RnB

Thisisrnb.com is one of the best R&B fan sites on the Internet, and its recent post on Jeremih’s influences is proof. Short but sweet, these 10 tracks reveal that many if not most of the singer’s recent hits rely on samples for songwriting inspiration. It’s obvious that Whitney Houston’s deathless hi-NRG chestnut “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” informed the hook for the 2015 Jeremih smash with Natalie La Rose, “Somebody”; and that Snap!’s Euro-rave conqueror “Rhythm is a Dancer” led to his chorus on “Don’t Tell ‘Em.” But did anyone know that he copied a vocal line from Shai’s sappy a cappella ballad “If I Ever Fall In Love” for the hook of his most recent chart smash, “Oui”? One can conclude from this list that the “Birthday Sex” king has grown a little derivative, but leave it to Thisisrnb.com to assess his recent creative direction more kindly. “Some writers are just naturally gifted with the ability to remix, remake or flip a set of lyrics into a different melody or copy a melody with different lyrics,” goes the post, which is unsigned. “We’d be interested to know if he has been consciously doing remakes of big hits to hopefully land another big hit, or if it’s been more organic and just came out during sessions.”

1992 was a transitional year for R&B and hip-hop. The first wave of bass was coming to an end, New Jack swing was beginning to wane, and East Coast and mainstream hip-hop had yet to transition between the golden age of the ‘80s and the boom bap of the mid-90s. One era hadn’t quite ended, and another hadn’t quite begun, and there was a bit of schizophrenia; the charts were populated by Southern rap bohos (Arrested Development), and Northwestern rappers who appropriated the sound and subjects of Miami bass. This truly awesome playlist by Spotify user John Cunningham is interesting because it captures this dynamic and operates from a very specific critical perspective and rejects the usual nostalgia associated with these type of playlist. It also really bangs. His original playlist was originally named simply “B96,” and we cleaned the title up a little bit to be more descriptive.

We may have reached a sort of peak America on August 20, 2016. After a fit of false starts and head fakes, Ocean revealed his masterpiece, Blonde, an album that, in many ways, embodied a greater idea of what America could be: inclusive and diverse, both culturally and aesthetically; adventurous and transparent, embracing experimentations in search of an emotional honesty; and, not least importantly, fun, and filled with an overarching optimism.Things may have gone downhill since then, but we still have Frank, and he’s been particularly productive in 2017, releasing a slew of more pop-oriented singles, and, maybe just as importantly, curating his own radio show, blonded, on Apple Music. Ocean has never been particularly forthcoming in interviews—on the few occasions he’s done them—but his taste in music offers a rare and deep glimpse into his creative processes and inspirations.For many, Ocean’s music is singular, and his talent and sound seem to have emerged from a vacuum, but there are specific antecedents to each component of his music. Like many music masterminds—from Prince to Radiohead—he’s interested in genre pastiche, extracting and recontextualizing broad and seemingly disparate forms of music. Listening to these broadcasts is like watching a master chef at work in their kitchen.We’ve combined and organized selections that Frank picked for blonded, as well as previous lists he’s provided over the years and the music that he’s sampled, dividing the playlists largely along genre lines in order to provide a key for how Frank thinks about music. The main playlist here represents a megamix of all the tracks featured in the segmented playlists below. (You can access the original blonded podcast by visiting Apple Music, or subscribing to our Spotify channel, where we’re collected them as Spotify playlists.)FRANK’S AMBIENT/ELECTRONIC/GLITCH ITCH

Frank Ocean’s video performance piece Endless was a teaser “album” of sorts, released just one day before Blonde. With the visuals’ stark, high-contrast lighting, and the tracks’ broken soundscapes and fractured melodies, it was an immersive and frequently confounding experience. There were certainly songs there—the Isley Brothers/Aaliyah cover “(At Your Best) You Are Love” remains one of the most haunting tracks Ocean has released—but for the most part, the piece was focused on generating a skeletal, unsettling, and haunting atmosphere. This vibe was carried over to the creeping sounds of Blonde tracks “Seigfried” and “Futura Free.”This focus on textures over tunes is the common denominator for most of the tracks on this playlist. A beautiful, gentle piano melody emerges from the skittering beats of Aphex Twin’s “Flim.” Todd Rundgren’s 1970 proto-ambient work “There Are No Words,” meanwhile, moves like fog—eerie, otherworldly, and all-encompassing. Rundgren’s other contribution to this playlist, his 1973 track “Flamingo”—sampled on Ocean’s track “Solo”—is comparatively less whispy, with chirping birth noises fluttering around a circular synth figure. It’s no surprise to see Arca here; the Venezuelan queer performance artist and Kanye/Björk producer has been mining the same space between operatic melodrama and jarring ambient noise as Ocean did on Endless and the last half of Blonde. The tracks here do occasionally gain momentum —with French maverick Sébastien Tellier’s reflective 3 a.m. anthem “La ritournelle” in particular—but, for the most part, the music here serves as a pensive, ambient mood board.Further Listening:Decoding Endless: Frank’s Wild YearsThe Best Ambient TechnoThe 50 Best Ambient Albums of All TimeAphex Twin’s Field DaySUNDAY-MORNING HEARTBREAK AND SOFT R&B JAMS

There’s a warmth and intimacy to many of Frank Ocean’s best tracks—think of the delicate dance of “Pink + White” from Blonde, or Channel Orange tracks like “Bad Religion,” the bouncy “Monks,” or the titantic “Thinkin’ About You.” The Rhodes-driven tracks reference, of course, the classic R&B of Stevie Wonder, but they also point towards another, more modern and gentle strand of R&B that descended from neo-soul forebearers such as Erykah Badu and D’Angelo. Esperanza Spalding (who Frank included on inaugural edition of blonded radio) is a great example of this, skirting the borders of jazz, funk, and soul and paying homage to each, but carving out a singular aesthetic that’s both modern and timeless.The best tracks here are those that negotiate traditional genre boundaries with a gentle grace. Yussef Kamaal’s “Yo Chavez” interweaves vibe-laced ‘70s jazz fusion with a shuffling broken beat over airy textures that points towards the looser, groovier parts of Channel Orange. The classic boom-bap funk fuzz of the OutKast/Erykah Badu collaboration “Humble Mumble,” or the loose, euphoric glow of Kehlani’s “Undercover,” also reflects the warmth of Ocean’s “Pink + White,” while Darando’s raggedy falsetto on the forgotten ‘70s classic “Didn’t I” (originally included on installment five of blonded radio) is endlessly fragile and haunting. These are deeply intimate love songs, but most of these capture a love interrupted, deferred, or forgotten—a confessional focus that Ocean has returned to time and time again throughout his career.This is perfect Sunday morning listening, but it’s pretty damn good for any day (or time) you want to push play.Further Listening:Raphael Saadiq Behind the ScenesWhy SZA’s CTRL Is the R&B Album of the SummerUnpacked: Solange’s A Seat at the TableFRANK’S RAP TRAX

In many ways, Frank Ocean is less invested in rap music than his R&B peers. When he listed out his favorite tracks for the Blonde magazine last year, hip-hop was absent save for an OutKast and, um, DRAM track. And while Ocean has provided guest turns on a number of tracks—and he actually raps on Earl Sweatshirt’s lazy, SoCal anthem “Sunday”—he’s not nearly as promiscuous as other singers, and, as frequently as not, he tilts the gravity of the track so that they become Frank Ocean songs. (Kanye, wisely realizing this, stripped his contribution from the end of The Life of Pablo’s “Wolves” and made it its own track, the appropriately entitled “Frank’s Track.”)Still, Frank is deeply invested in the genre, both through his Odd Future lineage and in rap’s culture, sound, and attitude. The hip-hop tracks that he’s included on blonded radio (episodes #4 and #6 focus on the genre) and beyond tend to be chart-driven singles, and remind us that Ocean is ultimately a pop artist. The hypnotic “Tunnel Vision” from Kodak Black has this year’s best use of the flute (and, really, that’s saying a lot) and matches the loopy, hall-of-mirrors vibe of many Ocean tracks. And while Frank famously called out the Grammys for giving Album of the Year to Taylor Swift over Kendrick—"hands down one of the most 'faulty’ TV moments I've seen"—that’s not the only thing linking Lamar and Ocean. Both endlessly distort and manipulate their voices: Kendrick changes registers, effects, and pitch with nearly every verse, while Ocean—on tracks like “Nikes”—uses vocal mutations to add both texture and narrative drama to his tracks. It wasn’t surprising that he included “LUST.” on installment #4 of blonded.But, more than any aesthetic linkage, these guys are his friends (A$AP Rocky), his collaborators (Future), and his idols (OutKast), and this playlist acknowledges those influences and associations.Further Listening:Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN., UnpackedFrank Ocean’s Best Guest SpotsSongs That Prove the Flute Was Always Hip-Hop’s Secret WeaponFRANK’S INDIE ROCK FIXATION

“Indie rock” is a bit of a misnomer. It always has been. It’s more of a philosophical approach or psychographic than it is an aesthetic designation, but, however you look at it, Frank Ocean has long been a rabid fan of this spectrum of music. The surf-rock guitar line that anchors “Ivy” wouldn’t have felt out of place on any number of ‘60s-revivalist rock records from the past decade, while the clamour and noise of “Pretty Sweet” sound a lot like the psych/lo-fi groups that populated the ’90s rock landscape (though, granted, the two-step/garage drum line at the end turns it into a Frank Ocean track), while the bouncy melodies and sullen vocal counterpoints owe more than a little to The Smiths.There’s been a long-standing tradition of indie-rock critics trying to project their own music onto R&B and hip-hop musicians, and that’s not what we’re trying to do here—but it’s also undeniable that Frank has focused a lot on this type of music (particularly on the fifth edition of blonded radio). Some of the selections here are exactly the songs you’d expect from someone who spends his summers headlining festivals—MGMT’s “Electric Feel,” The Flaming Lips’ “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots”—but others convey a deeper investment. Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop” reflects Ocean’s own penchant for creating long-form, mise-en-scene narratives over noisy, clattering backdrops, even if Alan Vega’s tale of a down-and-out factory worker killing his family is a little more macabre than anything on Frank’s albums. The shimmering, ephemeral “Wild Thing Runs Free” from Baltimore noise-punk group Teen Suicide resembles the rambling interludes that dot Frank’s own albums. And it’s not surprising to see (Sandy) Alex G show up on the second edition of blonded—after all, he did contribute guitar work to both Endless and Blonde—and his track “Mis” is imbued with a certain shambolic majesty.We don’t want Frank to abandon custom luxury cars and glitter for stick-and-poke tattoos and dive bars, but this is a great, revealing, and fairly unexpected playlist.Further Listening:Ambient Dream Folk & Beyond Dreamy Noise Sounds: The Best of Kranky RecordsFierce and Fuzzy: The Lo-Fi Revolution

Moses Sumney had a certain feeling he wanted to capture when he recorded Aromanticism, 2017’s most irresistibly sumptuous debut album. “That moment as you’re feeling asleep,” he told the New York Times in September, “or right when you wake up, when you’re still one foot in and one foot out of the dream world, and everything is really murky and you feel like you’re floating.”The L.A. breakout artist is hardly alone in his quest to capture that ineffable state. This year yielded a startling abundance of music that had the same alluring softness as Sumney’s blissed-out R&B. Fellow travelers like Sampha, Kelela, Nick Hakim, and Syd all double-downed on the combination of smudgy beats, pillowy synths, and diaphanous vocals that had once marked Frank Ocean as an outlier but now seems everywhere. More cerebral and less carnal than the R&B sound that had been dominant since the rise of Drake, it aims to evoke a more solitary variety of bedroom experience than the genre has typically prioritized.That’s not to say there aren’t great songs about love and sex, too. But there’s definitely a more introspective bent to the new R&B, as well as a more adventurous musical sensibility. Though Frank Ocean gets the most credit for charting out this dream space and building a home there, the Weeknd certainly used to know the neighbourhood. Neo-soul mavericks like D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, and Bilal explored it as well. In their own music and productions for FKA twigs, Kelela, Solange and more, the likes of Dev Hynes and Arca approach it from other angles. In any case, Sumney, Sampha, and other sleepy-eyed occupants of R&B’s vanguard made this space just as inviting to listeners this year.

You could pretty easily make the case that Chicago is the musical center of the United States. Blues, juke and house all originated (at least in part) from the city. Two-Step (or just Steppin) never achieved the national name recognition as house music, but it was a pretty potent strain of R&B that peaked in the middle half of the last decade. Like a lot of music to emerge in the past thirty years, it was a dance first. The music was bright, romantic and highly syncopated. Its great, summery R&B music. It was popularized nationally by R. Kelly in his "Step in the Name of Love" single, but that was really just the tip of the iceberg, as this excellent playlist demonstrates. Rizoh over at Beats did a great job capturing some of the highlights from the scene. Listening now, it definitely feels of a certain time and place, and it seems very out-of-step with the more dour and minimal sounds the genre would adopt in subsequent years, which makes two step even more powerful.

With a slim oeuvre for which my colleagues have made grand claims, D’Angelo has used writer’s block as a kind of incubator: for thirteen years he watched as Brown Sugar and Voodoo matured into R&B touchstones, unsullied by mediocre contractual follow-ups. At the turn of the century I preferred other Soulquarian releases like Mama’s Gun and Things Fall Apart, not to mention his fellow mononym, the crucially Sade-besotted Maxwell; what they lacked in accretive density they compensated with forthrightness. A dumb binary, I realized later, especially when the accretive density was as tasty as devil’s pie without the addictive qualities.Speaking of “Devil’s Pie” — it inspires D’Angelo’s ambivalence. Not lyrically — he’s an example of why submission to the eddies of his bass lines and the silt of his harmonies produces useful tensions. The moment in that track when hand claps joins the scratching and granitic groove laid down by Questlove as D’Angelo repeats the title hook reveals the potency of devil’s pie as an aphrodisiac, mephitic and deadly. 2014’s Black Messiahreached new heights of studio craft: the stentorian piano of “Another Life”; yet another tumbling opening of a groove in “The Charade”; the sitar as bridge joining East and West, engaged in diplomatic back channel communications with Roy Hargrove; the mumbled imprecations meant as prayers but, despite their unguent qualities, sharpened with menace.Still, I reach for Brown Sugar most in 2017—the impishness with which he scrubs a metaphor of Mick Jagger’s eros-inspired sensationalism.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

No way in hell will I essay my own context-building, not when exemplary profiles by Philip Gourevitch and Jonathan Lethem exist. Besides, my intro to James Brown I credit to an episode of The Cosby Show in which Rudy Huxtable did her best “baby baby baby” lip syncing to “I Got That Feelin’.” What Gourevitch wrote in 2002 about “Please, Please, Please” strikes me as definitive:

The song doesn’t tell a story so much as express a condition. The singer might be speaking from the cradle of his lover’s arms, or chasing her down a street, or watching the lights of her train diminish in the night; he might be crouched alone in an alleyway, or wandering an empty house, or smiling for all the world to see while his words rattle, unspoken, inside his skull. He could be anyone anywhere. His lover might be dying. He might be dying. He might not even be addressing an actual lover. He could be speaking of someone or something he’s never had. He could be talking to God, or to the Devil…Speech is inadequate, so the singer makes music, and music is inadequate, so he makes his music speak. Feeling is stripped to its essence, and the feeling is the whole story. And, if that feeling seems inelegant, the singer’s immaculately disciplined performance makes his representation of turmoil unmistakably styled and stylish—the brink of frenzy as a style unto itself.

Facing such a statue in the park, I saw fit, more than ever, to include songs I wanted to hear again, hence the absence of “I Got You” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” On the other hand, I included a track from 1991’s forgotten post-prison Love Over-due called “(So Tired of Standing Still We Got to) Move On,” boasting some of the most ferocious rhythm lickin’ of his career — and that’s saying a lot. Also a contender is “What Do You Like” from James Brown Plays the Real Thing, designed to showcase his organ playing. He’s also responsible for one of the more galling examples of plagiarism in popular music: forget “rewriting” and use the verb “re-releasing” Bowie’s 1975 “Fame” as “Hot (I Need to Be Loved, Loved, Loved)”; it works because “Fame” is a monster and so is Mr. Lickin’ Stick.Sigh. An evening I anticipated listening to new music I’llnow spend listening to Star Time. Sigh.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Hi, Q! I didn’t even include your arrangements and conducting for the Count Basie Orchestra or Billy Eckstine, or your scores for In the Heat of the Night and The Color Purple. I can even devote a paragraph to your stewardship of New Order when they got an American label and genuine promotion. From The Wiz to Tevin Campbell, you’ve been involved in democratizing R&B: thanks to you, more (white) people listen to it without its losing a note of interest.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

Creating a playlist that attempts to rank the best Rihanna songs ever is a double-edged sword. On one hand, everyone loves Rihanna. She’s been one of pop’s most compelling singers and personalities for nearly a decade, and her ability to incorporate outre sounds with extremely addictive pop hooks is nearly unmatched. Her aggressive, sexually positive persona has both captured and anticipated a fundamental shift in how gender is performed and represented in pop culture. But you don’t need us to tell you this——thousands and thousands of words have been spilled about Barbados’ finest. And you certainly don’t need Complex to rank her greatest songs, because you (should) already know a good two-thirds of these by heart. Still, it’s a well curated list, and it’s always great to have the pretext for revisiting Rihanna.

For a decade, Terius Youngdell Nash was R&B’s best producer-writer, making everyone from Rick Ross and Mary J. Blige to a young pimply Justin Bieber sound good. He has faltered in the last six years, but after the surfeit of collaborations and works for hire, who could blame him and sometime partner Christopher “Tricky” Stewart if their powder ran dry?The Prince comparisons were too on-the-nose, not when Ready for the World was eager for a Wiki link. Nash’s high, effete voice and commitment to the love-you-down wasn’t as weird as Prince’s. Give him this: like the Purple One he understood that he wrote best for women. Electrik Red’s How to be a Lady Volume 1 remains one of the fleetest and sassiest of the millennium’s R&B albums, and chances are you haven’t heard it if you’re not on my social media lists. Rihanna’s performance on 2007’s “Livin’ a Life” also needs a shout-out; in the last two years she seems to have rediscovered its distinctive empathy.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.