This album's real good, and probably my favorite of the genre from last year. R'n'b builds upon itself, and where there are obvious stylistic antecedents it's really nice to see them referenced overtly (the interpolation of Akon's Don't Matter on Undercover, the sample of New Edition's If it Isn't Love on In My Feelings, the album title's update of TLC's CrazySexyCool) rather than by way of a pale, uncredited imitation of the source material. SweetSexySavage is the quintessential document of r'n'b in 2017, capturing the flavors of the year in terms of production and subject matter while highlighting the requisite doffs of the cap to the throwback hits on which its target audience grew up. R'n'b is at a weird juncture; in a manner resembling the ascendance of rap over the last few years, the genre has become the sound du jour, with the expectations that its culture will shift to match expectations.

It's unclear where this paradigm came from*, but there's an ill-fit sense that in any given year the genre must have a superlative performer (2015: Beyonce, 2016: Solange, 2017: SZA) who speaks for the entire scene and whose output, in practice, is an acceptable substitute for engagement with the genre as a whole. It's a horrible misread; r'n'b (and increasingly, popular music as a whole in the playlist era) is a singles-based genre, and the tendency is to laud albums that fit the precepts of other genres not for their expression of the current state of r'n'b but their ability to appeal to newcomers for whom immersion in the genre is otherwise unlikely.

This could be innocuous (albeit, you know, in opposition to every other macro-level trend in how music is evaluated both critically and commercially), but it reminds me of a point that the excellent Eve Ewing made on Twitter a while back: the tendency to treat wokeness, specifically among self-proclaimed allies, as a distinctly achievable binary. The entire idea that the value of a year's worth of r'n'b can be contained within a single work which, once acknowledged, can check a box for a publication or individual critic's responsibility to investigate the genre is incredibly troubling and incredibly common. SZA's CTRL (a fine album) was near-universally lauded as one of 2017's top five-or-so albums; literally anything else representing the genre was largely absent from those same lists (save maybe for a generous Kelela placement).

It's incredibly hollow praise, and it's of course no surprise that it's widespread. One wonders how many critics, given the opportunity, would rather just buy a bumper sticker that says Black Women and be done with it. The (valid) justifications of the coronation of an album like CTRL - it's timely, it's real, it's personal, people relate to this - are laughably common within the genre, and would pose a massive challenge to the notion that any other music is worth listening to (jury's out) were they held with the conviction that the SZA adoration professes. There's a verse in Not Used To It that goes:

All single mothers in my family /
Don't know if you're really understanding me /
Never seen a n***a be a real man /
I never seen a n***a with a real plan /
And I still never been to a wedding /
And I just see my family stressing /
All the sons who grow up with no daddies in every generation /
Was all just raised on my granny

but we can ignore it this time because Kehlani's label didn't shell out for the right marketing push or agree to sponsor Levi's jeans or fit the right white editor-in-chief's idea of the music that defined his year. I just don't understand why, contra rap or ambient music or New York-based producers of global electronic music styles, a single r'n'b album is considered enough.

* This phenomenon's totally present in rap as well, where there's a well-documented history of female artists being passed over unless they agree to embrace the role of challenger to whoever happens to be the most visible female rapper at the time.

Highlights: Piece of Mind, CRZY, Too Much