No Blacks Topped Billboard In 2013!

http://entertainment.time.com/2014/01/10/color-blind-no-african-american-artists-had-a-no-1-hit-in-2013/:smt072

 

That is rare indeed. Of course some Whites sing like Blacks. Mr.Thicke on the other hand should pay Marvin Gaye's family some moolah.

 

good! bunch of sell-out, money-chasing idiots making music these days. Ppl like "fiddy (christian pimp) cent" and "nicky (whore of babylon) minaj" were really bad signs, and now the chickens are coming home to roost

Maybe black folk will start to make actual music again. See if we can get our soul back

This and the decline of the black birth rate. :mrgreen: Tip of the iceberg

 

Doesn't surprise me either. Most popular black acts are garbage right now. Cats been doing the same 'ish since the early 90's. How many more male RnB singers do we need who try to dance like MJ?

Female RnB acts are a little better. However, they pick material that may be good songs, but are crappy singles.

There really needs to be a better level of skill in the A&R division when it comes to dealing with RnB acts.

All the excitement and innovation is going on in Pop, right now. Black artists need to step up their game.

 

Who cares? Blacks damn near don't even play instruments anymore on these charts. You gotta go to the bedroom musicians, streets and churches to find black folks with talents. You can only swag and whine over a club/dubstep beat for so long before that shit gets old to even the biggest top 40 head. Bitch ass record executives afraid to step outside the box and push the same shit, and the black entertainers go along with the shit.

 

Not surprised as far as it concerns black men. The last two decades have seen zero interest in creating black male singers with mainstream appeal. The industry constantly looks for white male, white females and black females who fit that bill as hopeful mainstream singers. Black dudes? Not so much. Overall black male R&B singers are nowhere near as prominent as they were in the late 60s, 70s and 80s. And black male R&B singers with crossover appeal? That has been a dying breed.

Black guys are now pigeon-holed into the rap genre. For very new black male singer (of ANY genre) that gets a record deal there appears to be 20 black guys entering the industry as rap artists. And those rap artists typically use profane language, end up writing about the same old thing (getting rich, getting hoes), get into various degrees of trouble with the law, sabotage their appeal with inexcusable bouts of narcissism (hello, Kanye) or all of the above. That leads to less sales, less money and thus less recognition. Meanwhile white guys (or Bruno Mars) come in and fill the void for mainstream hip-hop and R&B music often with black men producing and writing their material. And black male consumers are okay with this which also means they are a major part of the problem. These same black men also are satisfied that the ladies like Beyonce and Rhianna are the biggest black selling artists on the scene and they treat these women like icons. Straight white men, as a collective group, NEVER settle for playing second fiddle to their own women in any genre. Period. End of story.

What does surprise me though is that no black female artists topped the Billboard chart for 2013. There are no shortage of black women singers being ushered onto the scene and many of them have found crossover success. But perhaps what is happening is that more and more white women are following the paths of white men by incorporating elements of soul, R&B and hip-hop music into their work. And when you get white girls like Adele or Lorde or whomever doing this there is no need for all those white female consumers to buy the black female product unless those females are Beyonce and Rhianna.

White people taking on black styles and profitting from it is nothing new. The way for black genres to stay strong however is by having a continuous flow of fresh, strong black talent constantingly producing great material and staying ahead of the game. And the work they produced, as was the case in the past, would find its way to pop radio stations and thereby success on the pop charts. That is no longer the case. As far as R&B is concered it has been damaged because it has virtually ignored or been ignored by one entire sex of the black community: black men. When Usher has concernts that are only for female concertgoers then there is a major disconnect. A successful male rock or country artist is going to have loads of female fans by default but he won't alienate male record buyers in the process.


Chickens come home to roost. It has never been easy for black male singers to crossover to mainstream because of white society's discomfort with black male sexuality. But at least record companies and black producers tried to find or create such individuals. Now they don't even care if they have black male singers on their labels.

 

God damn man, is everything to blame about the dominant white male establishment in Hollywood and the music industry? How about fucking becoming an author, a TV Host like Steve Harvey, or comedy, like Dave Chappelle?

 

Unless you're a record executive, you shouldn't measure the value of music by the amount of sales it generates.

 

I wonder how The Weeknd did last year.

 

Tell that to the kids today.

 

They need to bring back *n*sync*

 

Preach!

 

I miss the 80's. It was about music and musicianship. I mean, the synthesizer, an instrument that been around a long time was king in the 8o's. Today, some artists use synthesizers and percussion. Some use a complete rhythmn section(guitar, bass, drums and keyboards). Some use a string quartet to an orchestra to back them up. But, that is not bankable as much now. If I were to put out an album, you better believe that there will be real instrumentation and not this gimmicky approach that is in vogue now.

 

When I was a kid in the 80's the older folks (people who were around the same ages we are now) were saying the same things about our music (what many consider classic stuff now).

Bottom line: most of us are old and out of touch. It's a cycle. It happens.

However, what's going on with black artists isn't surprising. And, it's more of a cultural thing than a musical issue. Since the 90's you had to be from the streets (or fake like you were) to be a credible black artist.

Well, the general public has lost its fascination with the hood. That cycle has passed. People want to have fun now without the bourdon of "keepin' it real." But, black artists, especially males, still have at least one foot in that era.

 

When I worked at the church, the church has a AM radio station. It won a prestigious award for gospel radio. A lot of gospel now sounds like R&B. But now it covers jazz, too. To me the really good gospel was like the Edwin Hawkins Singers singing "Oh, Happy Day." Or The Dixie Hummingbirds singing the Paul Simon song(or it was their song first)"Loves Me Like A Rock" or The Five Blind Boys, Shirley Caesar, Mahalia Jackson and Andre Crouch. Even Little Richard had put out a gospel album called God Is Real. I think this is where black music should return to.