Shawn Jackson, Brand New Old Me
Tres Records

Shawn Jackson’s second album riffs on underground striver themes: surviving the mean streets of “Lah City,” toking on “purple swishas,” taking “Starget Practice,” and going on “T!LT.” The beats explore well-worn niches, too, from K-Salaam & Beatnick’s Kanye-styled chipmunk soul (“Good Writtens”) to Beat Maker Beat’s future soul funk (“Izichu”). The L.A. rapper negotiates these paths with aplomb, but his lyrics often reveal a disarming vulnerability. On the title track, he admits, “Lately I’ve been living with this monkey on my back/ Put my soul into the music but no money for the tracks.” Jackson has a nice flow, but he may have trouble standing out amidst the blogosphere’s mass of rappers that have also mastered the technique of rhyming, if not necessarily the trickier art of songwriting. Brand New Old Me presents his modest strides forward in the latter department.

This essay on Shabazz Palaces was published in the July 14 issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Dipped in blackness

What lives in the mysterious Shabazz Palaces

“I’m a bright light on the dark side of town,” raps “Palaceer Lazaro” on “Capital 5.” One wonders how he got there. “Palaceer Lazaro” was once known as Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler, the leader of beloved 1990s stars Digable Planets and a 1993 Grammy winner for “Rebirth of Slick (cool like dat).” Digable Planets proudly celebrated Brooklyn, N.Y., as a nexus of black culture. Nearly two decades later, Butler has relocated to Seattle, where he heads a collective of dread artists called Shabazz Palaces.

Shabazz Palaces issued two EPs in 2009, a self-titled effort and Of Light. Both strike a consistently darker tone than the playfully cool acid-jazz notes of Digable Planets. Shabazz lobs grenades at Babylon, ridiculing “All these pop rappers in magazines looking cute/Talk frozen while they posing their white boy suit.” On “Chuch” from Of Light, he opines, “Your rap’s a corporation/A soft drink, nigga/What can y’all tell us.” But Shabazz isn’t a cranky old-schooler flying a tattered boom bap flag. His group mixes dread bass and dub, the sound of an impending (or in progress) apocalypse. Percussive shots ricochet about like burst shrapnel. On “Chuch,” township voices loop over a bone-cracking dollop of feedback.

Shabazz Palaces has only granted a handful of interviews, including to The Stranger and Pitchfork.com. When I tried to contact the group via a publicist at Yoshi’s San Francisco, where Shabazz Palaces performs July 16, I received a Facebook message from journalist and musician Larry Mizell Jr. He presented himself as the group’s “sort of minister of information.” What resulted was a silly exercise in double-speak. A sample:

SFBG: What does the name Shabazz Palaces mean?

Mizell Jr.: Band names are without fail the least interesting thing about that band. The words Shabazz and Palaces themselves are heavy with meaning — lost nation, houses of the royal — but the music is all. What that sparks in you is truly most important. I personally see/hear in it so much: time, antiquity, cosmos, kings, crowns, Adidas.

SFBG: Is Butler a Muslim? I notice he often uses Islam iconography in his art.

MJ: I’ve noticed that too, but I can’t speak to one’s spiritual beliefs. Where the listener is at with it matters most. Symbolism is powerful stuff, though. And it’s used on us every day. Understanding that gives you power.

It’s easy to view Shabazz Palaces as a meta-exercise: group conducts a non-media campaign = media tastemakers fall in unrequited puppy-love over group. And, of course, rappers are regularly accused of meta-commentary, including their constant referral to hip-hop as an actual person (or H.E.R.). However, Digable Planets excelled at turning Brooklyn’s sights, sound, and esoteric philosophies into a kind of exotic wonderland with hip-hop as the framework for an unabashedly optimistic worldview. Their ad hoc approach sometimes got them in trouble: in 1994 the trio was erroneously accused of anti-Semitism for showing a Jewish shekel bill in the “9th Wonder (Blackitolism)” video. More damagingly, hardcore advocates dismissed Digable Planets as cutesy bohemian jazzbos, even though their experiential approach seemed as valid as any “keeping it real” mantra.

Perhaps that’s why a chastened Butler can no longer view the street action from the safety of a coffee shop window. He still engages in culture jamming and spits “100 SPH” (100 styles per hour), but he now portrays himself as a willing participant in the violence. Like so many 1990s alt-rap idealists turned disillusioned realists, he has reformed himself with a macho perspective. Palaceer Lazaro can subvert gangsterism, but he must engage it. As he warns on “Kill White T”: “If you ain’t convinced, I can go and get my gun.”

Shabazz Palaces offers rays of hope, too. The chimerical glow of “Blastit” and the dreamy melodica of “Sparkles” posit the group’s soulfulness as innate qualities worth defending with blood. On “A Mass,” Palaceer raps, “Sometimes I hate my life, wish I ain’t love it so much.”

Photo by Kyle Johnson.

This essay on the Roots’ How I Got Over was posted July 14 on Rhapsody.com’s Music Stuff Place blog. I wrote it for my Rap Is Not Pop column.

Last week, I promised that I would abandon the concepts that have marked most of my Rap Is Not Pop entries and go deep on one album. This was my attempt. I didn’t get to mention my reservations about How I Got Over, from its meandering arena rock tone (interesting that critics called out B.o.B for that, but not the Roots — I guess it’s not what you do, but how you do it) to the way it ends, clumsily, with two tracks, “Web 20/20″ and “Hustla,” that didn’t match the rest of the album’s sound. But I’ve long since learned that it’s pointless to try and cram every thought about every track into a single critique. Better to focus on a theme, just as I would any other type of article, and give an impression of what the album sounds like. That leaves plenty of other nooks and crannies for listeners to explore.

Having said that, the essay just turned out okay. I made some writing mistakes.

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Rap Is Not Pop: The Roots’ Lost Paradise

Since 1996′s Illadelph Halflife, The Roots have explored social realism, portraying the mythical “streets” as a world of intractable crime, imminent dangers that require street smarts and split-second decisions, and blacks at risk of a high mortality rate — or, in scientific terms, a greater half-life. In some ways, Illadelph Halflife was a response to critics and fans who categorized the group as “jazz-rappers” after the brilliant 2004 1994 disc Do You Want More?!!!??! Much like Gang Starr, Digable Planets and other hip-hop acts saddled with the “acid jazz” tag, The Roots felt compelled to move in a more hardcore direction, albeit one that would continue to utilize their skills as excellent live musicians.

Illadelph Halflife also introduced another theme The Roots repeat to this day. Nineteen ninety-six was the year of De La Soul’s Stakes Is High. The East Coast-West Coast conflict, the incursion of organized gangs into the music industry, and Diddy and Dr. Dre’s commercialization of hardcore hip-hop all led rappers to portend that the music genre faced a virtual apocalypse. Now it seems silly that people actually believed authentic hip-hop culture would die just because G-funk and jiggy were so popular, but their concern felt very real back then, especially with the shooting deaths of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. on the horizon. Nearly 15 years later, and with the recent release of their ninth full-length album, How I Got Over, The Roots still sound the alarm.

The Roots aren’t just a cracking live band or a lineup of revolving musicians anchored by drummer and producer ?uestlove and rapper and vocalist Black Thought. It’s a sprawling collective. Philly emcee Dice Raw has been featured on every album, even though he isn’t an official member, and Truck North, Peedi Crakk and P.O.R.N. have made several appearances. Roots alumni include rapper Malik B., pianist and producer Scott Storch, keyboardist Kamal Gray, neo-soul vocalists the Jazzyfatnastees, poet Ursula Rucker, underrated multi-instrumentalist and producer James Poyser, and Incubus guitarist Ben Kenney — and that’s not counting frequent guests like Common and Mos Def.

“Walk alone, walk alone, I’m always walking alone, forever since the day I was born,” sings Kirk Douglas on “Walk Alone” from How I Got Over. However, the song features Truck North, P.O.R.N., Dice Raw, and Black Thought ruminating on their solitude, with Black Thought claiming, “I walk alone like the lost boys of Sierra Leone.” Its multitude of voices suggests that we may struggle as individuals, but we are never truly alone in spirit.

It’s not the only contradiction on How I Got Over. The title itself is widely assumed to be a celebration of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential victory, but the music’s downbeat tone is more indicative of the country’s subsequent soul-searching amidst a deep recession, political divisions and foreign wars. “Corporate monopoly/ Weak world economy/ Stock market toppling/ Mad marijuana, Oxycotin, and Klonopin/ Everybody out of it,” raps Black Thought on “Dear God 2.0,” a remix of Monsters of Folk’s “Dear God” (which itself seemed to revisit XTC’s “Dear God”). “Why is the world ugly when you made it in your image?” If the Roots have gotten over, then How I Got Over focuses on the personal and political torment they strive to overcome.

With its soft, melancholy keyboards from Frank Walker and ?uestlove’s strong yet understated drumming, How I Got Over may be The Roots’ most live and analog album since 1999′s Things Fall Apart. But while Things Fall Apart sounded defiant — a sonic representation of Okonkwo from Chinua Achebe’s literary masterpiece Things Fall Apart — the world-weary How I Got Over is lost in reflections. ?uestlove has called it a meditation on impending middle age, of turning 40 and taking, as he told Vibe.com, “one hard look in the mirror.” Left unspoken in the lyrics, yet mentioned enough in the group’s earlier albums that they continue to loom over their work, are those opportunities that now seem lost to time and chance.

For many, the rap wars of 1996 changed everything. There’s an entire generation of fans who firmly believe that the genre has been lost forever. Nothing can disabuse them of this notion, not even Drake’s Thank Me Later or Nas & Damian Marley’s Distant Relatives. They hear these recordings as lucky exceptions to mainstream rap strictures — or, as Black Thoughts rhymes on “Doin’ It Again,” “The unsung, under-appreciated, the one them underachievers had underestimated” — not as proof that there is a thriving hip-hop culture in spite of commercialism. Worse, it seems as if these fans may never return and are only too happy to relegate their love for hip-hop to youthful memories.

How I Got Over is melancholy, even tinged with tragedy. But it is not defeatist. The Roots invite newer emcees like Phonte Coleman and Blu to contribute, passing the torch to a younger generation. The album argues for hip-hop’s continued relevance amidst changing mores, and proves that The Roots’ vision of hip-hop as a form of unfettered creative exploration, not just regional hood niches, is still relevant. “I’m the definition of tragedy turned to triumph,” raps Black Thought on “The Fire.”

Or, as Douglas sings on the excellent title track, “Someone has to care.”

Tommy Boy Entertainment CEO Tom Silverman made an interesting claim during an interview Wired.com posted on July 9:

Silverman: People are telling me that the majors have teams of people who actually buy singles on iTunes to try to drive it up the charts — buying their own songs. It blew my mind. I mean, we’re not learning anything.

Wired.com: That is incredible. I wish I could figure out how to prove that — they’re not going to tell me. I guess they would only lose 35 percent of that money.

Silverman: 30 percent. So if they buy 50,000 songs, we’re talking $50,000 less 70 percent, so it would cost about $15,000. For $15,000 in a week, they can buy 50,000 more song downloads, which could drive the record up three or four positions on the chart. And they hype of it all would make people believe it, and then the next week it would be real, which is what always used to happen.

I was hoping that your Chris Anderson’s manifesto was going to show us that we could get music that rose to its natural best level on its own, without being hyped, but with the majors fighting for relevance and trying to figure out ways they can control it by gaming it, instead of just focusing on getting the best stuff and giving artists what they need to make their art better.

I’ve long suspected that record labels use iTunes to hype the charts. It’s incredible when tracks miraculously debut at number one on iTunes’ digital charts during their first week of availability — despite no prior marketing campaign to announce their arrival in the store.

A good example is Eminem’s “Not Afraid.” On May 12, the track debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 with a reported 380,000 downloads — the most one-week sales for a digital song in 2010. It managed this feat despite minor traction on national radio stations, as well as leaks to web sites and blogs. Perhaps the iTunes community is so faithful to the service and to Eminem that they would purchase “Not Afraid” en masse the minute it was available, even if it was widely available for free on the Internet.

In March, Boston rapper Sam Adams faced charges that he gamed the iTunes system to launch his EP, Boston’s Boy, to a top 10 slot on its hip-hop charts. However, Billboard disputed them, citing Nielsen SoundScan data that Boston Boy garnered sales in several markets, with only 22 percent coming from Adams’ hometown. So far, Adams remains the only artist formally accused of buying his own iTunes product. (When I say publicly, I refer to national outlets such as Billboard, not random blogs such as Plug One.)

Most would argue that news of major labels using iTunes to hype its records is just business as usual. However, such a controversy could foment collateral damage for Apple. The company is weathering numerous crises in 2010, from accusations that its app store is riven with hacks and fraudulent accounts to reports that a significant proportion of its iPhone 4 systems suffer from poor reception and may have to be recalled. And let’s not forget that the Justice Department has launched an investigation over complaints that Apple bullies labels into foregoing participation in Amazon.com’s “Daily Deal” program.

As noted in the Silverman interview, these are unproven allegations. However, it seems the rumors are prevalent enough to warrant further inquiry.

This essay on new-era Dungeon Fam was posted on Rhapsody.com’s Music Stuff Place on July 7. I wrote it for my Rap Is Not Pop column.

Prince once sang, “All The Critics Love You In New York,” mock-celebrating the rock-crit establishment’s hive mentality. I think the bees are nesting over Big Boi’s Sir Lucious Left Foot: Son Of Chico Dusty, much as they did with Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 2… Sir Lucious Left Foot is a fine album, of course, but I don’t think it’s the unqualified success that many others seem it is. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, of course. But is it an opinion, or just bandwagon-eering?

Or let me put it this way, since everyone’s so fond of Metacritic-styled ratings. Do I think it’s worth a 90, or a 9.2? No. But who knows? Maybe I’m just a contrarian that isn’t convinced of Sir Lucious Left Foot’s greatness yet.

Unfortunately, I didn’t delve into any of those issues in this essay. The concept I explored — how the Dungeon Family ethos survives, even with OutKast largely missing from scene — is a decent one, but I was frustrated by my lack of dense analysis for Big Boi’s long-delayed album. (I have a relatively strict 1000-word count for my column.) Next week’s edition will be devoted entirely to the Roots’ How I Got Over. No conceptual gimmicks.

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Rap Is Not Pop: Dungeon Family’s Future

You’re forgiven for believing that Big Boi’s debut album, Sir Lucious Left Foot: Son of Chico Dusty would never be released. Since Big Boi announced the project in late 2006, it has endured numerous recording sessions, several failed teaser singles, and even a label switch, from Jive (onetime home of OutKast) to Def Jam. In retrospect, four years doesn’t seem like a long wait, especially when judged against a graveyard of shelved, infinitely delayed, and/or simply lost rap epics, from Dr. Dre’s decade-in-the-making Detox to Black Star’s rumored second album.

Sir Lucious Left Foot is symptomatic of the Dungeon Family these days: embattled, perhaps a far cry from its glory years, yet resolute. The famed collective, once centered on groundbreaking music from OutKast, Goodie Mob, and production crew Organized Noize, no longer exists as a functioning unit, at least in not any real sense, beyond one-off reunions and retrospective magazine articles. Its legacy endures, however, from the triumphant debut of Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid to Andre 3000’s fanciful remake of the Beatles’ “All Together Now” for a Nike commercial that aired frequently during the 2010 NBA Playoffs.

Bug Boi first introduced Monae as part of his short-lived Purple Ribbon All-Stars, a crew that also included Killer Mike, Bubba Sparxxx, Organized Noize producer Sleepy Brown and others. Her performance on “Lettin’ Go” from the 2005 compilation Got Purp Vol. 2 revealed little about the creative direction she would eventually take. Big Boi then served as an executive producer on her first EP, 2007’s independently released Metropolis: The Chase Suite (reissued the following year after Monae signed with Bad Boy Records), where she formally introduced herself as a cyborg in the image of Fritz Lang’s Expressionist dystopia Metropolis: “I’m an alien from outer space, I’m a cyber-girl without a place, a heart or a mind.”

I find it amusing that Monae’s urban/pop vision of artificial intelligence has entered the Zeitgeist, a meme to be appropriated by Beyonce, Erykah Badu, Christina Aguilera and others. She’s not official Dungeon Family, but she carries its tradition of creative innovation. A direct connection can be found on OutKast’s last album, 2006’s Idlewild, and appearances on “In My Dreams” and “Call the Law.”

Idlewild should have been OutKast’s version of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk – a glorious bloated musical starring gold-grilled D-boys, funk-rock bohemians and Atlanta University Center buppies. (Check out the Morris Brown marching band on “Morris Brown.”) But a niggling atmosphere of exhaustion sucked the life out of the party, from the duo’s insistence on not rapping together, an unfolding “Hollywood Divorce,” to Andre 3000’s visible annoyance with the limits of superstardom. Like most OutKast albums, Idlewild ends with a meandering Funkadelic-style jam, but “A Bad Note” sounded gloriously prickly and recalcitrant. “You can’t fumble a chord when melody is a thousand light years away,” sang Andre 3000. It was a celebration of nothingness, pushing imagination to its breaking point, then presenting the shards as a kind of anti-feast.

To their credit, none of the Dungeon Family has looked back, even if their solo work hearkens to the glory years of OutKast’s Aquemini and Goodie Mob’s Soul Food. Last year, Khujo Goodie teamed with Jneiro Jarel for Willie Isz’s Georgiavania. Khujo, who possesses a country drawl and a prickly intelligence, may be the most underrated rapper in the camp. Paired with Jneiro Jarel’s futuristic beat tributes to Cocteau Twins and TV on the Radio, Khujo embarked on a widely unappreciated adventure into dirty South Gothicism.

If Khujo Goodie was criminally slept on, then Goodie Mob’s Cee-Lo suffered from overexposure. Forming Gnarls Barkley with producer Danger Mouse, he recorded “Crazy,” one of the past decade’s most memorable hits. It was so big, in fact, that the public ignored the duo’s follow-up album, 2008’s The Odd Couple. It seems that people had already tired of their ecstatic retro-soul like last year’s Christmas toy. Cee-Lo is finishing a solo album set for release this fall, and it’s anyone guess how it will sound, or how it will be received.

Meanwhile, Andre 3000, Dungeon Family’s undisputed shining light, wanders the musical wilderness. His hit-and-run guest spots, from his reunion with Big Boi on UGK’s instant classic “Int’l Players Anthem” to outstanding verses for Jay-Z’s “30 Something,” Devin the Dude’s “What A Job” and, most recently, Ciara’s “Ridin’” remix, only increases our longing for a real Andre 3000 experience – an album, an actual song, anything. Perhaps that explains why his fun Beatles cover feels more substantive than it actually is.

If this sounds like a plea for OutKast to return to us, then so be it. Monae’s The ArchAndroid and Big Boi’s Sir Lucious Left Foot don’t equal Aquemini, but they’re more than adequate consolation prizes. Sir Lucious Left Foot could even be interpreted as a sequel to the first disc of OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. But Big Boi’s musical sensibility isn’t as finely tuned, and he offers some real duds, including the bland “hustler’s” anthem “Hustle Blood” (with Jamie Foxx) and the thin pop-punk of “Follow Us” (with Gym Class Heroes wannabes Vonnegutt), alongside winners such as “Shutterbugg” and “Shine Blockas.” Worse, excellent OutKast reunion cuts such as “Royal Flush,” and a duet with Mary J. Blige, “Something’s Gotta Give,” have been excised, the result of sour grapes from Jive Records when Big Boi successfully moved his project over to Def Jam.

We can only wonder what Sir Lucious Left Foot would have sounded like if it had been released as Big Boi intended. To his credit, he doesn’t indulge in nostalgia, even as he asserts his continued relevance. “You can’t destroy what we done built,” he raps on the operatic “General Patton.” There’s no use trying; Dungeon Family is embedded in our culture now.

Props to Talib Kweli and Hi-Tek for commissioning this video. Kweli gets so much criticism for being an anachronism — a rapper concerned with social issues. It takes a major disaster like the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to demonstrate that we still need artists who speak truth to power.

Directed by Sam Ellison.

Marco Polo, The Stupendous Adventures Of Marco Polo
Duck Down Records

It seems counterintuitive for rising producer Marco Polo to turn The Stupendous Adventures of Marco Polo into a platform for dozens of MCs. But Marco Polo isn’t an instrumental beat maker; he excels at scoring tracks for a wide breadth of underground voices, from backpackers (Red Clay’s “Official”) to street rappers (Torae’s “Combat Drills”). Utilizing a range of sampled sounds, from “The Bridge’s” brassy funk horns to “Think of You Now’s” cool piano tones, Marco Polo compiles plenty of heaters. However, a few cuts (Granddaddy I.U.’s grumpy-sounding “The Veteran”) fall flat.

TOKiMONSTA, Cosmic Intoxication
Ramp Recordings

Jennifer “Tokimonsta” Lee has waded into a teeming L.A. beat scene with her Cosmic Intoxication debut. So give her praise for excelling at production fundamentals and spinning a cool vibe on this 21-minute EP. Her best numbers, including the breezily surreal “Line To Dot” and “Doing It My Way,” mine a melodic element reminiscent of mid-90s trip-hop. A few moments on Cosmic Intoxication, especially the soul chops of “Glaring Lights,” may sound like overly familiar clichés. With luck, however, Tokimonsta has only begun to develop a voice that separates her from the beat crowd.

Onra, Long Distance
All City Records

The key to Onra’s third album, Long Distance, is the heavy boogie rhythm of “My Comet.” Released as a 7-inch on All City Records two years ago, it sounded uncharacteristic of the French-Vietnamese producer’s sound at the time, which consisted of crusty post-Dilla donut loops. Now it anchors Long Distance, a tribute to hot early 80s soul and post-disco that stands as his best work to date.

Long Distance bears an unmistakably French touch. Its album cover depicts a nocturnal tableau reminiscent of M83’s Before the Dawn Heals Us. It swerves between post-disco soul and uptempo electro rockers like “Mechanical” (and its Euro-dance hook “Let’s make love tonight”). One of its best tracks, “High Hopes,” finds Reggie B replicating funk heroes Slave with his soft, yearning vocal delivery. On “Sitting Back,” Onra chops a vocal snippet and inserts it into a storm of distorted keyboard washes and flurries, aiming for club appeal as well as the head nod factor. For “The One,” he recruits T3 from Slum Village, who flips he flips a surprisingly sensitive tale of cheating and heartbreak over stiletto-sharp stabs and a drum machine tempo straight out of Cheryl Lynn’s “Encore.”

Onra stays faithful to the boogie theme throughout Long Distance, but he also stretches it to its breaking point. At 21 tracks, it’s probably too long by a few cuts. Some of these like “Girl,” where he loops a recording of a girl lusting after him despite having a boyfriend, push the album’s pace along. And “Oper8tor,” which inserts the vocoder-ized hook from Midnight Star’s “Operator” amidst a two-minute-long stutter step, has kitschy charm. But B-side loops such as “Moving” and “Rock On” add unnecessary filler to what is mostly a dynamic and focused set.

But if Onra freely (and masterfully) exploits the current Zeitgeist for all things boogie funk, he seems to have found his identity within it. His acclaimed Chinoiseries only emphasized the difficulty of replicating Dilla and Madlib’s loop aesthetic. 2009’s 1.0.8 had a frantic, hurried feel; unlike fellow Europeans such as Dorian Concept and Hudson Mohawke, he seemed uncomfortably toying with glitch funk. Long Distance certainly has its glitch elements – check the appropriately titled “Wonderland” for proof – but it’s nestled in a seductive dance floor groove. Onra’s true home, it seems, is in the thick of the night light haze.

This essay on Drake was posted on Rhapsody.com’s Music Stuff Place blog on June 15. It analyzes Thank Me Later‘s mix of hip-hop and R&B. Obviously there’s a lot more to be said about Drake’s rap and vocal performance, the production, and specific criticisms and praise. In the meantime, check this out.

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Rap Is Not Pop: A Brief History Of Rap And B*llsh*t

Hip-hop and R&B share a history fraught with musical romance and cultural tension. There have been successful marriages — Diddy, Faith Evans and 112’s massive “I’ll Be Missing You” tribute to the late Notorious B.I.G. comes to mind — the two cultures remain suspicious of one another. R&B fans often claim that rappers are just entitled industry thugs that perpetuate noxious ghetto stereotypes about people of color. And hip-hoppers claim that R&B singers are just bougie careerists whose babymaker blandishments are far removed from the halcyon days of sweet, socially-relevant soul.

Drake’s new album, Thank Me Later, revisits those fault lines. Merging introspective lyrics and emotive (and, yes, occasionally Auto-Tuned) vocals, he has become something of an overnight superstar. But it has also led to accusations of being an industry product cynically designed for radio hits. Some rap fans complain that he’s more concerned with wooing teenage girls with lovey-dovey vocal hooks than spitting deft rhymes for the hardcore faithful. Or, to paraphrase as De La Soul once put it, it’s whether his mix of rap and R&B simply translates into “rap and b*llsh*t.”

The cultural divide dates back to the mid-80s, when the hip-hop sound evolved from freestyle, disco and electro to hardcore 808 drums and James Brown samples. Industry veterans argued that hip-hop was displacing musicians that played “real” instruments. On The Black Album, Prince mocked rappers with “Dead On It,” singing, “See the rapper’s problem usually stem from being tone deaf.” By 1988, Public Enemy was shouting, “Bring the Noise”: “Radio stations I question their blackness/ They call themselves black but we’ll see if they’ll play this.”

Some historians claim that rap music was shut out of urban radio in the late 80s, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. N.W.A.’s “Express Yourself” and got some spins, as did LL Cool J’s “I Need Love.” Hurby the Luv Bug’s crew (Salt N’ Pepa, Kid-N-Play), Heavy D. and the Boyz, Kool Moe Dee and, of course, MC Hammer were huge. These artists were part of “new jack swing.” Pioneered by New York producer Teddy Riley, “new jack swing” muted the hardcore 808 sensibility with daffy synths, light drum machine rhythms, and sometimes even hip-house beats. Urban radio, retailers, and even video channels like MTV and BET wanted party rap for shaking your rump. Fiery agit-pop statements like Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back and X-Clan’s To the East, Blackwards didn’t fit.

Hence “rap and b*llsh*t.”

Not every merging of rap and R&B – a new term for soul music that emerged in the late 80s, and was codified when Billboard magazine changed its soul charts from “Black Music” to “R&B” in 1991 – aspired to The Arsenio Hall Show props and HBCU infamy. Everyone has a soft spot for New Edition and associated projects like Bell Biv Devoe. (Remember “S-C-H-O-O-L/ You’ve got to go to school and ring that bell”?) Mi’chelle’s singles with Dr. Dre, particularly “No Lies,” were funky excavations of post-electro gangsta funk. And the Jungle Brothers’ Done By the Forces of Nature presented Afrocentrism, UK soul and acid house as a revolutionary force. “Well my family sets all the trends/From Soul II Soul large to Loose Ends,” raps Afrika Baby Bam on “Doin’ Our Own Dang.” Then he adds, “Yeah, the industry’s filled with sloppy cats/ R&B mixed with sloppy raps.”

For the Jungle Brothers, there’s an aesthetic difference between Soul II Soul and “R&B mixed with sloppy raps.” Soul music is classic, the stuff of Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye, while R&B is trendy, just gimmicks made by Riley and his modern equivalent, Timbaland. And it’s not just intellectuals making that distinction: when interviewed, modern-day R&B stars like Ne-Yo and Trey Songz inevitably give props to Stevie Wonder, not Jodeci and R. Kelly, even though they sound more like the latter.

Fairly or unfairly, R&B has become a euphemism for mass-market gentrification. Urban radio programmers haven’t dispelled this perception, either. After all these years, they’re still more likely to play rap with an R&B vocal and/or dance element over a straight-up hip-hop gem. It’s been a winning combination for self-described D-boys, gangsters and thugs ever since Diddy paired the Notorious B.I.G. and Total for “Juicy,” and some rappers like Plies have built entire careers out of playing the sensitive thug looking for an R&B “hood” chick. The fact that Plies spends the rest of albums like Definition of Real pushing “weight” and busting shots at “n*gg*s” makes radio-pandering gimmicks like “Bust It, Baby” seem like a depressing charade.

However, R&B has also inspired challenging works of art. On 808 and Heartbreaks, Kanye West uses the genre to explore his breakup with a longtime girlfriend and the death of his mother. The production, full of quantized machines and Auto-Tuned vocals, turns the familiar babymaker sound of thrusting drum machines and eerie synth lines into a lonely crying jag. Although he mostly sings (the hit single “Heartless” being a notable exception), the tone merges R&B and hip-hop sensibilities (as well as electronic pop like Depeche Mode). It underlines the best of both (musically at least – West’s singing is another matter).

Even though he raps much more than West, Drake’s Thank Me Later follows in the 808s and Heartbreaks tradition. His lyrics are full of introspective thoughts, whether it’s fame and its aftereffects or the lack of a steady girlfriend. And his achingly light and melodic vocals exemplify R&B as a kind of aching need for love, companionship, and personal validation. Not surprisingly, he references the late Aaliyah Haughton, one of R&B’s undisputed queens, and her sublime “Let Me Know” on his “Unforgettable.”

If some regard Thank Me Later with suspicion, it’s only because we the audience have come to expect less. Rap should consist of hot bars and coke raps; R&B is supposed to re-invent sex, and their merger should be a pancake melding of the two. When the combination exceeds our expectations and sounds better than the sum of its parts, we’re reminded of how good it should be.