Adventures In Terrible Music Part I

Chris Rock couldn’t have said it better: “Yo man, R and B sucks.” And you know what? It really does. I put it up there as a close second (possibly even a tie) with the new obnoxious country music that, for some stupid reason, was all over the place in the middle part of the previous decade (“Honky Tonk Badonkadonk”? Barf) as my least favorite type of music.

Each day at work, I am subjected to eight hours of FM 105.3, “Philly's Best R and B and Classic Soul.” Now, the classic soul isn’t all that bad. It’s entertaining and likeable and I especially enjoy when they sprinkle a little bit of Motown in there as well. However, I would have to say that about 85% of their musical programming consists of R and B and of that 85%, 100% of it is the same five songs that have been on a non-stop rotation of torture since late July.

Maxwell’s “Pretty Wings,” Whitney Houston’s “I Turn To You” and Ginuwine’s “Last Chance,” coupled with some other forgettable crap has bled out of the speakers of the radio in my office for close to six months now. Even if I liked these songs and enjoyed listening to them, hearing them every hour is enough to make me completely wash my hands of the already sad state of popular music, especially commercial radio.

For starters, the lyrics are terrible. It is as if an eighth-grader wrote some pathetic poetry for his girlfriend in a note asking her to the spring dance. It is so clichéd and played out and I cannot see how anybody with even a single brain cell or the smallest fragment of an imagination and creativity can find these lyrics appealing. Not to mention that they just repeat the same thing over and over again while intersplicing it with various ‘ohs’ and ‘ahs.’

Here is a little sample of Ginuwine’s “Last Chance.”

“If this your favorite song, turn your radio on. Play it for your man or your lady all day long.” Repeat 1,000 times

This is a song about the actual song that he is singing! And it isn’t like he is conveying some sort of existential meaning or some “Matrix” like view on the song itself, it is simply lyrics regarding the sounds coming out of his mouth. Can it get any more stupid?

Then there is the actual music. Generic beats with the occasional snare hit and if you are extra lucky, you can have the always exciting synthesizer, which if it isn’t used ironically (as is the case with R and B where EVERYTHING is ultra serious), lost its relevance in 1987. It is almost as if some recording studio engineer thought ‘Okay, hey, we have a bunch of crap laying around the studio that nobody will touch, why don’t we make an R and B sound out of it?’ If it weren’t for the terrible singing, this music could easily pass as the shit that they play in the mattress section at Strawbridge’s.

Then there is the actual singing, and R and B divas (oh, how I loathe that term) this can almost be blamed entirely on you. Granted the guys singing about constantly having sex is creepy and borderline pathetic, the ladies take it to a whole new aggravating low.

There is nothing more annoying in modern music than a woman holding a note for longer than three seconds. Just because you can switch octaves and fly up and down the vocal scale, doesn’t mean that you have to incorporate that gimmick into every single one of your songs (especially at the end of them where it just sound like a hyena being raped and murdered). What once may have been considered a novel and talented way of expressing your musical abilities has evolved into a knock-knock joke, something that at one point in time may have had some sort of merit, but now is just old and terrible.

This is especially the case when singing The National Anthem at a major political or sporting event. Stop trying to stretch the song so that it lasts an entire quarter of a football game. There is no reason to have the word “brave” last the length of a 22-minute sitcom nor is there any reason to make hearing the word “banner” as pleasant as a root canal without any anesthetic. Just because you are able to, doesn’t mean that you should. I mean, I can go around pushing people in front of busses, but I don’t (although if I heard that terrible Whitney Houston song again, I wouldn’t mind somebody introducing me to the front of a speeding through a red light SEPTA bus).

Lastly, the people who actually enjoy R and B take themselves way too seriously, almost to the point of parody. They cannot laugh at themselves and are the types of people who never smile while dancing. They jut out their lower jaw, rarely make eye-contact and often are on the verge of fornicating in public. Now hey, I’m all for public fornication, however I have to draw the line when it consists of a guy essentially sexually assaulting a strange woman on a dance floor to a “slow groove” while wearing an all white outfit with the wind blowing while doing his best Usher impersonation. It’s just creepy, dancing shouldn’t be like a job interview with a Fortune 500 company.