Rhythm and Bullshit? The Slow Decline of R&B

By Mark Anthony Neal, PopMatters. Posted July 8, 2005.

Yeah, I'm nostalgic: When Mary J. Blige first uttered the opening lines to "You Remind Me," it was about making sure that hip-hop remembered that R&B came from the same streets where crackheads roamed and the same tenement vestibules where drama went down on the regular.

But as I listen to Mario's "Let Me Love You" for the 727th time, it is perhaps easy to suggest that R&B has lost its Soul, or that Clear Channel, Radio One (luv ya, Cathy!), AOL Time Warner and Viacom -- a neo-plantation cabal if ever there was one -- ripped its heart out.

Hip-hop may have sold out, but at least it has sold out on its own terms. R&B, on the other hand, has sold out on somebody else's, on a pop-chart paper chase.

Truth be told, U(r)sher was nothing more than a soon-past-his-peak R&B singer before John Smith laced him with some crunk junk; Ray J could have sang the hook on "Yeah!" and topped the pop charts. And now, 10 million units later, we want to act like Mr. Raymond is the second coming of Michael Jackson? I ain't willing to grant him the second coming of Bobby Brown. And it is not like we even knew Mr. Legend (in his own mind) and Ms. Queen of Crunk n' B were in the room, until some hip-hop act sanctioned their presence.

But what ails contemporary R&B is not just a matter of the commercial success of John Legend -- and Amerie and Ciara and Mario. The current state of R&B comes not from a sudden decline, but a process more than 30 years in the making.

This story begins in 1972, when a few enterprising master's students at the Harvard Business School prepared a study, commissioned by one of Columbia's execs, detailing how the Columbia Records Group could better integrate the then largely independent black music industry into the mix.

The now infamous Harvard Report -- officially known as "A Study of the Soul Music Environment" -- has often been referred to as a sinister blueprint aimed at arming a litany of "culture bandits" with the theoretical tools to return black culture to a neo-colonial state.

There's no denying that this is exactly the situation we're staring at now, but it has nothing to do with the Harvard Report. What those MBA students articulated was a no-brainer marketing plan, informed by the commercial success of Motown and the cynical (though not mistaken) view that the Civil Rights "revolution" likely had more to do with the realities that black folk had disposable income and white folk consumed a hell of a lot of black popular culture than anything to do with real structural change in American society.

In response to those expecting more sinister designs in the Harvard Report, David Sanjek rhetorically chimes, "why did [Columbia] feel the need to document what they should have already known?" (Rhythm and Business, 62). What Sanjek suggests is that eventually somebody in the music industry would have come up with their own version of the Harvard Report -- say, Clive Davis, who incidentally was a president at Columbia at the time that the report was commissioned. The point is, with or without the Harvard Report, the takeover was well underway.

Black music has always had a complicated relationship with big business. That this relationship has typically had little to do with actual music perhaps explains the often unbalanced quality of this thing we've come to call R&B. This complicated relationship also partly explains what exactly R&B is.

The term R&B is essentially a shortened version of "Rhythm & Blues," but as a novice might discern, that which is called R&B bears little resemblance to the musical landscape created by Ruth Brown, Louis Jordan, Laverne Baker, Charles Brown and the Coasters. And perhaps that was the point. Musical innovations aside, R&B was essentially a marketing ploy that finally gained a significant foothold during the late 1970s.

R&B was born out of competing logics -- record companies tried to negotiate the realities of black culture and identity within the history of race relations in America while trying at the same time to reach a wider audience of black consumers and white record buyers. As black radio needed mainstream advertisers to court the emerging black middle class (as much an ideology as a measurement of economic and social status) and mainstream record labels became fixated on crossing over black artists to white consumers, terms like "Soul" and "Rhythm and Blues" quickly became too black.

The same terminology turnover occurred during the late 1970s when urban began to stand for radio stations that essentially programmed black music. As Nelson George explains, "Urban was supposedly a multicolored programming style tuned to the rhythms of America's crossfertilized big cities.... But more often, urban was black radio in disguise." (The Death of Rhythm and Blues, 159).

According to the Harvard Report, black radio was strategically important to record companies because it provided "access to large and growing record buying public, namely, the Black consumer." The report is oblivious to the fact that the very birth of what was called "race music" in the 1930s was premised on selling goods and services to a uniquely defined audience, namely African-Americans constrained by Jim Crow segregation -- an audience that might even buy a record or two, in the process of buying furniture, cleaning supplies and an insurance policy.

Mark Anthony Neal is a staff writer at PopMatters.com. Parts 2 and 3 of this series can be found at PopMatters.com.

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