Before We Learned to Be Unbothered
On women-led R&B, the dignity of yearning, and the songs that let love make a mess of you. There is a certain kind of music I keep returning to when I want love to feel larger than common sense. I do not really know how to name it without flattening everything into “old R&B,” because the music I mean stretches across decades. The S.O.S. Band was making some version of it in the eighties. SWV carried that feeling through the nineties. Alicia Keys inherited parts of it in the early 2000s. There were women fronting bands, female vocal groups, solo singers, gospel harmonies, slow jams, soul and R&B all folding into one another. They do not sound identical, but emotionally they live in the same room for me. The drums are patient. The harmonies take their time. The woman at the centre of the song is usually in love, confused by love, disappointed by love, waiting for love, or doing something she probably knows is not completely sensible because of love. And somehow the music...
