Ne-Yo Asks: Why Are You <i>Not</i> Bored With R&B?
Ne-Yo isn’t letting the lukewarm response to “Closer” get in the way of his ambitions to “switch it up, try to add to the ‘urban’ sound, expanding the minds and outlooks of music lovers.” He wants you to know that he’s bored (bored!) with R&B and, frankly, can’t understand why anyone else isn’t. “Me, I have a very short attention span, always have, so I get bored EXTRA easy. So with everybody doin’ the same ol’ thing, wearing the same ol’ thing, sounding the same……….MY question is, how is everybody else NOT bored??” Good question, Ne-Yo! Some answers, based on my favorite R&B tracks of late.
1. Some singers just want to make awful pick-up lines, and some of us are puerile enough to enjoy hearing them. You get more points for a memorable bad line than for something respectable, but totally anonymous. Chris Brown putting a Wrigley’s reference (“double your pleasure, double your fun”) inside of an oxymoron (“we’ve only got one night to…dance forever”) is some sort of masterstroke. As is the concept of making love in a club.
2. Some people just ignore the nonsense on top and focus on the beats. R&B is just as likely as rap or any other genre to bring us novel sounds (pretty much anything recorded by Tricky Stewart) and interesting twists on past ones (“Girls Around The World,” “Run”), and it’s easier to ignore a self-impressed R&B lothario than some thug with a blocked colon whose naked materialism and received hate speech holds a mirror to society or something (for rock, just take out the naked materialism). It’s also fun to hear the latest in technology married to songform rather than treated as an end to itself, which is why old Timbaland productions still get played and Goldie’s don’t.
3. Mary’s pain is not boring, and never will be. Really, Ne-Yo. To even remotely suggest this is vain and piggish. You’ve worked with her, and you need to make clear that when you mock R&B, you are not mocking Mary. Show some grace.
Mary J. Blige – Stay Down (Official Video) [YouTube] Ne-Yo This… And Ne-Yo That!!! [YEAR OF THE GENTLEMAN Blog]
