Some R&b albums are classics in certain circles. In the black middle class I'd suppose Mama's Gun and Voodoo and Urban Hang Suite were classics, but nowhere else is that true. In many hoods One could wager that Usher's Confessions was the last classic, or perhaps one of those Beyonce albums, but as time goes on, it appears the last truly universally regarded (universally among Blacks) is october 1994s My Life. The one before that seems to be Sade 92 Love Deluxe.

Does this jibe with y'all or is there a classic released since then?

Poll question: The last classic R&B album was Mary's "My Life".

Poll result (24 votes) True. (1 votes) Vote Falsehood. (23 votes) Vote

______________________________________________________________________________

"There's a fine line between persistence and foolishness..."
-unknown

"To Each His Reach"
-George Clinton

Don't get me wrong, I love that album.

I just think throwing 'underrated' at it is completely. . . well, wrong.

~Austin

Not that most people think its wack.
But rather its one of my favorite soul records...probably my favorite record by a female artist period.
I never really hear it get mentioned among the "classics".

in any real sense.

Yes I'm aware of how much that album sold along with the backstory the record was sold on.

It still piggybacked Lil Jon's watershed moment to get to where it got & nobody is going to really care about a formulaic trend-hopping clown like Usher as they will Mary in ten years.

in a way that Emancipation is not.

'classic' = widely accepted by the given audience as a good/great album, w/ or w/o massive sales figures.

Confessions fits, regardless of our opinion of its quality. it's the last album i can remember that got over big time w/a relatively broad Black audience. Emancipation was also well received, but not as well received as Confessions. i dunno that i'd consider it a classic among the Blacks.

Although Yeah wasa bit derivative and divisive as a single, I think You Got it Bad is a universally loved single, as well as you don't have to call.

The back story involving Chilli, who once again was liked by both the hood and middle class blacks, make it grounds for being a universal R&B classic.

It reminds me of Jay Zs Reasonable Doubt tho: a really good album that was never mindblowing, but got bumped to classic because of a poverty of classics at the time.

just fyi... not trying to be snarky.

YEAH!(c)Lil Jon/Ush

we can devise ways to hate on it or otherwise diminish its stature among other classics, but it's still a classic. lol

.

b/c if you were you'd already know.

i dunno what to tell you.

.

b/c the Blacks love that record.

giving me the thumbs-down on its classic status.

I ain't worryin' about scoring points, I've almost caught beatdowns from members of The Blacks over not having Tupac in my Top 5 MCs, still alive like Pac is tho!

own at least 1 copy of the album. and wouldn't stop playing it back in 2004/2005.

as do at least 2 of my older aunties.

and my best friends in Chicago, NYC, SF and STL too (some of my best friends are Black).

and it was a hot topic in the barbershop back when it came out.

so, yeah. it's a classic.

nah but seriously, I don't see that album as being one subsequent generations are gonna go back to or hold up as a classic or even one folks who grew up on will be playing like that.

The singles save the annoying Lil Jon anthem seem to have already been mostly forgotten, I'm waiting for the same fate to finally kill 'OMG' but I still here that bullshit everywhere.

20 yr cycle. no doubt about it.

15 yrs ago we were over My Life. look at its status now.

.

and I guess I see where this thread was going, but if we could talk BOTH blacks AND WHITES, Confessions wins. If the youth decide the pop battles then 8701 came out my 7th grade year and Confessions came out just as everyone was figuring themselves out, finding their lanes and doing what people do. And Confessions ruled that part of my adolescence. Whether it was a walk to the Blockbuster or late night phone calls/hangouts with girls, it was Usher on the theme music.


~~~~~~~~~
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I feel like a target doing it because I feel like black women were the audience, but...it was my jam in a way that My Life wasn't.

My Life was some beautiful shit & we all felt Mary when she was going through her shit with K-Ci and whatnot. But I can't pop that in the ride and play it just on GP like I can with Confessions. I can still hear a song from Confessions and it takes me right back to the last time I heard it. The Supermodel song, Can You Handle It - I rarely fast forward through anything on that album. Which was not the case for Here I Stand or Raymond V. Raymond or any of the other shitty Usher albums I bought or copied on a mixtape.

It was really Usher at the height of his music-making abilities, I think. Mary still had some growing to do and she didn't do it until later. I mean My Life was a beautiful moment, but it's played now. I might even say it's more played than Share My World. At least when I listen to that I don't want to find the Henny and start drinking.

commercially viable,
critical acclaim,
crossed over... but it's still well regarded across a large section of black people.

confessions, definitely.

I guess I didn't get the memo that mentioned that only the "Black Middle Class" are fans of Maxwell, D'angelo & Badu and the "real" ghetto Black folks bump that real Black shit like Usher, Beyonce and Mary J.

mamas gun
brown sugar
love jones soundtrack
miseducation of lauryn hill
bitter
house of music
embrya
who is jill scott?
voodoo
instant vintage

you know what forget it...theres too many

classic = you can put it on @ the fam reunion & everybody from big mama to your drunk ass uncle on the grill to lil yung junebug w/ the doo doo pamper is gonna be nodding & grooving to it

people jam to the singles off the love jones soundtrack.

put on an album cut, people would be lost.

everybody knows every song off of confessions...
even the ones that aren't singles.

that's why confessions makes the cut,
but the love jones soundtrack doesn't.

people only know the lauryn hill song,
the dione farris song,
and probably the coletrane instrumental.


nobody remembers the cover of "inside my love"
except for music heads.

do or die

.

but if somebody doesn't want to type a well reasoned reply,
i'm not going to type one out myself.

snark goes both ways.

simply put. i have THE. best music taste on the planet. you are not my peer.

I propose a simple test of our...shall we say...styles?

you put together a mix. whatever you want. 10 songs. any era. any kind of music.

i do the same.

we present them to the public, allow them 24 hrs to digest.

then ask them simply...which is better

or should i say WHO is better.

Do you accept?

Game on.

Not going to be a mix tape with fades and stuff...
I'm not a DJ.

But I'll put together a compilation with links or whatever.

We'll let the lesson decide.

Not sure if it will prove who was "right" regarding this particular post since it's open to any genre of music but I'm intrigued to see what the 2 of you put together. Hopefully you both pick mixes that you love and just not shit that you think will help you win on this board.

>Hopefully you
>both pick mixes that you love and just not shit that you think
>will help you win on this board.



i can't speak for binlahbab, but i know for sure
that MY mix is going to have a good balance.


if i don't love it,
it's not making the cut.
but i'm not going to post up a bunch of obsucre songs by obsucre artists that i know that nobody would like.



my goals are simple.
(1) i want to beat binlahbab in this competition.
(2) i want to use this as an opportunity to put people up on songs by relatively popluar artists that they may have missed because the only thing people play are the hits and the popular critical favorites.


in other words, i'm not going to post up 10 classic songs that
everybody has heard a million times.

"billie jean" and "human nature"
are two of the best songs michael jackson ever did...
but that's not going on this mix because we've all heard them,
and we all love them.



it would be waaaaaaay too easy
to make a 10 track compilation that just compiles all the
"safe" choices that make critics lists all the time.

so i'm not going to post up songs like

MJ, billie jean
or the rolling stones, satisfaction
or al green, let's stay together
or ac/dc, back in black
or prince, when doves cry
or hendrix, purple haze
or the beastie boys, fight for your right to party.


sure, those are fantastic songs,
but nobody would learn anything.


i want anybody that downloads the mix
to find a few gems that they might not have heard otherwise.

so yeah, i'm going to keep the lesson's taste in mind...
but i'm not going to just post up a bunch of "safe" choices.
where's the fun in that?

i look forward to your capitulation reply in my victory post on wednesday.

damn. the starbucks at work is capping my bandwidth limit i think.
i won't be able to upload a proper mix until i get my internet
turned on in my apartment next week.

in the meantime, here are the youtube links for my
mixtape submission.



dock me a notch for it not being in proper format if you want.
but this mix is pretty nice, if i do say so myself.


marvin gaye-- please stay (once you go away)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_GVSFPg-dA


i'll stay-- funkadelic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r3EGpIToOA

little girl blue-- diana ross
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn2BNleBIPI


when the whip comes down-- rolling stones
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ_smuQOiXg&playnext=1&list=PL91CEE59A54569B8B

tick, tick, boom-- the hives
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edykzECKzow

let there be rock-- ac/dc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbImaMM3qT4

morphine-- michael jackson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m--XV-CfRA

jackson 5-- the wall
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_gkD6tvnyU

the isley bros.-- the highways of my life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOaeL11IzRc

california dreaming-- eddie hazel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqDGTT2OtsQ

me: oh, that's Binlahab's joint? *delete*

do or die

but who cares about that? the point here is My Life is NOT our most recent R&B classic album. you proved that by naming just one classic album that's been released since then - Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

lol @ joe corn mo daring to test the god when it comes to music tho


do or die

>mamas gun
sure.


>brown sugar
known for singles, not as an album.

>love jones soundtrack
known for singles, not as an album.

>miseducation of lauryn hill
sure

>bitter
no.


>house of music
no.


>embrya
among music heads that dig "neo-soul"... not among
a large section of black folks.



>who is jill scott?
among music heads that dig "neo-soul" artists,
but not among a huge section of black people.
close, but no cigar.

>voodoo
sure.


>instant vintage
only among music heads... not a large section of black people.


>
>you know what forget it...theres too many
>
>

>>who is jill scott?
>among music heads that dig "neo-soul" artists,
>but not among a huge section of black people.
>close, but no cigar.

Bullshit.

Joint reached way beyond neo-soul lovers. Joint was being bumped in the hood, and errywhere else black people were when it dropped.

Hoodrats, boughetto chicks, hardlegs, gangstas, reg. cats were all bumpin' this joint.




______________________________________________________________________________

"There's a fine line between persistence and foolishness..."
-unknown

"To Each His Reach"
-George Clinton

Agree with these:

mamas gun
brown sugar
miseducation of lauryn hill
house of music
who is jill scott?
voodoo

Not these:

love jones soundtrack- classic to whom?
bitter -not a proper soul album
embrya - not his best album
instant vintage - ditto with the LJ soundtrack and Embrya plus I personally found this album to be bland and unmemorable but that was just me.

The Love Jones soundtrack is a classic to every black person on the planet whether they wanna admit that shit in mixed company or not.

What is your definition of a "proper soul album"? Me'Shell IS proper soul, as she breathes and lives. I mean, I don't think Bitter is a Classic, and if I had to pick, I'd go with Cookie, but I'm just curious about your definition of proper soul.

...Bitter is NOT an R&B album. It's an acoustic pop/rock one. She even said that the goal of that album was to get her out of the R&B/Soul box. I would vote either of her first two albums as two of the best soul albums of the last decades.

Also, the LJ soundtrack is mainly beloved by middle class blacks who are now in their mid 30s to mid 40s. That does not equate "black folks as a whole".

>...Bitter is NOT an R&B album.

I never said it was R&B. R&B and soul are different.

>It's an acoustic pop/rock one.

Right, we don't agree here.

>She even said that the goal of that album was to get her out
>of the R&B/Soul box. I would vote either of her first two
>albums as two of the best soul albums of the last decades.

Not sure that artists always reach their goals, though. She may have said that, doesn't mean that listeners/audience don't classify it as soul.


>Also, the LJ soundtrack is mainly beloved by middle class
>blacks who are now in their mid 30s to mid 40s. That does not
>equate "black folks as a whole".

I doubt you have any empirical evidence of this and I was being snarky, so we can let this ride. But...LOL at "beloved by middle class blacks."

..the most underrated R&B/Soul record EVER recorded...

Hm. I'm not sure about that. And I love Me'Shell.
It was a beautiful album though.

>love jones soundtrack

the "Rush Over" joint by MeShell is classic!

I say "Mama's Gun"....but I get the point...R&B is and has been shitty for YEARS...oh, and an honorable metion goes to Amy Winehouse with "Back to Black"...banger of an LP...will wait on the hate to arrive...

be considered "classic" to me..

the songs being sampled where classics...

.

I mean I could say My Life was one of the last great R&B albums (I dont believe that, but that's how I would have stated the post if I did)

but to call it a classic conjures an era, that this album is not from....

it sampled from that era..but it's a post-classical R&B album.

I mean if you want to start getting into classic evoking a different or certain era, that could mean many things to many different people depending on age/genre-preferences/etc.

Check out NEW Soul music at: www.myspace.com/starbeing

i love music!-THE MIGHTY O'JAYS

BLACK WOMEN RULE!

Bumpin in the STEREO:

Jennifer Hudson-I Remember Me
Various Slave albums
Abbey Lincoln-Straight Ahead
Mint Condition-7
Prince-For You

Neo-soul was too limited of a niche (in terms of audience) to produce any universal classics.

B'Day is a possible retrospective classic, kinda like Reasonable Doubt in rap. The smartest move she ever made was to re-release the album in conjunction with the multiple videos. That definitely elevated singles like "Get Me Bodied" to classic status, and brought more fans into the fold.

I don't know if it's considered true R&B, but Timberlake's FS/LS is up there too. The core urban R&B audience may not have embraced it as a whole, but it's impact on the larger mainstream audience can't be denied.

I feel like there should be at least one mention from the BadBoy R&B stable, as well as an early Timbaland-helmed project. But I can't think of any off top.

"B'Day" wasn't even a real album. It was a collection of singles with some filler, similar to the LPs of the '60s. She's a singles artist and a pop celebrity, not an artist who makes GREAT albums.

Confessions is a fan favorite but I wouldn't call it a classic. Beyond the singles, the rest of the album, while well-produced, didn't blow anyone away. Although, I'm sure some will contradict this.

Miseducation is definitely a contender but was it a proper R&B album or a soulful album by a world-renowned hip hop artist?

Hmm.

But that shit was karaoke. Damn near every song used to be a hit before she looped it and sang over it.

I can accept that from hip hop from I give it the fish eye in R&B. Sorry.







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