MickyDolenz said:

SoulAlive said:

but that's not something that should be celebrated all it did was cheapened and destroyed R&B music

Destroyed it how? Rap is bigger all over the world than R&B in itself ever was. Hip hop also influenced mainstream fashion plus art with graffiti. Other than a few that crossed over, most R&B acts didn't sell that much. That was the entire reason for crossover, to get the bigger audiences to possibly make more money. Rappers don't really have to crossover today like an R&B singer or band had to. Rap is already mainstream. Just like rock n roll, which was also an offspring of R&B, sold more than R&B did. If traditional R&B sold a lot, then record companies wouldn't have abandoned it. Hip hop didn't destroy old R&B, the lack of enough of an audience for it to make a big profit did.

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There's still people who make traditional R&B, just like in the 1970s & 1980s there was Sha Na Na & The Stray Cats doing 1950s style R&B/doo wop/rockabilly after they long fell out of mainstream popularity. There's Beatles & Pink Floyd tribute bands for the audience who wants to hear that style of music. Orchestras, opera singers, and Renaissance Faire bands still perform music written hundreds of years ago. Some people here always put down Lionel Richie's solo career. But if he stuck with doing whatever the early Commodores were doing, he'd be obscure today and Nicole Richie probably wouldn't have become famous.

SoulAlive was speaking primarily of the art form. Not popularity and numbers sales. If popularity and numbers sales and getting the mainstream heads(still can't believe people are obsessed with that word around here) are the end all be all in terms of talent then Justin Beiber is a better artist than Jon B. Not! The Spice Girls are better than EnVogue. Not! We don't even know if these record sales numbers are always legit. There were plenty of articles floating throughout the years about music retailers getting extra copies of albums for free and reporting bogus numbers.

The reason Rap is bigger than R&B the last 2 decades is simply evolution and technology and the fact that there wasn't a need to rely on musicians to record in the studio. The evolution of computerized keyboards and drum machines damn near made musicians obsolete. That's why you had a lot of R&B bands pair down their lineup throughout the years. That's what really destroyed R&B. Not sales so much. There are plenty of stories of R&B acts that sold an ass of music and got shitted out of royalties. Nothing new under the sun. Parents of rap music and teenage radio friendly acts had more disposable income too than they did in the 70's and early 80's. Kool Moe Dee once stated years ago that when he and other rappers came out in their heyday they had no plans of making a career out of it because they didn't have any idea it would become as big as it has. Kool Moe stated their thinking was to make a quick buck get out and do something else with your life. The rappers can thank their popularity partially to the forefathers of R&B before them for providing them the music to ride and rhyme on.

As for Lionel Richie, you do know the Commodores became a crossover act long before Lionel

went solo. You wanna start with Brick House, Easy, Three Times A Lady, Still, Sail On? Even without the quote unquote mainstream audience Lionel and the Commodores were a fixture in black households. It was nothing for me to walk down the street in my neighborhood growing up as a teenager and damn near every other household had a Commodores album playing especially the blue album. Same for Parliament/Funkadelic. I don't know what rock you were hiding under but Nicole Richie's popularity had more to do with her best friend and high profile socialite Paris Hilton and less to do with her dad Lionel. The two had a reality show in the early 2000's called the Simple Life for about five seasons. Lionel even stated during his comeback album back in 2005 that Nicole was more famous than he was so much that people would ask him if he was Nicole Richie's dad. Nevermind all the hits he has with the Commodores and as a solo act.

phunkdaddy said:

The reason Rap is bigger than R&B the last 2 decades is simply evolution and technology and the fact that there wasn't a need to rely on musicians to record in the studio. The evolution of computerized keyboards and drum machines damn near made musicians obsolete. That's why you had a lot of R&B bands pair down their lineup throughout the years. That's what really destroyed R&B.

Why didn't it kill country bands then? They're popular on the charts today. Even rock bands kept mainstream popularity past the New Jack Swing era and some had rap elements like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Limp Bizkit, Rage Against The Machine, etc. I said that there's acts who still make old R&B, but I don't know why people expect them to be on the radio today. It's a whole new generation. It's not like Dean Martin & Harry Belafonte got Top 40 radio play in the 1980s. Very few R&B acts had blockbuster sales, they generally didn't sell like Fleetwood Mac, U2, or The Beatles. That's why many old R&B albums go out of print and the labels put out different deluxe versions of Dark Side Of The Moon every few years. It's like you're not going to see Beatles style anniversary albums of the average R&B act album.

MickyDolenz said:

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Someone on social media said Mariah is doing the most to become Peg Bundy

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Mariah is such a joke. I just don't understand why so many people swoon over her and treat her like some kind of goddess? It baffles me.

lol @ the amount of uninformed opinions being passed off as fact in this thread.

Empress said:

Mariah is such a joke. I just don't understand why so many people swoon over her and treat her like some kind of goddess? It baffles me.

would she have been as big if she hadnt started making all that dance/rap shit?

LittleBLUECorvette said:

Young black kids went from doo-wopping on the streets in the 50s to trying to be A crooner like Sam Cooke or James Brown in the 60s to starting a funk band in tjeir parents garage in the 70s to rapping on the corner in the 80s ... and itsbeem rapping ever since because no new art form has really begun since Hip-Hop. That was the last major music art form as we know it.

Like André 3000 said in Hollywood Divorce, by the time music & fashion from the hood hits Hollywood, they've gone on to the next thing. In a way that's bascially saying that the audience abandons what came before. I read an interview with B.B. King once and he was saying gigs were starting to dry up in the early 1960s for blues singers until the British Invasion acts started talking about them, remaking their songs, and taking blues acts on tour with them. They got a whole new white hippy & beatnik audience they didn't really have before. B.B. said many middle & upper class blacks were embarrased about the blues and thought it was low class & country, like black hillbillies wearing overalls and chewing tobbaco. He said he wanted to change that image and had his bands dressing sharp. That's around the time soul music was beginning to become popular on the radio and blues was starting to get stuck in juke joints.

StrangeButTrue said:

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Someone on social media said Mariah is doing the most to become Peg Bundy

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The Roof was slick. Her Daydream album probably remains her best for me.

Glitter was criminally underrated sans the lead single.

Empress said:

Mariah is such a joke. I just don't understand why so many people swoon over her and treat her like some kind of goddess? It baffles me.

What about Beyonce? Crazy in Love, Irreplaceable, Single Ladies and Halo are her most recognizable hits and she didn't write any of them but the bitch has writing credits on them.

Her collaboraters want to rave about how she's heavily involved in her music but how the hell is that possible when she wasn't even involved in her biggest songs?