When NPR Music started “I’ll Take You There,” a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week streaming radio channel, it signaled the cresting of a wave — a second wave — of R&B.
“Rhythm and blues is a feeling,” wrote Jason King, the host of “I’ll Take You There,” when the channel debuted in February. “Rhythm and blues is about getting up to get down to get on the good foot to get happy and enjoy yourself when the suffering hits, when the blues wants to envelop you like a fog.”
While “I’ll Take You There” plays plenty of classics — Ruth Brown, Dinah Washington, Aretha Franklin — it’s also home to a new breed of soul crooner; the “alternative R&B” artists of 2014, to whom many attribute a quasi-revival of the genre.
Of course, to say R&B has been “revived” is to say R&B was, for a time, “dead.” Nothing could be further from the truth. True, critics have pointed out that recent trends have favored hybridization with pop and hip-hop (the Beyoncés, Rihannas and Ne-Yos of the world); but R&B hits have been firmly ensconced at the top of the charts since Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang,” on through Ms. Knowles’s “Partition.”
What we are witnessing now is a branching-off, or blossoming, of sorts, says Sasha Frere-Jones, writing for The New Yorker — not unlike the divergence of alt-rock in the 1980s and ’90s; a transmutation that is just as innovative and experimental as it is a return to roots.
R&B stars who staked out their claims to fame in the early 2000s — Beyoncé, Ashanti and company — take cues from Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston, but “a more low-key set of musicians, such as FKA twigs and Kelela, has taken cues not from these stars but from another pop leader — Aaliyah, who died in a plane crash in 2001, at the age of twenty-two, after recording three studio albums,” writes Mr. Frere-Jones. “The beat is of the era, with steady kick drums, but it feels gentle, and the producer throws in conga slaps, guitar figures, and synth blasts that don’t always recur,” he says of the Washington, D.C., bred singer-songwriter Kelela. “This is an R&B that’s related to the spiritual slow burn of Al Green, but it’s more obscure. It’s abstracted from the church but charged with a secular power, no matter how icy and distant it is.”
He describes the British R&B upstart FKA twigs as “an extrovert, making videos that use images from Egyptian mythology, and wearing elaborate outfits. She has mastered a graphic language that matches her movement — a neglected skill in recent generations of pop stars. She is also fluid and self-contained as a dancer.” Her debut album, “LP1,” is “an intriguing and fertile template: she places all the romantic and sexual action offstage, thereby returning to a premodern era of nondisclosure in pop lyrics. Yet it feels entirely postmodern. The sounds on the album span such a wide range that it’s hard to know what to call any of it. Some passages sound like string quartets played backward, some like eggs dropped from a great height.”
Another much-lauded newcomer is Tinashe, a Los Angeles-born singer-songwriter whose debut album, “Aquarius,” will be released soon — “quite unexpectedly, one of the most idiosyncratic major-label female R&B albums in years, full of slow and heavy breathing,” according to Jon Caramanica of The New York Times.
“Unlike Beyoncé, a maximalist through and through, Tinashe has taken a path charted by Janet Jackson, Aaliyah, Ciara and others,” he writes. “She’s a low-key sensualist with a mild undertow of brooding. She doesn’t sing with bombast, but rather in smoothly spread out phrases somewhere between whisper and lip lick. ‘Aquarius’ rarely raises its voice, and prefers ooze to slap.”
It’s a formula that began to emerge en masse in 2011, with the coining of “PBR&B,” a portmanteau of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and R&B, meant to signify a “hipsterization” of the genre. Critics have lumped a variety of performers — Jhené Aiko, Solange Knowles, Devonté Hynes (a.k.a. Blood Orange), Frank Ocean, SZA, even Drake — under this “hipster” moniker and its iterations: “alternative R&B,” “experimental R&B” and “R-neg-B,” to name a few. And this is not a terminology embraced with any particular warmth.
“Calling it ‘hipster R&B’ is a nice way of saying it’s R&B that white people like,” wrote Jozen Cummings for The Awl in 2011. “Here’s my problem with that: It’s myopic, lazy and it sounds to me like a form of musical segregation that’s not entirely based on genre.”
FKA twigs, a.k.a. Tahliah Barnett, is similarly skeptical of the compulsion to categorize and subcategorize: “I share certain sonic threads with classical music; my song ‘Preface’ is like a hymn. So let’s talk about that. If I was white and blonde and said I went to church all the time, you’d be talking about the ‘choral aspect.’ But you’re not talking about that because I’m a mixed-race girl from south London,” she told The Guardian.
Aimee Cliff at The Fader agrees. “‘Alternative’ or ‘experimental R&B’ is a term that needs to die,” she writes. “It’s not a genre, but more like a door to condescension. By adding the prefix, it sidelines R&B itself by implying it’s not experimental, boundary-pushing or intellectual. It throws side-eye at the genre, while at the same time claiming to have discovered something worthy within it.”
Perhaps that’s what “I’ll Take You There” gets right. Yes, it’s a channel predicated on genre — a specific genre. But it blends the old with the new, traditions with experiments, “mainstream” vibes with “hipster” — and in that way, fleshes out the many fascinating, refracting facets of a complex, historic mode of musical expression. It is delightfully myopia-free.