Is it cause of Whitney Houston? Mariah Carey being shoved in everyone's face in the 90's, Babyface being a cash cow or what?

I love a lot of 90's ballads and r&b/pop, but the music scene was so dull compared to the energetic 80's and even today. Not saying today is better than the 90's, but people are more crazy in their clothes, videos etc. everything was just so proper in the 90's and everyone was playing it safe, including the 80's artists, some of which did not survive the decade as a result. And even upbeat songs were kind of slow and hard to dance to and not in your face like the 80's. Don't get me wrong I liked Timbaland's stuff, but the 90's teen pop had the energy that was lacking for years which is why I feel they blew up when they did, cause most music in the 80's had that upbeat vibe to it, in pop, r&b, hip hop

Yes. Her adult contemporary ass killed all the fun and shit hop came along and buried it.

alphastreet said:

the 90s rock compared to todays music. even hip hop had more samples of actual music then todays synth sounds. i wonder if music will ever revive.
im sure ill educate my future kids on how to apreciate music and how fun it is to play instruments. i wonder if music can get any duller then todays stuff

yeah the 90's really were full of samples and rehashes, even more than now or just about the same

vainandy said:

You never disappoint.

90s R&B sucks for the most part,especially the late 90s.The music became too damn slow! Everything became midtempo.Remember Brandy and Monica's 1998 hit "The Boy Is Mine"? That's the tempo that many R&B songs were in and it was so boring.

And you remember who Brandy has said her idol is don't you?
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[Edited 11/21/08 10:14am]

vainandy said:

The whole tempo issue is a red herring. No one tempo is better than another. The problem with R&B is not the tempo.

midnightmover said:

No one's got soul anymore and there were a FEW in the '90s that had it but now most of commercial R&B, which had been building up until then, is now basically hip-hop mush.

well tempo can determine whether a song is fun or not, the slower it is, the harder it is to dance to isn't it?

Though I loved the boy is mine, it was all good music but just not the kind you can dance to or really get high over. True the artists could sing and had good melodies, but that was it.

He should have stayed his dull ass in The Deele where they made good music.

I remember midtempo completely taking over after shit hop had gotten huge. I remember it starting around the time of Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg....damn those bastards. Before that, most rap was fast, fun, and funky. There was stripped down midtempo rap (the shit hop) but it was underground where it belonged. The rap jams were mainly what was on the radio. After shit hop became mainstream, that's when it seemed like all the R&B artists started slowing down their tempo also and even stripping off all their instruments and adding those god-awful weak shit hop sounding drum machines in their music.

Timmy84 said:

Exactly. Ain't got shit to do with tempo. "Let's Get It On" is mid-tempo. Does that mean it's boring?

The hell it ain't! When has there ever been an era since the rock and roll era where absolutely no fast mainstream music is being made other than the 1990s and 2000s?

Uptempo songs are great for the dancefloor and shaking ass. Slow jams are great for the bedroom and getting an orgasm. What the hell good are midtempo songs for? Absolutely nothing except for bobbing heads which is no fun whatsoever. If all people want to do these days is bob their heads, well they need to slow the tempo down even more because I got something they can bob their head on. Other than that, speed it up because the damn classical music era of nothing but dull slow music died when rock and roll took over and it should have stayed dead.

vainandy said:

The fact that you dismiss all midtempo songs as useless only shows why you can't be taken seriously.

If every other song of that era was the same tempo....yes....it would have been a dull as hell era and I eventually would have started hating that song also.

I don't dismiss all midtempo songs. I love The Gap Band's "Outstanding" which is midtempo. I would have been pissed as hell though if every other song of 1982 was midtempo also. Things would have been dull as hell. And the fact that you can't understand that only shows that you can't be taken seriously.

vainandy said:

These are your own words... "What the hell good are midtempo songs for? Absolutely nothing except for bobbing heads which is no fun whatsoever."

midnightmover said:

True. It gets kinda wordy to be specific. Then we have to get into musicians being replaced by sequencers, on the one vs. on the two, how songs are arranged, structure and the death of the bridge in songs, the substitution of bass guitar for synth bass, The reduction of importance of a bass line in contrast to the incline in focus on the kick drum, artificial sounds replacing natural sounds, the re-training of the general publics ear and the acclimation of the public to artificial tone, the 3:30 length limit, payola, I could go on...
All are factors that can be and have been discussed in great length on here.

BlaqueKnight said:

Yeah, the real problem is that the music don't have no swing. The weak drum machines and absence of harmony are a big factor too.

IMO 99 percent of so called modern R&B sucks.

I personally think its a disgrace that the term R&B is nowadays being used for music that used to be soulfull, passionate and raw (Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, The Meters, etc).

Contemporary R&B is in essence 'polished commercial pop'. Music to 'score' commercially, most of the time dealing with superficial images (being 'cool', being popular with the ladies, having lots of bling-bling).

Even the so-called 'Nu Soul' suffers from that kind of slickness, i think. Music from the likes of Erykah Badu, Alicia Keys and John Legend is ultimately too 'slick' for its own good.

Not that is something new or so. I think that process was allready starting in the late seventies and early eighties, with the 'discofying' of soul and funk. It was obvious allready with the likes of Midnight Star and Atlantic Ocean in the eighties. And it went even further downwards with New Jack Swing in the nineties, and the totally uninspired and generic R&B by the likes of Rhianna and Beyonce in this new millenium.

Its like the contemporary 'R&B' artists simply dont have to guts to just make music for themselves, that it always has to be polished up and made 'slick' for the sake of what? commercial succes? stardom?

A shame, In my opinion.

And read the little gray quote box in which you quoted me to make this reply. Read the part about "Outstanding" in the little gray box and another post I made earlier about how things would have been dull if every other song had been midtempo. You had to have read it because you quoted it. Looks like krayzie is back with a new screen name.

As for midtempo songs, even back in the day, I really didn't see them as serving a purpose. They were nice to listen to every now and then but they sure as hell weren't something that I played as the majority of my songs or neither did anyone else because midtempo songs were in the minority back then and should have stayed that way. I didn't start hating midtempo songs until midtempo songs became the only thing being made.

vainandy said:

Part of it is BALANCE. Remember back in the day, we had mid-tempo grooves on the radio but not nearly AS MANY as there are today. Mid-tempo dominates the airwaves. You rarely hear anything over 101 bpm. That's why songs like Hey Ya stood out so much. It was sooo much faster than all of the music around it.

Well, I'm glad to see we at least agree on this.

Sorry, i dont hear it Blaqueknight.

I find her music way too polished, calculated and her silly 'new age'-lyrics sure dont help either.

vainandy said:

Your comment about "Outstanding" was only made AFTER you dismissed all midtempo songs. You were basically correcting yourself after the fact. Nice to see you toned down the militancy.

Exactly. And when we went to a club or a skating rink where they beatmixed and overlapped the music, if....and I do mean if....the DJ did a midtempo set, it was usually at the very beginning of the evening when he was waiting for the crowd to arrive. And some of us that arrived early sometimes were complaining that he needed to change the beat and liven things up. Things were about a party back then. These folks don't know how to party these days. Computers aren't the reason these kids are all fat these days. They are all fat because their music is too damn slow to shake the fat off their asses.

Riverpoet31 said:

I think there were factors that went into R&B's fallout, so to say, or whoever is blamed for it:

1.) Black artists who were originally funk artists doing soft rock (Lionel Richie, Geoffrey Osbourne, Larry Graham, Kool & the Gang)
2.) The crossover success of Thriller
3.) The arrival of Whitney Houston
4.) Hip-hop's acceptance into R&B that then went to New Jack Swing and then hip-hop soul and finally contemporary R&B
5.) Sean "Puffy" Combs and his collaborations with Jodeci, Mary J. Blige and Faith Evans and incorporating elements of gangsta rap with R&B singers and sampling classic eighties funk/R&B tunes (which he shamelessly admitted in that Ma$e song)
6.) People wanting to be like Mike



I'm sure there's more, lol.