Do you like R&B?

60s - 70s Soul and its R&B progeny up until the mid 80s were a different animal than the crap that is being produced now for the following reasons:

- The need for singers to sing every word in 15 different octaves. It's just pretentious and irritating. If you turn off the backbeats, 80% of the current R&B singers would be wailing into a microphone like a banshee and not singing.

- The replacement of a background band with simplistic computer generated backbeats that can be found on your kid sister's "Fisher Price: My First Keyboard". At least Rock ditched the synths at the end of the 80s.

- Lack of diversity in the subject matter and tone. Soul and R&B used to have a wide breadth of subjects they used to touch on from the political to the environment to intersocial relations. Now all it's about is love, sex or the lack thereof.

Marvin Gaye is probably doing triple gainers from the quarter pike position in his grave to see what genre has become.

I was actually thinking about starting a topic about discussin R&B :P

So yes, I do. I like some of the modern R&B, but I agree with how a lot of it has gone downhill.

I couldn't agree more with you...modern R&B just totally sucks imo.

All of it sounds so similar, and like you said...it is ALL about the same thing.

The early stuff though is, to me, a completely different genre - and can, in my opinion, actually be classed as music, and not just some pre menstrual whore moaning on and on about her love life.

Yeah there is alot of rubbish around now lol but there are still amazing R&B singers out there.. Neyo, Usher, Mario, Ray J

Its like the only music i listen to, but yeah alot can be the old songs lol

oh hell i love the old r&b singers. i didnt even know the crap these days was called r&b until someone told me :S. i always called it n music you know what the n stands for i also called it a chick speaking bout love, which the beatles already did the hell out of 40 years ago, with a computer generated beat looped for 4 mins.

there is only 2 R&B artists i can stand though and thats cause i think she has a great voice and thats aaliyah and alicia keys 1st album was imo great.

i will add that when umbrella female dog(you know who im talkin bout) got famous when that FN POS FEMALE DOG POS umbrella piece of crap song became famous i actually considered suicide

I love R&B as much as I always have and I really don't think it's going downhill at all. I do prefer it back in the 90s and before 2005, but I still see way too many great artists to consider it falling--J-Holiday, Trey Songz, Usher, Neyo, Bobby Valentino, ect, ect. Even some of the greatest are still around singing from time to time like "Mariah Carey", R.Kelly", and " Mary J". And im loving the baby soft sound "The Dream" brings into the R&B mix myself.

The only thing I would say is that alot of the R&B hits beyond 2004 haven't really been timeless ones at all. So many of them are very forgettable to say the least. This is probably due to the fact that it's way to much rap/hip-hop merging going on--it's as if it's standardize or something nowadays to the point that I almost consider them one single genre sometimes. But yeah, I just don't feel it's getting bad enough to the point that it can really be considered going downhill. Times are different, people taste change and everything else changes eventually, so im sure the variety and originality will be on the rise soon enough when or if the majority gets tired of what is out there right now.

Modern Rn'B isn't Rn'B ... it's just boy bands (Pop) that happen to be black ...

(I'm talking about the commercial type of Rn'B realeased now ..)

I love the Motown records .. some of the best songs ever written in that era