Within weeks of each other last year Frank Ocean and the Weeknd, both largely unknown R&B artists at the time, released free digital albums—Nostalgia, Ultra and House of Balloons, respectively—that conformed to the structures of R&B but explored sonic spaces indebted to the aesthetics of indie rock. In a reversal of the status quo for R&B, they broke first with the largely white hipster demographic before catching on with the largely black “urban” audience. This process threw light on the fact that contemporary R&B, unlike other mainstream American pop styles—rock, soul, hip-hop, country—has never spawned a countercultural avant-garde.
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I can think of a few reasons for this. One is that modern, electronics-based R&B has been ruthlessly devoted to the pursuit of commercial success since arising in the mid-80s, so that musicians with pretensions of making “art” were likely to gravitate toward genres (particularly hip-hop) that have nurtured robust underground scenes. Another is that R&B is remarkably accepting of experimentally minded musicians (especially considering its focus on satisfying mainstream audiences), which tends to deflate the potential for an iconoclastic insurgency. Some of the style’s wildest innovators—Prince, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, Timbaland, Christopher “Tricky” Stewart—are also its biggest successes, and they worked from the center out (big smash songs followed by experimentation with esoteric genre workouts), rather than from the fringes in. Frank Ocean and the Weeknd are now collaborating with heavyweights such as Jay-Z and Drake, but they started on the fringes—they’ve followed trajectories a lot like the one Nirvana took to superstardom, though at Internet-enhanced speeds.
Late Nights owes obvious debts to Nostalgia and Balloons, and a cynic might suspect that Felton is making a coattail grab. But he’s still a young artist—he was only 21 when “Birthday Sex” dropped—and he hasn’t stolen an entire blueprint so much as lifted a couple of keys, which have unlocked creativity he’s still learning to exploit. He’s borrowed some of the Weeknd’s techniques for turning his voice into a textural instrument rather than simply a vehicle for salacious lyrics, and his more refined taste in beats seems influenced by Ocean.
