By: Noeka Nimmervoll, Staff Writer and Petra Chase, Features Editor
Black women in music tend to get boxed into one repeated spot: rhythm and blues, more commonly known as R&B. Black artists in general tend to get pigeonholed in genres like rap, hip-hop, and R&B. However, Black women experience a unique struggle in the music industry at the intersection of racism and misogyny. Black women artists are labelled R&B despite making music in different genres. Even in R&B, a genre where Black women thrive, they’re often overshadowed by men and fight harder to achieve the same recognition as white artists. Genres like pop, indie, and rock have often excluded women of colour, further limiting the perceived possibilities for Black musicians.
The trend of labelling Black women as R&B artists comes from racial stereotypes by record labels and the music industry. Despite sharing influences with other popular genres, the growing fluidity of genres, and artistic journeys that transcend genres, R&B remains a uniquely stubborn label for Black women in music.
Alternative describes music that is outside the musical mainstream. However, “alternative R&B” is how many Black alternative artists are marketed to the music audience at large. Even when a Black artist makes music completely outside of the genre, the stereotype lingers. Toronto-based Canadian Congolese artist Lu Kala sometimes gets referred to as an R&B pop artist during press events. “There is nothing about my sound that is even remotely R&B . . . I get that label [because of] the way I look,” said Kala, according to ELLE. Check out “Hotter Now” or “Pretty Girl Era” for some of her hot girl pop anthems. Bright beats, synthed guitars, and rich pop vocals make her music fun, vibrant, and confident — everything you could ask from a pop singer-songwriter. Calling Kala’s music R&B is, by all understanding of the genre, illogical.
The experimental artist FKA twigs spoke about how she started being labelled “alt-R&B” once listeners saw her picture and found out she was mixed race. Before that, people would comment that her music didn’t fit any genre. She told The Guardian, “If I was white and blonde and said I went to church all the time, you’d be talking about the ‘choral aspect.’” From classical influences to unrelenting electronic sounds, she says her music is closer to punk, and, “Fuck alternative R&B!”
Mariah the Scientist, Chlöe, Normani, and Rachel Chinouriri are some of the many Black women who have spoken about receiving the same R&B treatment.
“My music is not alternative RnB My music is not Neo Soul. My influences are indie, electronic/alternative and pop music. Black artists doing indie is not confusing.”
— Rachel Chinouriri, singer-songwriter
How tf do ppl listen to ‘So My Darling’ and think ‘RnB?’”
R&B’s role in the music industry
After WWII, many African Americans in the US left small towns and entered cities for better job opportunities, which led to a boom of Black entertainment centres opening up in every major settlement. Black musicians of many styles, from blues to jazz, collaborated in these centres and pioneered many musical advancements in the 1940s: combos mixing seven or eight jazz and blues musicians, trios featuring piano/organ, bass, and guitar, and vocal harmony groups that integrated a doo-wop acapella style. These elements were all key ingredients for the development of R&B.
The term R&B originated in 1949 when a newspaper writer moved to replace the reductive term “race music” which was used from the 1920s to describe African American music. In the 1950s, record labels began releasing R&B artists onto the music market but often added elements of pop and Latin beats to R&B production, to make it more marketable to a mainstream audience. Some of the biggest names of the decades to follow helped establish the genre, and influenced artists to come: Etta James, Nina Simone, and Marvin Gaye, to name a few. The genre has continued to develop into the completely different sound that defines R&B today, and has been adopted by non-Black artists alike.
In Canada, Toronto, Montreal, and other major cities were where the evolution of several genres, including soul, funk, and reggae were nurtured. In the 1960s, many Black musicians immigrated from the US and Caribbean, bringing their sounds. Jackie Shane was one such icon of early R&B, bringing Southern blues traditions to the Yonge Street strip, where she built a lively audience. She topped the charts with her song “Any Other Way.”
R&B is loosely conflated with blues-influenced songs. However, many types of music are influenced by blues. Blues can be traced back to free African Americans living under Reconstruction and Jim Crow in the 1860s. Born out of the Mississippi Delta and spreading through the South, blues expressed singers’ feelings through characteristics like whining electric guitars, call-and-response lyrics, and melismatic vocals (those which stretch a syllable across notes). Its many styles and evolution, as musicians spread across the country and into urban settings, led to the creation of jazz, rock and roll, hip-hop, and rap.
“Black music is the backbone of all genres, the blood that runs through it”
—Rashad Shabazz, associate professor of African and African American studies at Arizona State University
“However, the way in which Black artists are racialized denies them the ability to identify outside of predetermined ‘Black’ categories. Hip-hop, rhythm & blues, rap: that’s where the music industry sees Black music.”
As writer Sumiko Wilson wrote for ELLE, “What distinguishes a pop song from an R&B song is subjective, but R&B can most easily be defined by its soulful nature. By name, it’s literally rhythm and blues, though it’s currently in its most malleable iteration. The distinguishing factor could be any detail, from the tempo to the lyrical content to the melismatic singing [ . . . ] Since the lines are so commonly blurred between genres, it’s almost as if the only detail differentiating them here is the artist’s race.”
Black women break boundaries
There are many incredible Black women artists who have broken out of the mold that the music industry creates for Black musicians. For one, some of the greatest pop stars of all time have been Black women: Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Rihanna, and Beyonce. At the 2022 Grammys, the Best Pop Duo Award was won by SZA and Doja Cat, marking the first time Black women had won this category.
Fefe Dobson, Canadian singer of the 2003 hit song “Everything” and 2009’s “Ghost” was pressured to become an R&B artist. Despite being reduced to an Avril Lavigne derivative, she defined her own path as a pop-punk princess and made the genre a more inclusive space for years ahead. Willow Smith and Fousheé are two artists who starkly departed from R&B debuts to release punk/metal albums, refusing to be reduced to one thing. Growing up with the stereotype that Black girls aren’t “supposed” to listen to Paramore or My Chemical Romance, Smith was inspired by her mother’s nu-metal band Wicked Wisdom, and the Black-woman fronted metalcore band Straight Line Stitch. She released her pop-punk album lately I feel EVERYTHING in 2021. Fousheé released her metal/screamo album softCORE in 2022. “It’s not acceptable for a Black woman to be angry – if we are, we’re pushed into the stereotype, when in fact we all feel angry sometimes,” she told The Guardian.
