Real R&B fans aren't waiting for the Weeknd
By praising the Weeknd, indie-leaning music critics are once again getting R&B spectacularly wrong
I still think the Weeknd album is much better than Lex is giving credit for - he/they get the clammy, skeezy vibe well enough that the songwriting doesn’t have to be all that. But this is a pretty great riposte to the hype (my piece included) because it focuses on not only better individual alternatives but says some smart and loving things about the genre as a whole too.
I want to put a moratorium on all gratuitous uses of the word “real” as a replacement for “what I think X should really be like.” Not sure what a “real” R&B fan is supposed to be. I’m going to give the author the benefit of the doubt here and assume he didn’t pick that headline. Silly Guardian. What next? Real dubstep fans aren’t waiting for James Blake? OMG tell me something I don’t know.
Also, R&B actually IS changing. The melding of indie with hip-hop and/or R&B is happening from BOTH ends…But the Weeknd are hardly the only ones mixing indie/bedroom/lo-fi aesthetics with R&B and rap right now. If they aren’t the most interesting group out there, they are still very clear examples of an exciting trend that’s happening. That’s what makes them so highly bloggable. This doesn’t mean that other things aren’t happening in R&B. This doesn’t mean that some music critics aren’t giving too much focus to stuff like this. But I’ve been listening to R&B my entire life, and I think the Weeknd is pretty cool and interesting. Plenty of “REAL R&B FANZ” (like Drake for instance, I assume he’s a real r&b fan?) agree with me.
I’ll have more to say on Lex’s article and related stuff: It deserves a really long article/post. But what theremixbaby is saying here is totally right on.
Just to confirm that as far as I know the heading and subhead here won’t have been anything to do with Lex - it’s all done by the subs. But that might be different on the blogs.
I hear what you’re saying—and in fact, nowhere is the word “real” used in the article. But when Lex says, “Only a fool could think the Weeknd the most exciting thing to happen to R&B in 2011,” he’s automatically setting up a wall between people who think the Weeknd are the most exciting thing to happen to R&B in 2011 and those who don’t. And he’s suggesting, if not stating outright, that people who think the Weeknd are the most exciting thing to happen to R&B are not real R&B fans, whereas people who see past this ridiculous notion are “real” R&B fans.
For the record, I do not like what I’ve heard from The Weeknd and think the coverage of it in relation to R&B has missed the mark a bit. But treating Weeknd fans as ignorant R&B fans—and in some way treating them as ignorant, period—is presumptuous, counterproductive, and unnecessarily nasty. I’m not going to go so far as to say that Lex goes quite this far, but he’s walking a very thin line. And it’s unfortunate, because he’s undercutting the best part of the piece, where he points to all those other R&B releases that haven’t been covered quite as extensively, which is buried under statements that are blatantly provocative and prone to incite reflexive reactions.
I think this is a completely fair characterisation of what Lex is doing! I just don’t see it as unproductive. He’s a troll, in the great tradition of British music press writers - most of whom, somewhat ironically, worked for the indie weeklies. But like the best of those, he actually does know what he’s talking about re. good alternatives.
The question “hold on, why are you paying attention to this stuff and not to that stuff?” is a) fundamental, b) often hard to ask politely, c) very much in the interests of the attention-payers not to answer. So trolling works as a way of asking it, for me.
(Well, not for me personally. I will point out that my own more consensual, nuanced, etc. take on the Weeknd, in the same venue as Lex’s, got no comments at all and about half the tweets.)
