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Since We're Rating Early 80s R&B Songs, Let Me Try To Articulate This

5

5 Grand

Old School Godfather
Picture being a kid and you're driving in the car with your mother and older brother. These are the songs that you're used to hearing on the radio

Love TKO - Teddy Pendegrass
Before I Let Go - Frankie Beverly & Maze
Outstanding - The Gap Band
Human Nature - Michael Jackson
Love Come Down - Evelyn Champaign King
Sexual Healing - Marvin Gaye
That Girl - Stevie Wonder
777-9311 - The Time
Encore - Cheryl Lynn
Mama Used To Say - Junior
Cutie Pie - One Way
Are You Single - Aurra
She's A Bad Mama Jamma - Carl Carlton


^^^^^ So that's what you're used to hearing during the day.


But at night time, the college radio stations would play these songs;


















The only way I can explain it is to make a R&B and Rap playlist and put those songs in random order.

In the early stages of Hip Hop/Rap Music, they used musicians to play the background music. Then it evolved into drum machines and synthesizers in the mid 80s. But the music was arranged like R&B, if you just listened to the Instrumental version, or the intro of the song you might think its an R&B song, until the person starts rapping. And that was the beauty of it, you would be expecting to hear an R&B song and all of a sudden the person starts rapping over the beat.


Now consider there's no internet, no MTV, no BET. And then imagine that the DJ doesn't announce the name of the song or the name of the group. Or if they do say the name of the song, they say it so fast that you don't have time to write it down or remember it.


So from my perspective, it was just this mysterious alternative to R&B. You'd see Rock and R&B singers/bands/artists on TV so you know what singers look like, but you have no idea what a rapper looks like, or how they perform. If you were lucky you'd see Kurtis Blow or The Sugarhill Gang on Soul Train. But otherwise there were no outlets that played Rap/Hip Hop.

But yeah, put all of those songs on a playlist and then randomize it.
 
what was it like when you first heard run dmc and later ll cool j? when did you know rap wasnt just a flash in the plan and was here to stay?
 
MC (master of ceremony)
Rap/rapping (slang term of the time for talk/talking)
"Hip hop" were just some simple rhyming words used while rapping that eventually stuck.

Lot of mom & pop record stores I been to in the 80's didn't have sections. Everything was just in alphabetical order and as far as I can remember, it was called rap
 
SheerExcellence said:
what was it like when you first heard run dmc and later ll cool j? when did you know rap wasnt just a flash in the plan and was here to stay?
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They used to play It's Like That on the radio and it wasn't like the Sugarhill Gang. They were using drum machines while the earlier groups had musicians playing the background music. So it definitely sounded different. But Sucker MCs was a different story. I'd hear it every once in a while, but they didn't play it on daytime radio. And like I said, there was no internet so there was no way to pull up a song and play it unless you had the record, or tape.

I remember I went to summer camp in 1984, a year after Sucker MCs dropped. When Sucker MCs came on everybody knew the words. It was the same summer as Purple Rain. Also Whodini and The Fat Boys came out around that time.

I never thought Rap was a "flash in the pan" because I wasn't old enough to remember what it was like before rap. I was 6 when Rapper's Delight came out. So as far as I was concerned it was a new style of music. But it was probably that summer, the summer of 84 when so many drop songs and albums dropped that you knew there was more to it. Especially after seeing Wildstyle and Beat Street and buying the soundtracks for both movies.

If you've never heard both, check out the soundtracks for Wildstyle and Beat Street. Wildstyle is pure Hip Hop with the DJs mixing records and the MCs rapping live. Beat Street was a studio album with actual songs. I think when I listened to the Wildstyle Soundtrack I started to understand that there was something beneath the surface. There was more to Hip Hop than just rhyming over a beat.
 
CeLLar-DooR said:
90s perfected everything good about the 80s and ditched all the crap

Games to movies to music to TV, everything was just better
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Everything was controlled by corporations in the 90s. In the 80s there were independent labels so things evolved organically. There were more small businesses and less mega stores like Walmart or Best Buy.

I'm sure you've heard about that industry meeting in the early 90s where they discussed shifting the paradigm from Afrocentric, socio-political rap to gangsta rap.

In the 80s you had a whole movement from KRS One, Public Enemy, X Clan, Poor Righteous Teachers, Rakim Shabazz, King Sun, etc. They all made pro-black music that was created to uplift the Black community. By 1992 there weren't any Afrocentric, socio-political rappers anymore. It was either gangsta rap, or rapping about smoking weed. Then it evolved into being a drug dealer. By the late 90s, with a few exceptions, every rapper was a drug dealer and a killer.

I'll take 80s Hip Hop and R&B over 90s Hip Hop and R&B. Yeah, there was more Hip Hop in the 90s and they had bigger budgets so the music was more polished and the music videos were more technologically advanced. But the R&B in the early 80s was leaps and bounds better than the R&B in the 90s. In the early 80s R&B artists were playing instruments. There were still bands in the early 80s. By the 90s R&B was just singing over a drum machine with a synthesizer accompanying the singer.


Just the top 20 songs from 1980-1983 >>> The top 20 songs in the entire 90s decade.
 
5 Grand said:
They used to play It's Like That on the radio and it wasn't like the Sugarhill Gang. They were using drum machines while the earlier groups had musicians playing the background music. So it definitely sounded different. But Sucker MCs was a different story. I'd hear it every once in a while, but they didn't play it on daytime radio. And like I said, there was no internet so there was no way to pull up a song and play it unless you had the record, or tape.

I remember I went to summer camp in 1984, a year after Sucker MCs dropped. When Sucker MCs came on everybody knew the words. It was the same summer as Purple Rain. Also Whodini and The Fat Boys came out around that time.

I never thought Rap was a "flash in the pan" because I wasn't old enough to remember what it was like before rap. I was 6 when Rapper's Delight came out. So as far as I was concerned it was a new style of music. But it was probably that summer, the summer of 84 when so many drop songs and albums dropped that you knew there was more to it. Especially after seeing Wildstyle and Beat Street and buying the soundtracks for both movies.

If you've never heard both, check out the soundtracks for Wildstyle and Beat Street. Wildstyle is pure Hip Hop with the DJs mixing records and the MCs rapping live. Beat Street was a studio album with actual songs. I think when I listened to the Wildstyle Soundtrack I started to understand that there was something beneath the surface. There was more to Hip Hop than just rhyming over a beat.
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In NYC, as soon as Rapper's Delight dropped it was getting daily spins on the radio. Kurtis Blow followed soon after, we knew it was here to stay. I'd say around '82 was when rap started to be taken more seriously than just a fad
 
MECCA1000 said:
In NYC, as soon as Rapper's Delight dropped it was getting daily spins on the radio. Kurtis Blow followed soon after, we knew it was here to stay. I'd say around '82 was when rap started to be taken more seriously than just a fad
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Cosign.

I think it was The Message. Once that song came out people realized that you could rap about more serious things instead of just party raps.

Having said that, it all died down in 1985 when the corporations decided rap was a fad and moved on to the next fad.

But it came back in 1988 with Yo! MTV Raps, The Source and the Arsenio Hall Show.
 
5 Grand said:
Cosign.

I think it was The Message. Once that song came out people realized that you could rap about more serious things instead of just party raps.

Having said that, it all died down in 1985 when the corporations decided rap was a fad and moved on to the next fad.

But it came back in 1988 with Yo! MTV Raps, The Source and the Arsenio Hall Show.
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'83 was a break through with RUN-DMC

'84 & '85 was huge because of the Fresh Fest (1st rap) tour was a nationwide success and Run-DMC Rock Box video made it to MTV, Crush Groove, LL Cool J

'86 Beastie Boys and a
break out year for the ladies with Salt & Pepa

I'd call it a steady rise
 
80's R&B is leagues ahead of 90's R&B.

80's just had too many folks from the mid to late 70's that were power house musicians.

You can't tell me Jodeci was better than Switch.

You can't tell me LSG was better than Levert.

You can't tell me Dru Hill was better than Cameo.

You can't tell me Ginuwine was better than MJ or Prince.

Or that Brian McKnight was better than Luther.

90's R&B is when they started to lose nuance and the shit been downhill ever since.

Thank God for Neo Soul!
 
Black_Samson said:
You can't tell me Jodeci was better than Switch.
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source.gif
 
I have to agree with the post above me to a certain degree, those 80s, 70s singers were truly singers and writers, most played the instruments with ease, See Prince.

Many folks sleep on the catalog of Bobby Womack, his catalog alone would destroy just about every male 90s R&B act with maybe the exception of Kels
 
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