Brown gave it its public face. Bobby Brown was the first true embodiment
of hip-hop in the R&B world, even daring to drop a rhyme or two himself, like a low-rent LL Cool J. Many folk looked
askance a few years ago when Whitney Houston referred to her husband as the
"king of R&B", but the reality is that Brown's breakthrough
recording, 1988's Don't Be Cruel, is singularly responsible for the trajectory
of R&B well into the 1990s. It is virtually impossible to imagine the
careers of R. Kelly, Dave Hollister, Jaheim, Joe, Avant, Usher and Justin Timberlake without the success of
Don't Be Cruel, which produced five bonafide R&B
and pop hits, including "Every Little Step", "Rock Wit'cha" and, of course, "My Prerogative",
produced by Riley.
In a 1988 New York Times feature on Brown, Peter Watrous was prophetic when he suggested that Brown's
"success could have important implications.... If [his] achievement is
followed by the deserved success of others, then perhaps the wall, kept sturdy
by radio, press and record companies, that has historically divided black and
white music worlds will begin to crumble." Behind Watrous's
prescient observation was the realization among the major labels that hip-hop
possessed real commercial potential beyond urban audiences. The popular view is
that the majors got involved with hip-hop in the aftermath of successful
crossover releases by Run-DMC (Raising Hell) and the Beastie Boys (License to
By the mid-1990s hip-hop would of course do so much more,
eventually becoming one of popular music's dominant genres. But the germ of that
success came years earlier via a small boutique label distributed by MCA, the
label Brown recorded for. Sean Combs gets much of the credit for carrying
hip-hop over the crossover hump, but before Bad Boy Entertainment there was Uptown, the brain-child of former Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde frontman Andre Harrell. In the early 1980s Jekyll and Hyde
('Genius Rap") were known for the business attire they wore on stage while
rapping, a look that captured the very aesthetic that Harrell hoped to
cultivate with the Uptown label, a style he would call "High Negro",
which melded the upscale blackness of R&B (and the
yellow-power-tie/Reagan-era generation of niggeratti
strivers) with the street. Harrell was not necessarily an innovator; groups
like Full Force ("Alice, I Want You Just for Me") and The Force MDs
("Let Me Love You") were already charting this territory. But Harrell
had the genius to mass market this sound. Not surprisingly, Heavy D and the Boyz were one of the label's first successes, the group's
"We Got Our Own Thing", produced by Riley in 1989, became
an anthem for the era of asymmetrical high-top fades,
Jodeci was comprised of two sets
of brothers from
It would be Jodeci's female
counterpart at Uptown, though, who would ultimately change the game, at once
representing the best of R&B and facilitating its demise. Andre Harrell
heard a demo of Mary J. Blige singing an Anita Baker
tune, but was at a loss as to how to promote her. Blige's
big opportunity came when she recorded a song for Uptown's soundtrack for the
1991 film Strictly Business. Though it was not released as a single, "You
Remind Me" caught the attention of hip-hop DJs and soon found its way on
the playlists of urban-radio programmers. With a hit
record in hand, Uptown forged ahead with Blige's debut What's the 411? The success of the recording
pivoted on the lead single, "Real Love". Built around the rhythm
track of Audio Two's 1987 hip-hop classic "Top Billin'",
"Real Love" was the blueprint for what Combs would dub "hip-hop
soul" -- essentially the marriage of R&B vocals with hip-hop beats and
samples, which by the end of the decade became the standard form of R&B
production.
What separated Blige from her
peers was that she tapped into the emotional core of a generation of music fans
for whom loss and betrayal were always the first and foremost expectations,
whether in love or public policy. Hence a song like "Real Love"
resonated very powerfully, because it captured the hip-hop generation's utter
fixation with delineating "the real", its existential quest for
authenticity. Unlike the civil rights generation, which was often consumed with
defending its legitimacy in the face of an all-too-present white gaze, the
hip-hop generation rejected the significance of the white gaze, defining the
real within the context of black community instead. What is at stake in this
quest for the real is the very real possibility of rejection and censure from
the community. It's a product of the apprehensions and
ambivalences associated with coming of age in an era where you are free to be
whatever. And it was Blige's vocals -- ragged,
displaced and aching -- that summoned all of these emotions, as she struggled
with the demons of betrayal and abuse in her own life. Blige
quickly became known as hip-hop's Aretha Franklin, not so much for her
technical proficiency but her ability to speak for a generation, much the way
What hip-hop soul did was bring the production values of
hip-hop to the R&B world. Combs is notable if only
because he was best positioned to exploit this marriage. By the end of the
1990s others were doing it much more consistently: Timbaland
(in his work with Aaliyah and Ginuwine),
Chucky Thompson, Jermaine Dupri
and even Dr. Dre, who produced one of Blige's biggest hit singles, "Family Affair"
(2001). The use of hip-hop production in R&B created a wider audience for
hip-hop itself, something Combs quickly took advantage of with Craig Mack, the
Notorious B.I.G. and Mase. While there were artists
who had crossed over to the pop mainstream -- Run-DMC, the Beasties, NWA and
Hammer being the most notable -- only after the success of hip-hop soul were
popular hip-hop artists routinely expected to cross-over as well, as has been
the case with Jay Z, Nas, DMX, Ja
Rule, Eminem, Nelly, Ludacris,
and the rest. Telling in this regard is the fact that R&B vocalist
Ashanti's breakthrough onto the upper tier of the pop charts,
"Foolish", featured a sample of the Notorious B.I.G.'s
"One More Chance (remix)" (itself built on a sample of DeBarge's "Stay with Me").
Despite the success of hip-hop soul and purveyors like Blige, Faith Evans and later Ashanti, the R&B world of
the mid-1990s still allowed for the relatively old-school stylings
of Gerald Levert, Brian McKnight, Keith Sweat and the
so-called neo-soul movement, which was essentially R&B packaged in
opposition to hip-hop soul and marketed to traditional R&B audiences tiring
of hip-hop's urban-radio hegemony. Ironically many neo-soul artists also relied
on the sample-based production that hip-hop initially popularized (listen to
Angie Stone's "Sunshine" and D'Angelo's
"Send It On", which sample Gladys Knight & the Pips and Kool & the Gang respectively). This moment in R&B
would be short lived, as the massive consolidation within the music and radio
industries would create the context where virtually all forms of urban music
would began the pop-chart paper-chase in pursuit of the new queen: hip-hop.
Part III
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Rhythm and Bullshit?: The Slow
Decline of R&B, Part Three: Media Conglomeration, Label Consolidation, and
Payola
Throughout the late 1990s, the Clear Channeling of radio and
record-label Universalizing left untold numbers of R&B acts undiscovered.
by Mark Anthony Neal
On
Arguably the most noticeable of the wide-ranging effects of
the Telecommunications Act has been the Clear Channeling of America's public
airwaves. Prior to 1996 companies were constrained from owning more than two
radio stations in any market and could own no more than 28 nationally. The
logic behind this was simple: As the Broad Artist Coalition and the Future of
Music Coalition argued in their joint letter to the FCC and Congress in 2002,
"radio is a public asset, not private property.... The quid pro quo for
free use of the public bandwidth requires that broadcast stations serve the
public interest in their local communities." While many radio stations do
some form of public-affairs programming -- usually in the early morning hours
on the weekend -- serving the public is broader than that. Part of the
responsibility of any radio station is to support music that speaks to local
tastes. This is one of the ways that local music scenes have developed and been
nurtured in the past, whether it was Rhythm and Blues in the Midwest in the
early 1960s (which produced Motown and Curtis Mayfield), the Philly Soul of
Thom Bell and Gamble and Huff in the 1970s or hip-hop in the San Francisco Bay
area in the late 1980s.
In the aftermath of the Telecommunications Reform Act, the
massive consolidation in radio has left fewer people making the decisions about
what music will be played. The ten largest radio conglomerates in the U.S.
control more than two thirds of the national radio audience, with Clear Channel
and Viacom (which, incidentally, owns both MTV and BET) controlling more than
40 percent of that. That these conditions impact what music you hear on the
radio and the ability of local groups to get on their local radio station goes
without saying. In the past, for example, if a particular region had 20 radio
stations, 20 different program directors (PDs) would
likely decided what would be played. In the current environment playlist decisions are now in the hands of a smaller group
of PDs, who often cede some of their decision making
power to regional and national program directors. Furthermore, as the Future of
Music Coalition noted in their 2002 report "Radio Deregulation: Has It
Served Citizens and Musicians", in any given region, the concentration of
ownership among a small number of conglomerates is even more intense. The Clear
Channeling of radio has homogenized American radio. This is why urban stations
in the major markets all sound the same.
The nationalizing of local radio has made it increasingly
difficult for listeners in various locales to hold programmers accountable. One
of the best examples of these struggles was the protest of
Along with radio consolidation has come the emergence of
nationally syndicated morning drive-time programming (
Brian McKnight
Musically, the TJMS adheres to a standard "smooth
R&B and classic Soul" format with no interest in breaking new R&B
acts. Instead they have made even harder for local acts to break through.
Nationally syndicated shows such as the TJMS or The Doug Banks Morning Show (on
ABC Radio Networks), have made local drive-time personalities obsolete, thus
denying many audiences the opportunity to have their local culture and music
reflected during the drive-time hours, when listenership
is at its peak. Despite being jettisoned from
Consolidation was not restricted to radio. In the late 1990s
record-label consolidation also played its part in the demise of R&B. As
Michael Roberts notes in his essay "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag,"
label consolidation began in the late 1960s when WEA (Warner Brothers, Elecktra, Atlantic) became one of the first super labels
(See Rhythm and Business). Motown Records, which the Harvard Report urged the
Columbia Record Group not to purchase in 1972, was eventually sold to Polygram in the mid-1980s. The Columbia Records Group
itself was purchased by Sony in 1988, at which point much of the popular music
produced in the
Because R&B had lost market share to hip-hop in the late
1990s and because new R&B was neglected due to the programming logic of
"classic Soul and smooth R&B" formats, R&B became viewed as a
retrograde genre. While undiscovered Soul and R&B artists suffered under
consolidation, hip-hop has benefited. Forms of hip-hop thought to be regional
as little as 10 years ago thrived in the new media landscape. The perception
among both the record labels and radio programmers is that this older audience
is unwilling to support contemporary R&B music to the extent that younger
urban and crossover audiences support hip-hop (the success of "classic
Soul and R&B" tours of course suggest otherwise). Even those acts
perceived to have commercial potential among traditional R&B audiences --
I'm thinking specifically of the Philly Neo-Soul scene that produced Musiq, India.Arie, Jill Scott, Bilal, Res, Kindred, Jaguar
Wright, Amel Larrieux and Floetry -- we're marketed as throwback performers, whose
proclivities for so called positivity were construed
as an aesthetic value. Regardless of the critical acclaim that Neo-Soul (organic
R&B) received, major labels and urban radio never thought it anything but a
niche market. Of course, such top-tier stars of R&B as Mary J. Blige, Usher, and Mariah Carey (no longer marketed as a pop
act) held their own in the marketplace, often trading creativity for
familiarity, rehashing the production styles that first made them popular or
acquiescing to the allure of hip-hop-style production in an attempt to remain
relevant to younger urban audiences.
One would be hard pressed to think of an R&B artist,
established or otherwise, that has received the kind of promotional support
that 50 Cent or The Game received for their major label debuts. One recent
exception might be Alicia Keys, though a fair amount of her initial success
must be chalked up to Clive Davis's bag of tricks -- this is the man who helped
established a little known teenage singer from New Jersey, Whitney Houston, as
the best selling female vocalist of the last generation. And such artists as
Meanwhile consolidation allowed hip-hop to leverage its
growing commercial power. As major labels began to seek out regional hip-hop
groups to sign -- much like the imperial powers of the past seeking to annex
new lands (and resources) to their empires -- it created the context where
these groups could quickly and easily gain a national audience once they were
added to the playlists of the urban stations of the
major radio conglomerates (and video channels). The damn-near-hegemony of crunk in 2005 is probably the best example of this process.
Crunk is not a new phenomenon -- can anybody say MC
Shy-D? -- but the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996 allowed for the
regional Southern sound to be heard in places like Detroit, Los Angeles, New
York and other locales far-removed from the "dirty, dirty."
Gerald Levert
But aspiring R&B artists have been challenged by what
the Future Music Coalition calls the "twin bottleneck" effect.
Basically, with intense consolidation in both the recording industry and
commercial radio, artists are squeezed out of a hearing at both the labels and
radio stations. While independent labels remain an option for artists, the
reality is that the four major label conglomerates -- the four industry
gatekeepers -- are responsible for more than 80 percent of what makes it on
commercial radio play lists. As the Future of Music Coalition explains,
"Major record labels have large promotional budgets. Because the
promotional money is there, radio companies have an incentive to make access to
the airwaves more scarce, and thus more expensive" (my emphasis). And of
course, among the major-label conglomerates, the competition for the airwaves
is fierce, as airplay directly affects sales.
What strategies can a label employ to guarantee that their
artists will receive the kind of airplay that they deserve? In the early days
of rock and roll, the practice of payola was critical for up-and-coming labels
trying to get the attention of DJs, who at the time were primarily responsible
for what was played on the radio. For example, there is a subtle scene in the
recent film Ray, where Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records passes cash on to a DJ
to get him to play Ray Charles's breakthrough crossover hit "I Got a
Woman". But paying DJs to play certain records has been illegal since the
early 1960s, when Cleveland-based DJ Alan Freed was indicted on charges of
bribery.
As program directors replaced DJs as the primary gatekeepers
of radio playlists, forms of payola have become more
elaborate and covert (See Fredric Dannen's Hit Men).
In fact there were two notable forms of payola, that while highly suspect, were
legal. One was the practice of using "independent" promoters to
interact with radio programmers (thus obscured the possibility that labels are
directly paying stations) and the other was that of "paid spins",
where songs for a particular label are played as part of an advertisement spot.
The latter is perfectly legal, as long as its
disclosed that the spot is paid for by said label. The case of independent
promoters received much of the attention in investigations of illegal payola,
simply because of the huge amount of money exchanged between labels, promoters
and radio stations to guarantee that certain records regular airplay. According
to Eric Boehlert, in the latest of his on-going articles on commercial radio at
Salon.com, the practice of paying independent promoters cost labels as a group
as much as $150 million annually. In this environment, virtually everything
that appears on a station's playlist has been paid
for in one form or another.
Most radio programmers retreated from using independent
promoters when Representative Russ Feingold and others in Congress, and most
recently New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, began to raise
questions about the process. (The same retreat occurred in the mid-1980s when
Rudy Guliani, then an U.S. Attorney, and Al Gore,
then a senator from
The current radio and label consolidation, along with the
emergence of hip-hop as the dominant cross-over genre and the perceived aging
of traditional R&B audiences, has created the situation where the best
R&B being recorded is simply not heard by the audience that would be
attracted to it. Satellite Radio has been one of the places where new R&B
can be heard, but the format's overall audience is still paltry when compared
to that of commercial radio. The alleged death of payola suggests that at the
moment, at least, there exists the possibility for a more diverse range of
music to hit the commercial airwaves, but even Boehlert laments that
"tight radio playlists are unlikely to improve
anytime soon", in part because programmers "will rely more and more
on proven hits singles as well as older, already familiar songs, leaving less
airtime for new acts." Ultimately, the current state of contemporary
R&B has little to do with the mediocrity of R&B's
status quo -- there is great music to be heard -- but unless mainstream labels
create conditions in which emerging R&B artists can be nurtured, without
the pressure to cross-over to urban youth audiences, and audiences themselves
become more vigilant about seeking out and supporting new music, much of R&B's current greatness will fall on deaf ears.
[
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