For quite some time now, pop and R&B music has increasingly become, essentially, hip-hop and electronic dance music. I like pop and R&B but I hate that studio musicians have been replaced by DJs and producers with synthesizers and sequencers.
Now I love hip-hop, and electronic dance music has its place, but as a musician I like hearing actual, real instruments: real drums, not drum machines; real guitars and basses, not loops; an actual piano, not synthesized, sequenced keyboard effects; singers who can actually sing, and not rely on doubling and Auto-Tune.
Who’s out there still making old-school pop and R&B?
I would recommend Eli “Paperboy” Reed - incredibly talented and soulful singer with a great band - I’ve heard his stuff but saw them on Later featuring Jools Holland and thought they were great.
I like Aloe Blacc and Raphael Saadiq. Kings Go Forth are a Philly Sound R&B band that are great.
ETA: oh, and I second Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings; great stuff.
If you like any of that, do yourself a favor and check out Truth & Soul Records; the label so nice that I gave you the link twice!
If you want something a little funkier, have a listen to Boston-based Lettuce (no relation to fellow Beantowners Ultimate Spinach except for being named after a leafy vegetable):
Not just a singing group backed by studio musicians, the whole act is a self-sufficient band: touring line-up is the same as the studio line-up (some guests for studio recordings, but there’s the official band as the foundation), collaborative songwriting, the “real deal” in every way you could want.
First, these share-the-music threads are one of my very favorite kinds. I always discover something new.
Second, I thoroughly agree with you about the preponderance of synthetic music–especially singers. If you haven’t seen it yet, catch a new documentary called 20 Feet From Stardom. It’s about backup singers who sing on hit records, but whose names most people don’t know (Merry Clayton, Darlene Love, Lisa Fischer, etc).
During the movie one person relates how a current record producer told him that on a project he allows several days to “tune” the recording. When asked what that meant, he said they go in and fix the pitches of the singers. The person relating the story, a truly accomplished professional singer, was astounded. So was I.
Why in the world would you hire someone as singer, who cannot, you know, actually SING (yeah, I know the answer. They have the right looks. The rest we can fix in the studio.)
It’s not like good singers are rare. I regularly encounter people with incredible singing talent who just work regular jobs because a music career is too risky. And most of them probably can’t afford to take the time off to attend an American Idol audition.
I don’t have any current suggestions to add to the discussion, but I may come up with something later to share.
You’re very welcome. I’m always happy to get together with people and listen to music; you play a couple of tunes for me and I’ll play a couple of tunes for you. It’s the best way to discover new music, IMO, even if it is over teh intarwebz.
Fitz and the Tantrums’ debut album from 2010, “Pickin’ Up the Pieces”, is a “neo-soul” album, with a strong 1960s Motown / soul feel. There’s little or no synthesizer in it – for that matter, they intentionally chose to not use guitars as the core of the sound, opting for vintage-sounding piano, organ and saxophone, and I enjoy the voices of both Fitz and Noelle Scaggs.
