The year's two best R&B albums were made by Jazmine Sullivan and Ciara - though both had contrasting gestations. Ne-Yo trailed Libra Scale with somewhat alarming pronouncements along the lines of concept albums about Japanese animé if only the inconsequential material that actually emerged was half that interesting. Rihanna, somewhat inevitably, followed Rated R - the darkest, most forbidding and most compelling album of her career - with Loud, a lazy hotchpotch of songs with so little thought put into them that it's probably best to assume they were all just demos she found on the cutting-room floor. That's not to say there weren't disappointments. Their loss: the no man's land that R&B acts find themselves in nowadays has proven to be fertile terrain indeed. If they're honest with themselves, they never liked R&B much anyway - merely buying into the male auteur myths of Timbaland and the Neptunes, never understanding the emotional centre of the genre in the singers and their ballads.
Actual R&B artists "doing" R&B were, judging from the amount of press they attracted in comparison, clearly inadequate.Įxcept, of course, those rock critics were completely misguided, as ever.
This year, we have tedious wimps Gayngs and How To Dress Well - an insult to all fashionable people everywhere - lauded for "doing" R&B, as though an entire genre was a stylistic gimmick. And as in 2009, there was always the tedious sight of rock critics creaming themselves over indie bands "doing" R&B: last year, Dirty Projectors were praised to the skies for being influenced by Mariah Carey (though mysteriously, none of this praise made it as far as Carey's own album).
The charts have pretty much been drained of it by now, even in the US, in favour of a sound that's best summed up as "the worst it's actually possible for house music to be" - a remedial sub-Black Eyed Peas, sub-Guetta mess performed either by irritants such as Ke$ha, nonentities such as Taio Cruz or former R&B singers desperately clinging on to the marketplace such as Usher.įew critics can take the moral high ground, though: the closest there was to genuine widespread critical enthusiasm for an R&B record in 2010 came with Janelle Monáe's The ArchAndroid, an album mostly praised for how it broke out of R&B - into overly busy Broadway retro rock & roll performed with all the emotion of a game show host, but never mind. If any one trend defined R&B in 2010, it was that people continued to grasp at any excuse not to listen to it.