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Usher’s Confessions, 2004’s biggest album, was fully pop and fully R&B all at once. Some 10-15 years ago, the situation was a lot different. Rihanna’s computerized dancehall smash “Work,” a nine-week #1 on the Hot 100, presumably made it as high as #8 on Pop Songs because like “One Dance,” it was on-trend. Even Beyoncé, who topped the Pop Songs chart five times between 2003-2009, could not climb any higher than #37 on the same chart in a year when she released the zeitgeist-seizing Lemonade. Sing-songy rap duo Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles,” the #1 song in the country (per Billboard’s all-inclusive Hot 100), is all the way down at #30 on the Pop Songs chart, indicating minimal top-40 radio airplay despite its viral popularity and unshakeable chorus melody. Drake, whose Views is the biggest album of 2016, had to make his own faux-dancehall song (“One Dance”) to maintain a foothold. and Lil Yachty’s jubilant “Broccoli” proving to be rare exceptions. Even the rock bands that cross over into pop bear some of these traits, be it the manipulated vocal samples of X Ambassadors’ “Unsteady” or the reggae bounce that lifts many Twenty One Pilots songs or the tropical house undercurrents in Maroon 5’s “Don’t Wanna Know.” There is also moody rap music (most recently by gnash), folksy singer-songwriter fare (most recently by One Direction alum Niall Horan), and pure, sparkling, state-of-the-art pop music (most recently by prodigious actress Hailee Steinfeld).Īs you can see, the field is blindingly white, with hits such as D.R.A.M. It manifests in the work of producers like the Chainsmokers and Major Lazer and DJ Snake, but also singers from Sia to Ariana Grande to Kiiara. Per the current sonic gerrymandering, pop’s dominant sound is breezy, bouncy, easy listening hybrids of lightweight dancehall and electronic dance music’s softer side. So it goes with Billboard’s essentially identical Pop Songs chart. A quick scan of iHeartRadio’s most recent top 20 playlist reveals as much: Only Rihanna’s retro soul ballad “Love On The Brain,” Bruno Mars’ robo-funk throwback “24K Magic,” and the Weeknd’s dark, sleek Daft Punk collab “Starboy” could pass for R&B by today’s standards, and those songs only loosely.
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Invisible walls have always existed between the worlds of pop and R&B - a division largely determined by race - but pop radio feels especially resistant to R&B right now, at a time when the sound of the top 40 has evolved to exclude most of R&B’s mainstream. Michelle, and Sevyn Streeter: queens all, but mostly confined to their empires. It’s even worse for women such as Mary J. When they do, it’s often by hopping aboard whatever stylistic wave is reigning that year - think of Usher’s electronic dalliances like “OMG” - than by appealing to modern R&B sensibilities. R&B’s workmanlike radio superstars churn out jam after jam, some of them truly transcendent, yet only rarely do they actually transcend.