Mary J. Blige is blaming radio stations for the collapse of the R&B genre and then praising Justin Timberlake and Adele for helping rebrand the genre. She made this known while in a live stream with Diddy.
According to Vlad;
Diddy hosted the first part of his Instagram Live discussion on the state of R&B yesterday with a number of legendary and current acts.
Friend and R&B icon Mary J. Blige joined Diddy to address if R&B was dead and who killed it, if so. The Queen of Hip Hop-Soul had a positive outlook on the state of the genre and praised the current generation for taking R&B towards a new direction.
“You can’t kill something that’s in our DNA,” Blige said. “It’s gonna keep transitioning from generation to generation to generation to generation. They was trying to kill it.”
She followed up her statement by calling out radio stations’ role in R&B music’s perceived demise. While praising the stations that support the genre, she claimed many radio stations played a role in R&B’s decline by choosing to follow the latest trends. Blige highlighted the efforts of herself and additional R&B legends before pointing out the differences in which R&B music is perceived when White acts perform the music.
“They wanna call it ‘Popular Music’ [when] Adele and Justin Timberlake get ahold to it, so now it’s ‘Popular Music,'” she added. “But it’s been popular music! We’ve been had it!”
I don’t think R&B is dead, just like everything in life it runs in cycles. Give it another 10 more years and you will see a resurgence people just need to be patient. There is nothing to really be worried about. Diddy has to have some better things to do than this.
Flip to the next page to watch Mary J. Blige speak about the collapse of the R&B genre…
