Souled Out
on the R&B vibe shift
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Recently, viral videos have been popping up on social media of middle school-aged kids singing along to Keyshia Cole’s 2005 song “Love”. Perplexing…because for these kids, the heart-wrenchingly vulnerable song is quite sunny and G-rated contrasted with many R&B artists’ music today, whose lyrics speak to their hazier, defeatist outlook toward love. SZA and Summer Walker boldly declare in “No Love” that “all I wanna do is fuck...get drunk…hop planes…all lust….there would be no loving you…fuck love.” A far cry from the old days, when Jill Scott coos about a man’s attention and self-sacrifice in “He Loves Me,” subtly inciting her arousal.
To be fair, Summer Walker is expressing her frustration with a man after she had put everything into the relationship and with whom, she concedes, she was in love. But the blunt and rather nihilistic reaction of “fuck love” seems to have become more prominent in today’s R&B music.
So where did the shift happen?
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