Alicia Keys, I have a bone to pick with you.
For the moments I spent at the back of the classroom imagining myself into the music video for You Don’t Know My Name. Me, all skin and bone and fantasy, scribbling tunnel-vision dreams on to the backs of school textbooks, distracted by the thought of an almost recklessly venturesome type of love; one that in any R&B music video would see me abruptly leave the room to run towards my lover in slow motion, them standing at the end of the corridor wearing a gold chain and diamante earring, the bridge building its way out into the final chorus.
For all the sounds love gave us – from Teddy Pendergrass and Luther Vandross summoning screams of passion at concerts from a generation of women I’m still learning to understand, to SWV and Aaliyah drawing out the sensuality of vulnerability – it was you, Alicia, who consolidated a sound of romance I grew to recognise; a longing love that spanned generations but lived in the now. “Grown” but naive enough to live vicariously through.
In my dreams I’d reenact the moment you call up Mos Def’s character “Michael”, picking up the house phone after 6pm when house-to-house calls were free, belling the landline of someone’s son. I’d swap the coffee house on 39th and Lennox for Mr Thompson’s maths class, and the fly blue suit with the shining cufflinks for the way he wore his white polo shirt under his school blazer, clocking his Just Do It bag sitting slanted across his torso like it belonged there.
In retrospect, I had no business loving the way I did, but Alicia made love taste of something salty and sweet; of sneaking into the Cineworld at Southside with snacks from Asda, delegating some coin to a Tango Ice Blast and hoping, this time, they wouldn’t search our bags. Like something complex that shouldn’t work, and sometimes it didn’t, but when it did, wasn’t it wholesome? R&B did that to you, sending you into a trance of an unrivalled passion.
So, maybe I have a bone to pick with R&B.
For selling dreams of men dancing down high streets through all four elements, just to chirpse. For boys from ends singing Let Me Love You by Mario down the phone to girls they were attempting to move to, dropping the playground bravado for something sweeter. For So Sick by Ne-Yo being the go-to song to sing at any talent contest for a solid few years. But in all its rose-tinted nostalgia and infatuation, R&B has always been trifling. Songs about love weren’t always songs about love: Donell Jones being indecisive about what he wanted in a relationship, popping up outside the restaurant window like the Candyman once his girl found a new man in Where I Wanna Be; Jagged Edge’s Let’s Get Married sounding more desperate than romantic; Too Close by Next being just downright nasty, growing to realise “you’re making it hard for me” meant a different kind of fighting temptation.
I don’t buy into the idea of “old-school” R&B being this perfect execution of love and wanting and needing that’s slipping into an evanescence. I don’t believe in its rebrand of being the ultimate sound of love that younger generations are now flailing in comparison to.
But something has changed. Love sounds distant now. Like muffled bass leaking through flimsy walls. Like foggy dreams fading into oblivion the morning after. Like some kind of hesitance towards the unsexiness of love; its compromise, its vulnerability, its openness and willingness to push through. How does love sound to a society that is hesitant towards its embrace?
Maybe I have a bone to pick with us.
For throwing back “who hurt you?” as a means of antagonising and passing blame instead of asking “how do you want to be loved?”. For reciting quotes from bell hooks’s All About Love on Twitter and avoiding the work it takes to adopt it as praxis in our offline lives. For sitting in a false nostalgia of how love supposedly once was, pushing perfectionist ideas of a different generation, while simultaneously minimising their love to a form of imprisonment.
In the distant hum of what love once was, I still hear that song, that chorus, that melody, reminding me that, as messy and chaotic and indecisive as it is, R&B still holds our love close to us; a muscle memory that refuses to forget itself. Maybe one day we’ll circle back on this love, dusting off its cobwebs and pardoning its mistakes, holding ourselves to the promises we make to each other when we say I got you, meaning: I see you; meaning: I love you. And when these songs remind us of our past selves, I wonder how we’ll look back on this very moment. How future generations will look back on R&B, and whether they’ll still ask: “Who hurt R&B?”, and, “Who hurt us?”
Tobi Kyeremateng is a cultural producer and writer
