No signifier of sincerity is left unexplored in the fantasy of domesticity that is K’Jon’s This Time: soft, pensive piano; light, Spanish-inflected guitar; muted horns; pliant strings; and, at the song’s end, a children’s choir.
“Last night tried to get some snooze/Dreamed we was breaking up, we were through,” he sings. “When I looked around you was gone/Found that a house is really not a home/When you’re alone.”
This Time is the second single from K’Jon’s major-label debut, I Get Around (Universal Republic), one of this year’s most promising R ’n’ B albums and also one of its least expected. For the first time in recent memory the most vital new soul music addresses particularly adult concerns, with a particularly adult sound.
Nowhere is this style more clear than on On the Ocean, K’Jon’s debut single, which has been on Billboard’s Hot Adult R ’n’ B Airplay chart for nearly six months. A dramatic exhale of a song, it’s a palpable craving for something that, especially in a recession, is more erotic than love: financial stability.
“Every now and then, it feels like/My ship has gone and sailed away,” K’Jon sings with just the faintest scrape of tension in his voice. “Now the tide is coming in, I see the waves flowing/Out there on the ocean, I know my ship is coming in.” Behind him are misty new-age-esque walls of sound, plinking piano and the sounds of gurgling water. All the while K’Jon remains placid, never trying to overwhelm or be overwhelmed.
While the second half of I Get Around forgoes the ethereal in favor of tougher songs, that material is far less convincing. K’Jon is a grown-up, and he can’t hide from that.
And he’s not alone. Last month the soul perfectionist Maxwell returned from an eight-year break with his fourth album, BLACKsummer’snight (Columbia); it sold more than 300,000 copies in its debut week to land atop the Billboard Hot 200 album chart, and it remains in the Top 3. Its commercial success is a testament to the timeless quality of Maxwell’s sound, but it’s also proof of a persistent, dormant audience for this style of music. (Similarly, when rumors of a new album from the lite-soul recluse Sade began circulating this year, anticipation ran unusually high.)
Both K’Jon and Maxwell represent a strain of R ’n’ B that has remained blissfully ignorant of the rise and domination of hip-hop. In radio formatting terms, it’s urban adult contemporary, a name that does this often vibrant and underappreciated subgenre no favors.
NEO-SOUL
For much of the last decade the format has been driven by neo-soul, though that movement has often felt like a conceptual offshoot of bohemian-minded rap. Adult soul, as practiced by Maxwell, K’Jon and others, borrows from classic soul in song structure and is preoccupied with more mature themes relevant to an older audience.
Twenty years ago some of these records might have been called “quiet storm,” and nowadays there’s overlap between smooth jazz, gospel and adult-oriented R ’n’ B. Kem, who like K’Jon is from Detroit, has released a pair of albums, Kemistry and Album II (Motown), that have helped shape the genre’s sound.
Additionally, particularly for artists from the Midwest, adult soul is the soundtrack to dance night. K’Jon cut his teeth singing on the Detroit ballroom circuit: his most recent independent album, which also featured On the Ocean, was called The Ballroom Xplosion (Up & Up).
Detroit ballroom is a sister style to Chicago stepping, a scene that was given national attention when R. Kelly began incorporating its gently sliding sounds into his own; the second half of the video for On the Ocean is a compelling advertisement for the Detroit style, with its intricate twirls and zigzag footwork.
Danceability isn’t really a requirement, though. Maxwell’s first three albums prized meticulousness, each one a study in soft, floating soul. Part of his charm has always been his seeming effortlessness, his songs little more than whispered entreaties.
Parts of BLACKsummer’snight are similarly entrancing. On Pretty Wings he laments in precise darts:
Time will bring the real end of our trial
One day there’ll be no remnants, no trace
No residual feelings within you
One day you won’t remember me.
And he begins Cold with one of the sharpest openers in any genre this year: “I’m eating crow, babe.” All in all, they are the cries of someone who’s seen too much.
But even though he hasn’t strayed far from his template, this is Maxwell’s least immersive album. In music this delicate, even slight disruption creates imbalance, and the orchestration on this album too often punches through, overwhelming Maxwell’s distinctive breathiness.
For years adult soul has been a hospitable landing pad for resurgent R ’n’ B stars of earlier eras. The new jack swing star Al B. Sure! recently released a strong album, Honey I’m Home — which includes a sensual reading of Michael Jackson’s song The Lady in My Life — on Hidden Beach, a label which has made grown-folks soul its mission.
RETROFITTED SOUND
This year the R ’n’ B journeyman Avant had a hit with a tender cover of the lite-rock standard Sailing by Christopher Cross. And on recent albums 1990s R ’n’ B stars like Ginuwine and Joe have retrofitted their sound, and their attitude, to suit an older crowd.
And adult soul is beginning to pop up in unlikely places. The rising rap star Drake has a hit with Successful, featuring Trey Songz and Lil’ Wayne, which is, unwittingly, the sister song to On the Ocean. Both are about firm resolve in reaching for goals that appear unattainable, and both are delivered with a wistful air.
“I want it all/That’s why I strive for it,” Drake raps. “I know that it’s coming/I just hope that I’m alive for it.”
Drake is a natural rapper but perhaps an even more natural singer. On So Far Gone, his standout mixtape this year, he shuttled back and forth between the two, depending on the mood of the song. Some of his sharpest rhymes are on the subject of stealing other people’s girlfriends, but his best singing is his most vulnerable, as on Brand New, the mixtape’s closing song.
It’s about failing to live up to your significant other’s history, a sentiment all but unexpressed in hip-hop and almost as tough to uncover in R ’n’ B. “It seems like everything I do, you’re used to it/And I hate hearing stories about who you’ve been with,” Drake sings in precise strokes of melancholy. “Feel like I’m in crazy competition with the past.”
It’s old-fashioned wisdom, something Bill Withers might have sung, and possibly Drake’s true calling. Perhaps it also explains the old-man sweaters he’s often spotted performing in.
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