Best Year for R&B Music…1996?

This is a hard one and one that is not yet set in stone in my book. I love the 90’s! I am a 90’s kid through and through. I miss everything about the 90’s. About 75% of my ridiculously large sneaker collection are retros from my favorite decade. What really keeps me in a 90’s mood are the movies and especially the music. Listening to this music not only takes me back to key moments from the past, but it also got me to thinking. What was the best year for 90’s R&B music? As I mentioned, this was hard and I may even change my mind in the next 15 minutes. However, the conclusion I came to…and I say this as I’m clenching my teeth…is 1996. Truthfully, I could have picked pretty much any year as the best one. For example, let’s look at 1993 real quick. We were still in the New Jack Swing era but slowly approaching the end of it. Out of this came an edgier sound for R&B music. Remember, this was also a time when they were starting to feature more hip-hop artists on R&B songs. With this fusion of the two genres, this also turned a lot of R&B fans into hip-hop fans and vice versa. In the 90’s music was fun. It was about having a good time, making you think, positivity and love. Hell…that was the 90’s period. It was most definitely a great time to come of age. And we’re not even going to talk about how timeless 90’s music is. Who has the time?

Where was I in 1996? I was a sophomore in high school for the early part of the year. That summer I was playing basketball every day and listening to music; continuing to add to my collection. Still recording songs off the radio as well. My baby brother was born that summer and I got my driver’s license the day after he was born. The later part of the year I started my junior year. So my life was great. Good times, carefree times, easy times. Not a damn care in the world expect basic teenage bullshit. The reason why I chose 1996 because I feel R&B music took a huge shift in its growth during this year. We may not have realized it at the time because there was just so much great music out, but it definitely did. So let’s examine this. In 1996, New Jack Swing was completely a thing of the past. Most artists of that era were able to adapt and sadly some weren’t. 1996 was also the first year that neo-soul music became mainstream. It was becoming more common for at least 2 songs on any particular R&B album to have hip-hop features. But let’s revisit neo-soul real quick. Neo-soul music gave R&B a whole new genre within the genre. Neo-soul was feel-good music that you could just vibe too. You could play it for any mood. Artists such as Maxwell, Angie Stone, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Groove Theory, Raphael Saadiq…I could go on. Even singers who weren’t “neo-soul” were starting to adopt a similar sound on a few songs yet being able to stay true to themselves. In 1996 we were starting to get music with a more personal effect from the singers. They appeared to be in a vulnerable space at this time and both male and female singers had no problem showing these vulnerabilities. This allowed for us…the fans, to become more familiar with and learn more about our favorite singers. And lastly, 1996 gave us Missy and Timbaland. Enough said! Yes…they were around before 96′ but Aaliyah’s “One in a Million” album really gave us Timbaland and Missy. Their sound was definitely something we had never heard before. Bad Boy records gave us some R&B releases in Faith Evans and 112 after only releasing hip-hop albums (Craig Mack and The Notorious B.I.G.). This was also the year that “Urban” radio stations started getting about as much in ads and revenue as their counterparts specializing in other genres. This was due to a broader audience listening to R&B music more than ever.

In my opinion, 1996 changed the way we would listen to R&B music from this point on. For about the next 10-15 years there was still a great run with predominately original music. For me, after this run, it was one of the last years that I actually listened to the radio. I didn’t necessarily care about new music anymore. It didn’t give me the same feeling as it did before. This was also the time where I mainly only listened to music from the 70’s, 80’s and, of course, the 90’s. I have a specific playlist in Apple Music (mid 90’s R&B) where I only have R&B songs from 1994-1996 with most of the songs being from 1996. R&B music in the 90’s can be divided into thirds and still give you plenty to listen to. The early 90’s had a different sound from the mid 90’s which had a different sound from the late 90’s. That’s why I mentioned earlier in the post that I could have picked any year of that decade. Each year it was something new, something fresh. You can hear influences in all genres of music coming from 90’s R&B. I personally just felt that the shift during that year was great for the R&B music which is one of the oldest genres in music.