Federal prosecutors in R Kelly’s sex trafficking case say the R&B star had sexual contact with an underage boy as well as girls, and jurors should hear those claims.
Related: Surviving R Kelly producers: 'We wanted to explain why you shouldn’t blame survivors'
Continue reading...With the 10th anniversary of her death this week, rediscover the best of Winehouse’s discography, where heartbreak and anger are mixed up with wit and joy
After all its emotional strife, the Back to Black album concludes with a jokey paean to weed. You could construct an argument that Addicted is Winehouse once more tapping into a venerable jazz tradition – it’s easy to imagine Fats Waller singing about someone snaffling his stash in the 30s – but perhaps it’s better to just enjoy its mordant wit.
Continue reading...As the US boiled with violence, 1969’s Harlem cultural festival nourished spirits with soul, jazz and gospel. Now, Questlove has turned lost footage of it into a brilliant, pertinent documentary
It’s 29 June 1969, and at Harlem’s Mount Morris park (now Marcus Garvey park), the 5th Dimension are about to take the stage. The Los Angeles group are already stars, thanks to hits including Up, Up and Away and Aquarius, from the musical Hair, which topped the Billboard charts that spring. But their pop-oriented repertoire, often penned by white songwriters, has kept them off the US’s R&B radio stations and thus from Black audiences. “We’d tried to separate ourselves from the segregation in our society, but we still got caught up in all that,” remembers the group’s founding singer, Billy Davis Jr, today. “And the average Black family didn’t earn enough to come see us at the nightclubs we were playing. They’d seen us on TV, but they’d never seen us live.”
That was about to change with their headline performance on the opening day of the Harlem cultural festival. A series of six Sunday concerts that summer, the festival showcased the cream of the era’s soul, gospel, blues and jazz artists before an audience of 300,000, many from the surrounding neighbourhoods. “I looked out and saw a sea of faces, and their response was so loving, so welcoming and exciting,” says Davis Jr’s wife and bandmate, Marilyn McCoo, for whom the festival remains a treasured memory. She’s not alone. Harlemite Musa Jackson, then just a five-year-old, still remembers how the 5th Dimension’s orange costumes, gleaming in the sun, made them look “like Creamsicles”.
Continue reading...The duo started their debut album 36 years ago, but work for Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey and others got in the way. Now it’s finally complete, R&B’s great studio psychologists look back at an unmatched career
Some albums take a long time to make, but few have had the gestation period of Jam & Lewis: Volume One. The production duo started work on their debut artist album 36 years ago, just as their career was taking off on the back of the SOS Band’s hit single Just Be Good to Me, but they were thrown off-course working for a minor figure with a couple of flop albums to her name: Janet Jackson.
Together they started shaping what would become her 10m-selling 1986 breakthrough Control, which understandably “kind of stopped the progress on our own album”, as Jimmy “Jam” Harris, 62, puts it today, when he and his partner, Terry Lewis, 64, appear on a video call from their homes in Los Angeles. With Control ready to be delivered, they wrote a song for themselves that sounded the perfect calling-card for a Jam & Lewis album. “We thought we were done with Control, then Janet’s manager came to hear the album,” says Harris. “We played him Nasty, When I Think Of You, The Pleasure Principle … And he says: ‘I just need one more song, for Janet.’ I’m going: ‘No, man, no.’ We get in the car to go to a restaurant, Terry puts a cassette in, and about the third song in, Janet’s manager says: ‘That’s the song I need.’”
Continue reading...The singer who backed the Rolling Stones, Coldplay and more weathered a miscarriage, then the loss of her legs in a car accident – but her new album Beautiful Scars shows she refuses to give up
Merry Clayton has an excellent memory. The 72-year-old singer tells tales with such particular detail: the warmth of falling asleep between gospel legends Mahalia Jackson and Linda Hopkins in the pews of her father’s church in Louisiana; the recording sessions with Bobby Darin, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Rolling Stones, for whom she delivered the searing holler of Gimme Shelter.
What Clayton has no memory of is the 2014 car accident that was so severe that doctors were forced to amputate both of her legs below the knee. She remembers waking up in hospital, but the incident itself, and much of the five months she spent recovering, is lost. “It was like I was in another place,” she explains, speaking from her home in Los Angeles. “I knew I was here in the world, but it was just like I was somewhere else. I was in la-la land.”
Continue reading...After she became the most awarded woman in Grammys history this week, we attempt to whittle down the best of her wildly varied and brilliant catalogue
As far removed as you can get from the innovations of the Beyoncé album or Lemonade, The Closer I Get to You is a slick cover of a 1977 Roberta Flack-Donny Hathaway duet, with Luther Vandross filling the Hathaway role. It’s lovely: a great song, beautifully sung, with Beyoncé admirably uncowed by the presence of a soul titan.
Continue reading...While questions rightly remain over its shadowy nominations process, Grammy voters should be praised for honouring a large number of women and people of colour
The Grammys always attract a degree of controversy. This year, there was singer Teyana Taylor protesting that “all I see is dick” in the all-male nominations for best R&B album, and a slightly peculiar statement from Justin Bieber, asking to be considered an R&B artist rather than a pop singer. More headlines were grabbed by the Weeknd, understandably shocked that his double-platinum album After Hours, and its accompanying single Blinding Lights – a song so omnipresent that it recently celebrated an entire year in the US Top 10 – didn’t receive a single nomination: he subsequently announced he would stop his label submitting his music in future. The latter’s complaint revolved around a lack of transparency in the voting process: the presence of nomination committees that retain executive power over who makes the shortlists and who hold the ability to add artists who have received no nominations in many of the Grammys’ categories.
The argument about transparency isn’t going to go away – if your voting process involves a shadowy and apparently unanswerable cabal who exert control over the nominations, you should probably expect people to look askance at it – but, the absence of the Weeknd aside, the actual winners in the Grammys’ big categories brooked little argument.
Continue reading...The co-founder of the Motown group was overshadowed by Diana Ross but won her battle to protect the group’s integrity
• Mary Wilson: Supremes co-founder dies age 76
In November 1969, Diana Ross announced her departure from the Supremes. It was not an entirely unexpected turn of events for anyone who knew about the internal workings of Motown Records. From the moment in 1963 when label boss Berry Gordy began taking an interest in the trio – whose seven singles to date had met with such commercial indifference they’d become known around Hitsville USA as the No-Hit Supremes – it was obvious who he thought the group’s star was. First Ross became the de facto lead singer on all their singles, with her fellow members Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard relegated to occasional leads on album tracks or on stage.
It was clearly unfair – Ballard and Wilson were fine singers, the latter’s soft-toned version of Come and Get These Memories from The Supremes A’ Go-Go (1966) is delightful – but you couldn’t argue with the commercial results: they had five No 1 singles in 12 months. In 1967, the band’s name was changed to Diana Ross and the Supremes, precipitating the departure of the increasingly troubled Ballard. From that point on, the Supremes were a Diana Ross solo vehicle in all but name: subsequent singles, including Love Child and I’m Living in Shame, featured Ross backed by session singers.
Continue reading...With 12 Grammy nominations since her 2008 debut, the US singer is already a genre leader – and her new EP seals her reputation with a cinematic portrait of six women commodified by their beauty
“Did you see the message from Issa?” Jazmine Sullivan asks me excitedly. For all the acclaim and Grammy recognition the R&B star has accrued over the past 12 years, she still reacts to starry praise with joy and disbelief. A hopeful tweet suggesting Insecure’s Issa Rae turn Sullivan’s latest EP into a short film elicited a positive response, and later in the week, the pattern repeats with Mary J Blige. “Wait … wtf?! I’m so happy man!” Sullivan tweeted after the soul legend signals her eagerness for a guest spot.
To onlookers, though, there was little surprise about the Philadelphia native – also picked to sing the national anthem at this year’s Super Bowl – being treated as one of the modern greats of R&B. When Sullivan arrived on the music scene in 2008, a much-touted 21-year-old protege of Missy Elliott, her USP was familiar in the genre: a vocal force of nature, honed in church, who drew on personal experience to deliver raw soul in the lineage of Blige (with whom she toured in 2010) and Keyshia Cole.
Continue reading...Butterflies with Mariah, Bronski Beat in the Peak District, Snoop Dogg on a food delivery ad … our writers reveal the tracks that made 2020 bearable
When it came to lockdown comfort listening, there was something particularly appealing about lush symphonic soul made by artists such as Teddy Pendergrass and the Delfonics. But there was one record I reached for repeatedly: Black Moses by Isaac Hayes, and particularly the tracks arranged by Dale Warren. Their version of Burt Bacharach’s (They Long to Be) Close to You is an epic, spinning the original classic into a nine-minute dose of saccharine soul. But their cover of Going in Circles, another Warren exercise in expansion, is their masterpiece, reimagining the Friends of Distinction original as a seven-minute arrangement with stirring strings and beatific backing vocals that builds into a story about lost love that transcends the genre’s usual parameters. A perfect, if slightly meta, balm for the repetitive lockdown blues. Lanre Bakare
Continue reading...With All I Want for Christmas Is You on the cusp of claiming the UK No 1 for the first time in 26 years, what better time to celebrate one of the great R&B repertoires?
Written and recorded in 2011, but – in Carey’s own words – “left in a holding pattern for a special reason”, this eventually came out this summer, by which time its lyrics, not least the line “we’re all in this together”, sounded weirdly appropriate. Lauryn Hill’s guest appearance turned out to be in sampled form, but never mind: the real power is in Carey’s heartfelt vocal.
Continue reading...The classics are back in the charts even earlier than usual – alongside the perennial row about the Pogues. So why not discover these lesser-known festive bangers?
Judging by the number of trees and lights going up already, the UK is rounding off the worst year ever by turning Christmas 2020 into a six-week celebration of successful vaccine trials. Sure enough, sales and streams of festive songs are up by 50% compared with the same week last year, with Mariah Carey leading the charge and likely to go Top 40 tomorrow. But to avoid being thoroughly sick of All I Want for Christmas Is You before you have even opened an Advent calendar, consider adding these lesser-known tracks to your playlists.
Continue reading...Informed by baile funk, metal and more, Linn da Quebrada and Jup do Bairro – with producer Badsista – are dodging racism, transphobia and music industry resistance to tell their own stories
Jup do Bairro and Linn da Quebrada first met at a festival in São Paulo through mutual friends. It didn’t go well, Jup says while we wait for Linn to join our Zoom call. “I looked at her and joked: Is it Linn for linda?”, meaning beautiful in Portuguese. “I remember she rolled her eyes and I thought: Yikes, game over!”
But the two musicians kept running into each other. “Linn often performed at the same parties I was invited to and since we both lived far from the city centre, we’d always wait for the bus together,” Jup says. In the end, they became close friends and eventually musical partners.
Continue reading...How did a turbaned drag queen from the sexual underground of America’s deep south ignite rock’n’roll? We unravel the mystery behind Little Richard’s subversive genius
As the world marks and mourns the passing of Little Richard, many have been asking: how was someone so unapologetically black and queer present at the origins of rock, a world-shaking music still associated, to this day, with white male musical acts like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones?
All these artists and more, including Bob Dylan in a Twitter thread, would be quick to acknowledge Little Richard’s formative influence on them. But “influence” is perhaps too weak a word here. Rock’n’roll history has never exactly neglected or ignored Little Richard: it just has never quite known what to do with him. The longstanding pissing contest over who can claim the title “King of Rock’n’Roll” – Elvis? Jerry Lee Lewis? – is a case in point. While his authorised biographer went celestial in choosing to style Richard “the Quasar of Rock”, perhaps we might do better to listen to the artist, introducing himself at the Club Matinee in Houston, Texas, in 1953: “Little Richard, King of the Blues … and the Queen, too!”
Continue reading...Singer with remarkable vocal range had been sampled by generations of hip-hop and R&B artists, including Beyoncé and Mary J Blige
The soul, funk and R&B singer Betty Wright, celebrated across pop genres for her remarkable vocal prowess, has died aged 66.
The cause of death was not immediately known but Wright’s niece confirmed the news, writing on Twitter: “Sleep in peace aunty Betty Wright. Fly high angel.”
Continue reading...Pop star unites with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey to support charities working with ‘communities of colour’
Beyoncé has announced a donation of $6m for mental health and other initiatives during the coronavirus outbreak.
The singer teamed up with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s relief fund #startsmall to make the donation to the National Alliance in Mental Health, University of California Los Angeles, and local community-based organisations working to improve mental health. In a statement on her website, Beyoncé said mental burdens were accelerating for people who can’t access basic necessities during the crisis.
Continue reading...In Listener’s Digest, our writers help you explore the work of great pop musicians. As fans eagerly await the album known as R9, here’s a guide to pop superstar Rihanna
Rated R (2009)
Continue reading...The actor, comedian and musician Donald Glover has made the first truly outstanding album of the decade, offsetting cultural examinations with moments of sweet levity
In hindsight, music has always been Donald Glover’s true calling. Before the sitcoms, the Star Wars movie, the Saturday Night Live hosting gigs, and the well-worn gifs of the performer walking horrified into a burning room with a stack of pizza boxes, you could find him on YouTube as a member of Derrick Comedy. The group’s greatest sketch, B-Boy Stance, saw Glover play an ageing hip-hop pioneer who had his arms surgically attached to his back, ensuring he was forever pulling the iconic pose – it riffs on the distance between the New York acolytes who witnessed the birth of hip-hop and those who came to the music after it was commodified. Glover’s understanding of American culture shines with diamond clarity; Atlanta, his comedy-drama that goes deep into the city’s rap scene, is the evolution of those ideas.
Glover’s early forays into rap were corny and forgettable. The Childish Gambino project felt like the side hustle of a talented kid eager to test every limit of his creativity – that the moniker was taken from an online Wu-Tang Clan name generator seemed to reflect how low it fell on his list of priorities. In 2016, the funk record Awaken, My Love! was an artistic breakthrough. Then came 2017’s vicious This Is America and a video that encapsulates the racial prejudice, police brutality and vicious gun lust freezing the soul of the self-proclaimed greatest country in the world. The clip became a pop cultural juggernaut, anointing Glover as spokesman for the Black Lives Matter generation.
Continue reading...R&B star announces numerous African pop and rap stars on album out Friday, as well as Kendrick Lamar, Pharrell Williams and daughter Blue Ivy
Beyoncé has outlined details for her 14-track new album to accompany The Lion King remake, entitled The Lion King: The Gift, to be released on Friday. The album features four new solo songs alongside collaborations with Kendrick Lamar, Pharrell Williams, Childish Gambino, Beyoncé’s daughter Blue Ivy and more. It is separate from the soundtrack to The Lion King, though the Beyoncé song Spirit appears on both. The singer voices the character Nala in the new 3D-animated version of the 1994 Disney classic.
Related: The Lion King review – deepfake copycat ain't so grrreat
Continue reading...R&B star was due to do two Saturday performances at the Californian music festival
Solange has cancelled her Coachella performance a week out from the Californian festival due to “major production delays”, organisers say.
The R&B star was slated for two Saturday performances at the festival – on 13 and 20 April – but on Sunday night it was confirmed both would be cancelled.
Continue reading...