A kung fu fighter in a disco

Not many I guess but a lot did the jitterbeat thing and it was always good.

Maybe I just don't think bombast suits Milian, but I've never had much sense of her as an individual singer rather than a vehicle for good (or less good) popwork, so I dunno how I'd back that up.

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chezghost.livejournal.com

my favourite thing by her is 'Whatever You Want' altho 'I Can Be That Woman' is a close second.

they both seemed very unexpected of her because they don't adhere to a certain template beloved of Murder Inc. and others. altho Ashanti's 'Only U' is maybe my favourite moody string-laden rnb track of recent times anyway.

i think a lot of this comes down to both Timba and Neptunes going off the boil and no other producers have the same stature as them yet.

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'Whatever U Want' is a truly magnificent artistic achievement.

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Milian is one of those who wavers for me between artist and vehicle - I think her voice is very distinctive, it's very warm and joyous, but she flits between so many narrative personae on her material (and conveys them all so effectively) that it's hard to pin down exactly which ones she identifies with most herself (whereas Beyoncé, Amerie, Teedra Moses, Ciara, Brandy and Mya all seem to have carved out a voice for themselves which comes through loud and string regardless of the actual subject matter of their songs).

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Can I request at some point a Poptimists Guide To R'n'B Ladies from you Lex outlining these distinctive voices - it's a fascinating topic and I'd love to know better what to listen out for.

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Certainly! I don't often get the time to post Big Proper Posts on LJ cos of work, but I will crank up my brain and get one out soon (and maybe it can help with a feature on r&b ladies for Plan B that I keep promising Frances). I will also make you a CD.

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I think Tim F and I have discussed the subject at length on ILM too in the past (we are literally the only two people who have ever seemed to be interested in it)

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The other thing with Milian is that she's such an auteur herself - she was known more as a songwriter than a performer before 'AM To PM', and that was released when she was 19, and of her hits I think only 'Dip It Low' wasn't penned by her. Which adds the twist that she is deliberately casting herself as vehicle for her own art.

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I was thinking about r&b yesterday as well - specifically I think 'Crazy In Love' changed the entire direction of the genre in that it moved the focus away from weird ravey sounds and computer-generated digital noise, and towards 'proper' instruments (sampled, played, whatever). Obviously examples of the former continue to crop up - 'Milkshake', Ciara and crunk'n'b, the new single from Black Buddafly - but there was a moment at which Timbaland and the Neps handed over the 'r&b producer du jour' baton to Rich Harrison. And now something like 'Promiscuous Girl' owes a lot more to the Harrison organic style than it does to Tim's earlier techno style.

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But that jittery/ravey/squelchy line continues with things like '1, 2 Step' no?

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Yeah, and "Oh". So my theory isn't much of a theory!

I think Lex has a point re. "Crazy In Love", which was a big riff-as-event record.

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Crunk'n'b doesn't seem to have the same impact as early-00s r&b though because it's hip hop production made for hip hop signifiers transplanted to r&b - whereas the production on turn-of-the-century Aaliyah and Kelis was made specifically for r&b, and it was r&b rather than hip hop which was the explicit driving force behind what Tim and the Neps were doing.

(Which is not to say that crunk'n'b is inferior in any way, obv)

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katstevens.livejournal.com

Most of the RnB that reaches my ears these days seems to be very minimal Rich Harrison-esque stuff indeed, with the melody solely coming from the vocal (perhaps one teeny sample) and the rest being made up with bishbash beats. e.g. Amerie.

This is not necc a bad thing, but as a child of teh RAVE I like lots of layers of mental things going on in my music.

This requires more thought on my part.

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I think there are quite a lot of layers in the Milian, but several of those layers are Young Jeezy popping up and shouting "Snowman!". I'm not totally sure what he's doing on there to be honest, I feel like I'm listening to a remix of a better unheard record.

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I desperately want there to be a version of this with a different rap - I'm sure there's one with no rap at all, but that's not what I want, 'cos there seems to be a good space for one. What I want is a rap that is not a Party Political Broadcast by Fathers 4 Justice.

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I like the rap! With the caveat that I have not listened to any of the words that Young Jeezy is saying, apart from "nephew" at the start.

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Deadbeat dad is what the media say
Best father in the world is what my son he'll say
Won't stop til you broke, that's what his mom's gone say
But hey
That's the type of game she play

For some reason this irritates me much more than many other, cruder, less specific forms of teh sexism in music, probably because F4J are just so gosh darn UNCOOL.

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Oh dear. I think what irks me most about that is how little it has to do with the song. Maybe if the song's narrator was a mother tearing into her child's husband THEN it would be appropriate! But as it is wtf.

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Well actually, thinking about it further, I suppose the really irritating thing is that it actually runs so counter to the rest of the song, you've got Cristina singing "we can make it if we try!", all fired up and the like, and then he comes in saying "yes! we can overcome the obstacles life throws at us like GREEDY MONEY-GRABBING WOMEN!"

I blame Kanye.

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Kanye did something really special though, something I've not heard much of in hip hop, which is celebrating the gold digger for being resourceful and canny and also hott - the song's totally in love with the archetype it describes.

Young Jeezy, er, does not do this.

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I was going to ask what it has to do with the rest of the song, but thought I might just be being naive.

How do guest raps actually work anyway? Does the rapper hear the beat, or the whole song and their place on it, or what? (cf Left-Eye's shocking guest rap on "Never Be The Same Again" where she clearly had nothing to go on but the title, but it's great anyway).

I guess pop gold is when an 'unrelated' song and rap actually spark off each other excitingly, I don't think that's happening here.

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Guest raps are funny, sometimes it's really obvious that all the rapper has heard is the beat and the title (eg Twista's rap on a rmx of Mis-Teeq's 'Scandalous': his rap is entirely "erm there is this word scandalous and here are some synonyms for it and er Mis-Teeq might be scandalous but I have not heard of them actually").

But then you get stuff like 'We Need A Resolution' and Teedra's 'You'll Never Find (A Better Woman)' where Timbaland and Jadakiss are responding to some quite subtle criticisms in the verses - maybe by chance but probably not.

I think - possibly stating the obvious - that guest raps work best when the song deals with relationships and love and so on, because the guest can either agree with his lady about how much they wuv each other, or go "hang on bitch you are WRONG and here I will put MY case forward".

An interesting one is Nas on Amerie's 'Man Up' - she tears into her object of derision so utterly and mercilessly that Nas would be completely ineffectual in response, so he plays the narrator's BROTHER and tears into the ex as well!

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