Hip-hop has always been regional. Atlanta shaped trap music while Chicago pioneered drill. But when it comes to the West Coast, one sound continues to stand above the rest: G-funk.

Defined by buttery synths, deep basslines, talk box vocals, and infectious grooves, G-funk transformed hip-hop in the early 1990s. It captured the sun-soaked streets of Southern California, blending the grit of gangsta rap with the smooth musicianship of ‘70s funk.

While artists like Warren G, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg helped push G-funk into the mainstream, DJ Quik carved out his own lane as one of the genre’s most gifted architects. A rapper, producer, engineer, and multi-instrumentalist, Quik’s music showcased a level of musicianship that continues to influence artists decades later.

What Exactly Is G-Funk?

Short for “Gangsta Funk,” G-funk emerged in the late ‘80s and exploded into the mainstream during the early ‘90s. The genre drew heavily from legendary funk groups like Parliament-Funkadelic, Zapp, The Gap Band, and Ohio Players, sampling or recreating their signature grooves and pairing them with rap flows.

Rather than focusing on aggressive drums or dense production, G-funk prioritized melody. The sound became recognizable through several defining elements:

• Warm synthesizer leads

• Thick, rolling basslines

• Slow-to-midtempo rhythms

• Talk box vocals popularized by Roger Troutman

• Funk-inspired guitar riffs

• Rich harmonies and layered instrumentation

The result was music that could feel smooth, celebratory, reflective, or intimidating—all while keeping listeners locked into mellow grooves.

DJ Quik: The Man Behind the Sound

Although DJ Quik earned recognition as an MC, production has always been his greatest strength.

Unlike many producers of his era who relied heavily on drum machines and chopped samples, Quik approached every record with the mindset of a musician. He played instruments, layered live sounds, and meticulously mixed his records until every kick drum, bass note, and keyboard melody sat perfectly in the mix.

His 1991 debut album, Quik Is the Name, introduced listeners to his signature style. Songs like “Tonite” blended classic funk influences with modern hip-hop production, creating records that sounded polished without losing their street edge.

As Quik’s career evolved through albums like Way 2 Fonky, Safe + Sound, and Rhythm-al-ism, his production became even more sophisticated. Jazz chords, live instrumentation, vocal harmonies, and intricate arrangements became staples of his work, proving that hip-hop production could be just as musically complex as any other genre.

A Lasting Influence

The influence of G-funk extends far beyond the 1990s.

Artists including Kendrick Lamar, Anderson .Paak, Tyler, the Creator, YG, and Blxst have all embraced elements of West Coast funk throughout their careers. Whether it’s lush synths, bouncing basslines, or live instrumentation, the DNA of G-funk continues to shape modern hip-hop and R&B.

DJ Quik himself has also remained one of hip-hop’s most respected producers, collaborating with artists across multiple generations while continuing to refine his sound. Many producers still study his mixing techniques, drum programming, and ability to create records that feel both polished and deeply human.

His influence often flies under the radar compared to some of his contemporaries, but among musicians and producers, Quik is frequently mentioned as one of hip-hop’s true perfectionists.

Essential DJ Quik Listening

If you’re just beginning to explore his catalog, these tracks offer the perfect introduction:

• “Tonite”

• “Born and Raised in Compton”

• “Dollaz + Sense”

• “Pitch in on a Party”

• “Safe + Sound”

• “Summer Breeze”

Why G-Funk Prevails

More than thirty years after its rise, G-funk continues to resonate because it was built on timeless musical foundations. Funk has always emphasized groove, rhythm, and musicianship, and producers like DJ Quik translated those qualities into hip-hop without losing their authenticity.

In an era where production trends can change overnight, Quik’s music still sounds remarkably fresh. His records are warm, dynamic, and full of life—qualities that make them just as enjoyable today as they were in the early ‘90s.

G-funk isn’t simply a nostalgic chapter in rap history. It’s one of hip-hop’s richest sonic traditions, and DJ Quik remains one of its finest craftsmen. His music reminds us that sometimes the most powerful records aren’t the loudest. They’re the ones that make you roll the windows down, turn the volume up, and let the groove do the talking.

Although G-funk reached its commercial peak in the ‘90s, its influence never disappeared. Today’s artists continue to reinvent the sound, blending classic West Coast funk with modern hip-hop and R&B.

Blxst has become one of the clearest examples of G-funk’s evolution. Songs like “Chosen” and “About You” lean into the same laid-back California vibes with a new formula for a new generation. Even Kendrick Lamar has paid tribute to the genre throughout his career. Songs from good kid, m.A.A.d city and To Pimp a Butterfly borrow from classic West Coast production while honoring the artists who helped define the region’s sound.

Jamari Shelton is a Chicago-based entertainment writer and pop culture enthusiast covering breaking celebrity news, television, film, reality TV, and the internet moments everyone can’t stop talking about. She recently graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in Broadcast Journalism, and is passionate about telling stories that inform, entertain, and spark conversation.

By the mid-1990s, R&B was reaching a commercial peak. The genre was polished. Vocalists competed through technical precision, powerhouse performances, and immaculate production. Record labels wanted crossover hits. Radio wanted bigger choruses.

Over 30 years ago, one woman dropped out of Grambling State University in Louisiana and dedicated herself to mastering her art full time. In Dallas, Texas, Her cousin, Robert Bradford, sent her some beats that he was working on. Turning a bedroom in their grandmother’s house into a studio, the two created magic. A demo.

That demo was taken to the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, and landed in the hands of Tammy Cobb, the then-manager of Mobb Deep.

That demo sprouted into a hit we now know as Baduizm by Neo soul pioneer Erykah Badu.

For nearly three decades, Badu has existed as more than a singer-songwriter. She’s become a curator of culture, a mentor, a tastemaker, and one of contemporary music’s most influential creative minds. Long before “creative director” became a job title, Badu was building worlds around her music—through fashion, visual art, spirituality, performance, and an unwavering commitment to authenticity.

The Woman Who Changed the Sound of Soul

When Baduizm arrived in 1997, R&B was dominated by polished harmonies, glossy production, and radio-ready love songs. Hip-hop soul was thriving, and mainstream R&B was bigger than ever.

She didn’t sound like anyone else.

More importantly, she didn’t seem interested in sounding like anyone else.

With songs like “On & On,” “Appletree,” “Next Lifetime,” and “Certainly,” Badu blended classic soul, jazz, hip-hop, spoken word, and African musical traditions into something that felt both ancient and futuristic.

When Baduizm was released in February 1997, it arrived at a time when R&B was dominated by polished vocal groups and radio-ready love songs. Then came this 26-year-old woman from Dallas wearing headwraps, burning incense on stage, singing over jazz chords and dusty hip-hop drums like she wasn’t interested in chasing anyone else’s lane.

People didn’t really know what to call it.

The term “Neo soul” was still finding its footing, used to describe a new generation of artists pulling from classic soul while blending jazz, hip-hop, funk, spoken word, and African musical traditions. But even then, Baduizm felt bigger than a genre label. It wasn’t trying to recreate the past—it was reshaping it.

Listeners connected immediately. Baduizm debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and No. 1 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, eventually earning triple-platinum certification in the United States. At the 40th Grammy Awards, Badu took home Best R&B Album, while “On & On” earned Best Female R&B Vocal Performance. For a debut album that sounded nothing like what dominated commercial radio, it proved there was an audience hungry for something more adventurous.

Back then, people called it Neo soul because they needed a way to explain this new wave of artists. But nearly thirty years later, the “neo” feels unnecessary. Listen to Baduizm today, and it still refuses to sit still. Some moments feel rooted in jazz. Others borrow from hip-hop, gospel, funk, spoken word, or psychedelic soul. It doesn’t belong to one genre because Badu never believed music had to.

The Badu Effect

If you spend enough time reading interviews with musicians, you’ll notice something interesting. People don’t just talk about collaborating with Erykah Badu, they’ll talk about learning from her.

Long before Baduizm made her a Grammy-winning artist, those around her recognized that she approached music differently. Questlove remembers meeting Badu before the world really knew her, immediately noticing the way ideas seemed to pour out of her.

Badu has built a reputation as the person artists call when they’re stuck creatively—not because she’ll tell them exactly what to do, but because she’ll push them to think differently. Instead of giving answers, she asks questions. Instead of encouraging artists to chase trends, she encourages them to chase themselves.

If there’s one artist who embodies Badu’s philosophy, it’s Solange.

The two have shared a friendship for years, and Solange has spoken openly about her admiration for Badu, calling her an inspiration and someone who showed her what artistic freedom could look like.

“She is mother, she is sister, she is friend, she is auntie, she is chief, she is warrior of many tribes,” Solange said while introducing Badu at the 8th annual Black Women in Music ESSENCE event in 2017. “She is a beautiful reminder that you cannot put us in a box.”

That holistic approach to art echoes what Badu had been doing since the late ‘90s.

Neither artist separates music from identity. Everything matters. The visuals, the clothes, the live performances, even the silence between songs all become part of the story.

Over the years, Tyler, the Creator has spoken about his admiration for Badu and has sought her advice, while Badu has consistently praised his willingness to take risks in venturing into genres. Their mutual respect comes from a shared belief that creativity shouldn’t have boundaries.

Even in a tweet posted in 2012 to X, Tyler shared, “Pronounced Zhane; Brandy; Share My World; Baduism; Faith; Are The Earliest Albums That Shaped Me Musically Today. I Love Them.”

Tyler is known for creating new eras with distinct visual identities. Flower Boy, IGOR, Call Me If You Get Lost, and CHROMAKOPIA, just to name a few. They’re immersive experiences complete with distinct looks, fashion, stage design, and storytelling.

She Made Being “Artsy” Feel Cool

One thing I’ve always loved about Erykah Badu is that she reminded me so much of home. The headwraps, incense, jewelry, all things I saw in the neighborhood in Chicago. Long before social media made “having an aesthetic” part of an artist’s rollout, Badu did it.

I remember flipping through the channels, and I saw the live performance of ‘Tyrone’. It was so magnetic. It was the first time I ever heard of and seen her. Something about her just made me so enticed. It’s like chasing after a butterfly almost.

Maybe that’s why Erykah Badu still feels less like a distant icon and more like that artsy friend who’s always putting you onto something before everyone else catches up.

Jamari Shelton is a Chicago-based entertainment writer and pop culture enthusiast covering breaking celebrity news, television, film, reality TV, and the internet moments everyone can’t stop talking about. She recently graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in Broadcast Journalism and is passionate about telling stories that inform, entertain, and spark conversation.

Nobody in the room is resting because nobody wants to. They’re high off the work itself. This is a city, she reminds me, where if you get sick, you just book an IV drip and keep it moving. She says it like a joke. It’s also a little bit of a warning. By the time the dust settles, she’s got a name for what the making of her latest album entailed: she was romanticizing being a workaholic.

That’s the album right there, tucked inside the process. No sleep in paradise.

But the grind is only half of Naomi, and honestly it’s the less interesting half. The other half is the part where she keeps signing up to be uncomfortable on purpose. Take “Light My Soul,” a song from the new album No Sleep In Paradise. She didn’t like it when it first came together. Too clean, too radio, “too mainstream for me,” she says, and you can still catch the tiny wince in her voice. Naomi came up on music she calls vibey, dark, and ambient, the kind of song you feel in your chest before you can even hum it, so a shiny pop thing felt wrong. Jordan walked her through it. She sat with it a little longer. “Okay, you’re right,” she told him, and now it’s one of her favorites on the record. She’s got a name for that whole sensation; the one where you make the thing that scares you and want to crawl out of your skin doing it. She calls it the ego death.

So let me put you on. The cool thing about Naomi Sharon isn’t just that she can sing, though my God can she. It’s that she walks straight at discomfort, the sleepless kind and the scared kind, and calls it paradise.

Refreshing, She Calls It

First, the new album is genuinely great, and I want to be specific about why. No Sleep in Paradise is her second, out now on OVO, and it follows a debut that critics and fans obsessed over. It’s lush. A little dystopian. Completely unbothered by the genre borders everyone else treats as law.

To understand how far she’s traveled, you have to know where she started sonically. Obsidian, back in 2023, was cinematic and hushed, alternative R&B laced with ambient house and little threads of Afrobeats and Spanish guitar, all of it built to frame that voice, the deep alto that had half the internet reaching for the same comparison. Sade. She’s heard it a thousand times. On No Sleep in Paradise, she does something sly with it. Instead of parking the voice out front and letting it do the heavy lifting, she tucks it into the groove and lets the low end lead more. There’s deep-house shimmer, there’s real soul, and running under all of it is this lounge-at-3-a.m. quality that turns out to matter way more than you’d expect (more on where that comes from in a sec). She built the thing to feel like “three different EPs almost,” and that’s exactly how it plays, drifting from ambient to mainstream-ready to stadium status without ever once stopping being her.

I ask her to describe her own sound, and she doesn’t reach for a genre. She says “refreshing,” then hits you with a challenge. “Who is just R&B nowadays? Even Drake, he raps, but a lot of his songs are pop.” She’s tired of the strict boxes, basically. “We’re so opinionated sometimes,” she says. “Even when I’m dropping something that has more genres on it than just R&B, people think I’m just R&B.” This album is her rebuttal; an expanded palette.

“Try,” the Kaytranada collab, is the one I’ve had on repeat this week. She’s known him for years, ran in the same circles. Somehow, they never talked about music until they finally got in a room last year, and it clicked, Naomi and songwriter Blush chasing it down while Jordan sat in. His fingerprints are all over the groove, and it’s the loosest she has ever sounded, which is saying a lot for a singer whose early reputation was built on control. Then there’s “Miss That,” the dance record, the “this-is-a-new-Naomi” moment, and she knows it. There’s the music video where she’s dancing like a pro, which leads to a small, funny thing she volunteers up. For years, she performed in latex dresses she could barely walk in. On her recent tour run opening for Doja Cat, she essentially decided she needed to be able to move on stage and brought on two dancers. “Try” is now her favorite thing to do onstage.

And then there’s “No Sleep in Paradise” itself, the song where the record quietly says the thing out loud. It reads like an insomnia song, but the insomnia is only the symptom. The city’s asleep, and she’s not. The room clocks the fire coming off her, and still nobody actually sees her. The higher she climbs, the less the ground underneath fits. That’s the whole dystopia tucked inside such a pretty title. Paradise, and she can’t sleep in it. Once you hear how the album was actually made, it sounds less like a complaint and more like a confession.

A Mini Toronto With Turntables

So where does that rooftop-lounge-at-3-a.m. thing come from? Rotterdam, mostly. And a dad with turntables.

Naomi Sharon Webster was born in Rotterdam to an Aruban father and a Dutch mother, which means the Caribbean and the North Sea have been fighting for the aux in her head her entire life. She grew up in what she describes as a micro Toronto or New York, industrial and urban and stacked with culture, and above all with what she keeps calling talent development. Her high school let you pick a theater class or an art class your very first year. The city, in her words, “kind of allowed me to do whatever I wanted.” And early on, she wanted all of it. She was a serious track-and-field kid, convinced she was headed to the Olympics, until theater got its hooks in her.

Her home was musical in a way that creates taste at an early age. Her cousin did musical theater. Her mom sings. Her dad DJ’d: “a producer first, and a writer.” He put her on to deep house and lounge music, Buddha-Bar, Café del Mar, and that zen is still the water she swims in. It’s why she works with Alex Lustig. It’s why her records breathe. Underneath all of it sits a broad palette she rattles off when I ask about influences: Tina Turner, Whitney, Stevie, Sting, Eva Cassidy, Babyface, Richard Bona. World music. Everything, honestly.

By four years old, she was lip-syncing Stevie Wonder with zero English, “making up my own type of English,” she laughs, comparing it to Simlish. She picked up the language partly through the music, watching TV in the original audio with Dutch subtitles running under it. Before she knew what the words meant, she already knew what they were supposed to feel like.

The Ensemble Was Never the Full Plan

You do not get to Naomi Sharon, the recording artist, without going through Naomi Sharon, the theatre performer. Before OVO, she spent years on Dutch stages, deep in the machinery of musical theater. Three years in The Lion King, playing Shenzi, eight shows a week. Dreamgirls. Later, Tina. She even did a run on The Voice of Holland early on, an experience she’s since described as the thing that taught her she wasn’t ready yet, that she was so busy panicking about whether the coaches would turn their chairs that she forgot to actually be present.

Somewhere in there, she went through vocal surgery, and the way she tells it, recovery cracked something open. If she was going to do something with real stakes for her own body and her own health, she decided, it had to be a decision she made for herself, not one a theater company made for her. That’s the seed of everything that follows.

For the longest time, she assumed making your own music meant you needed a record label and permission. Then she found out you didn’t. She dropped her first song in 2019, made it in GarageBand on her phone, took it into a studio to get it done properly, and dropped it independently.

“I was kind of done with working for a company,” she tells me. “If I wanna work, I wanna do it for myself.” Then comes the line she immediately worries sounds arrogant, but it’s just honest truth. “I saw myself much bigger. I was part of something, and I wanted to have a show that was about me. You don’t wanna be part of an ensemble. You wanna tell your story.” She’s quick to add that her theater years were beautiful, that she learned a ton, but you can feel how big that decision was. She walked away from something safe to go build something unfinished. But something that was hers.

First Lady of OVO

The OVO chapter is the part everyone already knows, so I’ll keep it moving and let the details do the work. She drops her first single in 2019 independently, and Drake finds it and messages her. It was a track called “Breeze” that caught his ear, and as she’s recounted it elsewhere, she was standing in a Zara when the message came through, certain it couldn’t possibly be real. He wrote back within a few hours, wanting to hop on a call. She stayed tapped in with his camp, and the deal became official at the top of 2023, making her the first woman ever signed to OVO. When he announced it, Drake framed it as the world finally getting to see the work she’d been quietly putting in since they met.

She refuses to treat it like a lottery ticket, which I love. To her, it read like a receipt. “A confirmation of the hard work I put in,” she says. She talks about the Instagram grind especially, the years of building an image and an aesthetic and the whole visible-artist project, because, as she puts it, “nowadays we find each other on social media.”

And once she was inside, the freedom is what actually moved her. Noah “40” Shebib, the architect of the entire OVO sound, she describes as a kind of wizard, someone who never pushed her in a direction so much as pointed at things and let her choose. She brought her own producers into the fold, and met people like Alex Lustig through the label. But the relationship that reshaped her music is Jordan (of Majod Jordan). The first time they got in a room together, they made “Waiting For You” in twenty minutes.

“To find that on your own label is very special,” she says. They work like “one brain” now, sometimes talking it out, sometimes just doing. She calls it a softening, which is such a good word for it, because this is an industry she loves that also grinds you down, and she’s hard on herself, and here’s a room where she gets to be vulnerable and have fun and stop performing being okay. Most of No Sleep in Paradise came straight out of that room.

Obsidian

If you’re only meeting Naomi now, do yourself a favor and go back to Obsidian, released October 2023, because it’s where the shape of her whole approach snaps into focus. The album is named after the stone. She’s told the story before: she was wearing an obsidian necklace and felt it get heavier as the day went on, like it was absorbing the bad energy around her, and she loved that an object could confront you like that, could sit you down in your own discomfort. Rebirth, confrontation, healing. Those were the assignments. In our conversation, she puts it plainer. “The difference with me is that I just write about it,” she says. “I put songs out about it.” That’s the whole deal she’s got with her audience. The diary stays open. “Life is very real right now. I find music very healing.”

That ego death she keeps chasing on the new record? It has a prequel. On Obsidian, it was Drake himself who nudged her out of her musical comfort zone and toward something more uptempo, and she’s admitted it scared her at the time; leaving that lane felt like leaving safety. She trusted it because she figured he heard something real. That leap gave us “Push,” the Omah Lay collaboration built on a Nineteen85 beat, one of the brightest things she’d done to that point. The discomfort is the tell that she’s growing.

In 2025 she dropped an EP, The Only Love We Know, and described it as lighter, carrying the energy of moving forward, of showing more of herself. Her words: on Obsidian she was “kind of hiding.” Read that against the woman on No Sleep in Paradise who’s dancing in the “Miss That” video and singing about being wide awake in her own success, and you can watch her unhide in real time, project by project. She opened for Tems in that stretch too, another room full of strangers to win over, another rep in the gym. Nothing about the arc is accidental. She has been methodically, stubbornly turning the volume up on herself for years.

She Is the Show

The commanding presence that Naomi Sharon has, the aura on record and the command onstage, is mostly theater. Eight shows a week for years will build it into your bones. “You get so used to performing, and to failing,” she says. The nerves are always about the wrong note, the dropped ball. Theater taught her to just pick it back up and keep going, to improvise through the mess. She’ll walk offstage and flatly call it “shit,” her word, and mean it, and also have had the time of her life. Both at once. Always both. That’s the muscle that most singers may never build.

Which is exactly why she comes most alive in our whole conversation talking about Doja Cat, whose European run she just opened. She calls it her TED Talk, affectionately. She’d finish her own set, decompress, then head up to catch the last thirty minutes of Doja every night, studying. What floored her was that Doja was pulling off the stuff Naomi learned in theater school, carrying an arena with a band and backing vocals and no dancers, just being the show. On her own off nights, Naomi would watch Doja find energy in anything – a fan, a bit with the mic – and yank the entire room back. “She is the show,” Naomi says, half in awe. You get the feeling she’s describing a mountain she fully plans to climb.

Greedy, in a Healthy Way

Which is where all of this lands. She wants the arena. She says it flat out, and I love her for how little she pretends otherwise.

The Doja tour was a challenge, winning over rooms full of people who didn’t know a single song of hers. Her own No Sleep in Paradise tour, kicking off in September, she calls “a warm bath.” Her people. Her music. The high of watching a crowd lock into a song in real time. And she’s hungry for what’s next in a way she refuses to apologize for. “I’m kind of greedy for the success I want,” she says. “In a healthy way.” The small rooms are done for her. She’s had a taste of the arena air. “I’m kinda spoiled,” she admits. “So I have to work harder to get there.”

I told her the music already sounds like it belongs up there, that “Another Life” and “Definition of Love” sounded stadium-sized the first time they hit my ears. She lit up. Singing “Another Life” in an arena, she said, felt exactly as big as she’d hoped. “Let’s work and manifest.”

What she wants from you, in the end, isn’t worship. It’s patience. “I’m gonna make more albums. I’m not gonna do it in the same lane every time.” You don’t have to love wherever she goes next. “But it would be nice if people would respect the journey.” That’s the ask. Follow the artist, not just the song.

No sleep in paradise. She’s fine with that. She’s romanticizing the whole thing on purpose, and after talking with her for an hour, honestly? So am I.

Artificial intelligence has officially entered the studio.

‘AI’ as a music tool has become a mainstream phenomenon in recent years, with the release of ChatGPT, a chatbot created by OpenAI in 2022. At the time, it wasn’t as advanced as it is today, but that’s changed drastically. AI can now write lyrics, generate instrumentals, imitate vocal styles, and even create entirely virtual artists capable of landing record deals and charting alongside human musicians.

For some, it’s the future of music. For others, it’s a threat to everything that makes music human.

As tech companies race to develop increasingly sophisticated AI music models, a growing number of artists are asking an uncomfortable question: Was my music used to build these systems without my permission?

Generative AI platforms like Suno and Udio train their systems by analyzing massive datasets of existing audio, sometimes containing millions of tracks by our favorite artists. Meanwhile, AI-generated artists are beginning to find commercial success, forcing the industry to wrestle with what creativity looks like in the age of algorithms.

For R&B, a genre built on vulnerability and raw vocals, the debate feels especially personal.

The New Gold Rush

Throughout history, every technological breakthrough has sparked a race for opportunity. Like the release of the iBook in 1999, forcing other tech companies to adapt to wireless networking. And fast.

Streaming changed how artists released music. Social media reshaped marketing. TikTok transformed songs into viral moments overnight. Now, artificial intelligence has become music’s newest gold rush.

Companies developing AI music software need enormous amounts of data to make their models sound convincing. That means feeding systems thousands of existing songs so they can learn melodies, harmonies, vocal inflections, production techniques, chord progressions, and songwriting structures.

The more music the models consume, the more realistic their output becomes. But many musicians argue that this process often happens without transparency. Or consent.

Unlike a young songwriter studying their favorite album for inspiration, AI can analyze an artist’s entire catalog within minutes, learning patterns that allow it to generate songs that feel eerily familiar. Even duplicate the artist’s flow and personality.

That distinction has become one of the industry’s biggest ethical questions.

SZA’s Breaking Point

Few artists have been more vocal about AI than SZA.

Earlier this year, the Grammy Award-winning singer shared that she searched an AI music database and allegedly discovered 238 of her songs had been included in AI training datasets. According to SZA, some of those recordings may even have been unreleased.

“Just checked and music AI has trained off 238 of my songs… If you’re a musician and you support this degenerate… you’re disgusting,” the singer posted to her Instagram story.

She has previously urged fans not to create AI-generated images or songs using her likeness, writing, “Hey, I hate AI. If you f— with me, PLEASE don’t make any AI images of me or songs.” She has also criticized the environmental impact of AI data centers, arguing that the technology carries costs beyond the music industry. AI requires large amounts of electricity to power processing chips and uses tons of gallons of water to cool data centers.

Kehlani Says “I Don’t Respect It”

SZA isn’t alone.

When news broke that AI-generated R&B artist Xania Monet had reportedly secured a $3 million record deal, singer Kehlani publicly condemned the development.

In a video shared online to her Instagram account, Kehlani said, “Nothing and no one on Earth will ever be able to justify AI to me, especially… AI in the creative arts, in which people have worked hard for, trained for, slept on the floor for, got injuries for, worked for their entire lives.”

Responding specifically to Xania Monet’s deal, Kehlani added simply, “I don’t respect it.”

Her criticism reflects a concern shared by many musicians: AI-generated performers could eventually compete for playlist placements, radio spins, label investments, and audience attention without ever spending years learning to sing, write, or perform.

Meet Xania Monet

Xania Monet has become one of the first AI-generated R&B artists to achieve legitimate commercial success. The “singer” made history by charting on Billboard’s Adult R&B Airplay chart before signing a reported multi-million-dollar deal with Hallwood Media.

Unlike what many assume, Xania isn’t simply created by pressing a button. Behind the project is Mississippi poet Telisha “Nikki” Jones, who writes every lyric herself before using AI music platform Suno to generate vocal performances.

Jones sees AI as a creative partner, not a replacement. Speaking with CBS Mornings, she explained, “Xania is an extension of me, so I look at her as a real person.”

When challenged about whether AI gave her a shortcut into the industry, Jones disagreed. “I wouldn’t call it a shortcut, because I still put in the work… I look at it as a tool, as an instrument. Utilize it.”

To Jones, AI simply expands who gets to create music. Instead of replacing creativity, she argues, it lowers the barrier to entry for people who may have stories to tell but lack access to studios, producers, or even the ability to sing. That perspective highlights why the AI debate has become so complicated.

The technology itself isn’t inherently creative, but the humans using it still are. When the pain weighs too heavily on our chests and we want to scream it out, we can’t. We look to a robot to develop it for us. But is that fair to the singers and instrumentalists who have trained and studied since childhood to perfect their craft?

Where Does Inspiration End?

One of the biggest legal gray areas surrounding AI is training data. Human musicians learn by listening to their influences. Prince studied James Brown; Beyoncé has cited Michael Jackson; SZA has drawn inspiration from jazz, neo-soul, and alternative rock.

That’s how art evolves.

AI, however, studies music at a scale no human ever could. It can process thousands of recordings, identify recurring vocal patterns, analyze songwriting structures, and simultaneously generate music influenced by countless artists. Supporters argue that it’s no different than human inspiration.

Critics argue that it’s fundamentally different because machines don’t simply learn—they replicate patterns at extraordinary speed.

The lawsuits emerging across the music industry could ultimately determine where that legal boundary lies. Recently, iHeartRadio enforced a “Guaranteed Human” policy that bans AI-generated music, synthetic voices, and AI-powered DJs across all of its radio stations and podcasts.

What Makes R&B… R&B?

Perhaps no genre raises these questions more than R&B. Great R&B has never been defined solely by perfect vocals. It’s defined by emotion. By the rhythm and the heart. A computer cannot mimic that.

Whether it’s Brandy’s harmonies, SZA’s vulnerability, Jazmine Sullivan’s storytelling, or Frank Ocean’s introspection, listeners connect because they recognize genuine human experiences.

An AI model can imitate vocal runs. It can recreate lush harmonies. It can even generate heartbreak-themed lyrics. But can it actually understand heartbreak?

That’s where many artists believe human musicians will always have the advantage. The AI conversation is no longer hypothetical. More artists, day by day, are discovering their catalogs inside training databases.

At the same time, musicians continue to use AI responsibly for tasks such as vocal cleanup, stem separation, and production assistance. The technology itself isn’t going away. The real investigation is how the music industry chooses to regulate it.

Should artists be compensated when their work trains AI systems?

Should listeners know when a song is AI-generated?

Should record labels prioritize human performers over digital ones?

Those conversations are only beginning. For now, one thing is certain: R&B stands at a crossroads. The genre has always evolved—from doo-wop to soul, new jack swing to neo-soul, trap-soul to alternative R&B. AI may become the next chapter in that evolution.

Because while artificial intelligence can learn the mechanics of music, it still has one thing left to figure out: Can you teach a machine to feel?

PJ Morton’s “last album” has been a few albums in the making. He fully planned on retiring as a musical artist after he released his magnum opus, Watch The Sun, in 2022. He said the same thing in 2017. “Gumbo was gonna be my last album. I moved back to New Orleans to start a sneaker store, and I thought that I’ll do music, but I just didn’t want it to be the way I survive necessarily or do it competitively,” he recalled before noting that as the reason he “swung for the fences” on Watch The Sun.

Then, he got the dream of a lifetime to travel to Africa, which led to the creation of 2024’s Cape Town to Cairo. Yet, there were still parts of his story left untold, of which may be considered his grand finale. He’s just not quite sure.

With his latest LP (and debut double album), Saturday Night/Sunday Morning, he’s making room for new dreams to come to fruition, adding, “If I don’t say anything else, I have said all I need to say.”

In this exclusive conversation, the crooner breaks down his layered beginning, the swift process behind the album, the dichotomy of being both sacred and secular, and why he feels Saturday Night/Sunday Morning could be a storybook culmination.

When did you fall in love with R&B?

It was very early still. I mean, the irony is that my dad’s favorite singer was Anita Baker. It was Stevie [Wonder] in the house. Prince, Whitney, of course Michael [Jackson]. I’m an '80s baby, and so I fell in love with it very early. There’s a video of me when I was two years old dancing to Motown 25. That was before I was thinking about music in a real way. I think about 12 or 13, a friend of mine gave me a cassette tape. One contained Donny Hathaway live on it, and one contained Stevie Wonder’s “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer.” I hadn’t heard that Stevie before. I knew nothing about '60s or '70s Stevie, and that kinda changed my world. That’s when I started to look at it like, “Wait, this changed my chemistry.”

At which point did you start pursuing music professionally?

I guess about 14 or 15 is when I started to write songs for real. I knew secretly that I wanted to write about everything. It was more just the pressure of my atmosphere and my environment [to write gospel music]. What I’d try to do is write it as contemporary as possible, you know? That was, like, my first shortcut. My first placement as a songwriter was on Men of Standard, but I was secretly writing R&B songs. By the time I got to Morehouse, I met India.Arie and was able to place my first song outside of gospel music on that Voyage to India album. That’s really what broke me into it altogether.

Saturday Night/Sunday Morning is both the name of your album and your memoir. Which one came first?

To be totally honest, just the title itself came first. I was a marketing major at Morehouse, so I’m always thinking of presentation. Initially, it came as a potential title for a documentary that I was gonna work on, and I just knew that the name really worked. It’s like when I said Saturday Night, Sunday Morning to people, they immediately got it without me explaining anything else. And I [know] those are hard to come by. I had the name and the documentary didn’t happen, but then I was approached about doing a memoir and I said, “Well, let me just use it for that.” I wasn’t thinking of an album. I had just finished Cape Town to Cairo. My whole point was I’ve done a lot of music and it wasn’t as inspiring for me to go do another R&B album. It’s like, you know, all the marketing tricks have been used. Everybody’s heard everything I’ve had to say and I needed something that was gonna challenge me, excite me. When I thought about Saturday Night, Sunday Morning,the album version [was] where I finally do a gospel album [and] I’m actually singing the songs as opposed to just writing and producing them [but] still doing my R&B thing. And that really did become exciting and like a challenge. Before I had one song, it’s like, “Okay, what does this look like?”

How long did it take you to make the album itself?

Man, we locked in. The majority of it was done January of this year. I went faster than I thought. That’s why I [wanted] a Juneteenth release date. That wasn’t gonna happen at first. I’m like, “Well, if I’m moving this fast, let’s try to drop it on Juneteenth. It just makes sense. It’s the Black experience.” It really just started to flow so fast. Once I got inspired, I was on the move. I was done by the end of February and [handed] it in the first week of March.

Was this the fastest album you’ve ever made?

Well, aside from Cape Town to Cairo [which was made in 30 days]. It’s so crazy you bring that up though, because I think that is what released me. I used to overthink a lot. Then, I went to four countries for 30 days and said that I was gonna do this experiment and write and record a completely brand new album in 30 days. I didn’t have any time to overthink. It made me trust whatever was coming naturally, you know? So for this, I was just in that and I’ve never done a double album in my life. So yeah, per capita, this is the fastest album I’ve ever made.

Is New Orleans also part of the reason why you wanted to push for the Juneteenth release date?

Not necessarily New Orleans but, I think Black. The raw Black experience. When I started to think of this album, it was like, “Oh man, this is the complete Black experience.” Folks used Saturday [night] to party, decompress, but we were going to church Sunday to recharge and get ready for this week that we’re about to go into. I’m like, “June is Black Music Month. Juneteenth is right there. Let’s celebrate.”

Which side came easier to you?

My plan was to do gospel one day and R&B the next. [But] every time I tried to write an R&B song, it turned into a gospel song. Again, it was about not forcing. So my brain, and maybe it’s part of my OCD, was like I can’t do both at once. Part of it too [was that] I hadn’t really done a lot of gospel albums, especially as me. I think, for me, it was the newer, fresher thing. It’s stuff I just hadn’t touched on as PJ. I’ve done plenty R&B albums and it was more daunting because it’s like, “What are you gonna say that you haven’t said before? What sonically are you gonna do that you hadn’t done before that pushes you forward?” ‘Cause I always need to be moving forward in some kinda way. What ended up happening is I finished Sunday Morning first and then it freed me to go and do Saturday Night.

I did not expect you to just go that route.

Me either.

Even with Saturday Night being the R&B side, it still doesn’t fully cater to what contemporary R&B has transformed into.

It’s probably why I lean towards soul music. What Donny Hathaway was. What Stevie is, you know? It’s like that intersection where there’s some spirituality in R&B. What’s going on is probably what inspired my album Gumbo when I said, “This is the first time I wanna try to talk about things other than just love and relationships.” [On] “Sell My Soul,” it’s talking about life in a way. “Protect My Heart” is a song I’d never heard before. So I was drawn to a lot of those things that I hadn’t talked about before. But then of course, I think it’s important to have those love songs where it’s like setting the atmosphere. We’re enjoying each other; we’re enjoying life. It was bigger than just relationships.

Is the documentary still coming?

We’re working on it. It’s turned into so many things. It’s now starting to find some focus.

For you, what has been the greatest challenge and reward in balancing the duality of being both sacred and secular?

The sacrifice on the front end. It was that a lot of times I got looked over. I ain’t never been nominated for an R&B category at the BET Awards. I’ve done all of this stuff in soul music. I have six Grammys, but because I didn’t line up with a Chris [Brown] and wasn’t that edgy, I think some people put me on the other side. But then the other side were like, “He ain’t all the way us either.” I was just stuck in the middle and that was a challenge, but I started to embrace it. Now, I’m so happy it went the way it went because I stuck to who I was, and now I’ve been able to create something that is all mine. Initially, that was disheartening. It’s like, dang, y’all don’t see me as this; I don’t belong over here. I think those sacrifices are necessary [though] when you’re trying to do something that just isn’t the norm.

The reward is the fan base and the creative freedom?

For sure. I had given up on the fact that I would be able to get a Grammy or anything like that. Once I said, “Okay, this is gonna be what it’s gonna be.” I slipped into that mainstream somehow and got into that conversation. So it was almost like the cherry on top.

Would you still say this is your last album?

Oh, you tryna break news here.

You been saying that it is your last album for the past several albums.

If I’m being totally transparent, I don’t know. To me, this was kind of like a magnum opus vibe— where it’s like here is everything. If I don’t say anything else, I have said all I need to say. I watched that Billy Joel doc, and at some point he said, “I’m done writing lyrics. I’ve said everything.” For me, it’s like making room for new artists, new things. It’s like you don’t have to say something new to be relevant. Frankie Beverly and Maze is like my North Star. The way he toured for 30 years without a new album and my audience feels very similar in the fact that it’s community. It’s like family reunion every year. So, I won’t say that this is my last album, but I will say that I don’t know what’s next. I’ll always make music; I’ll always perform. I [just] don’t know that it’ll be in the traditional [sense].

I love the transparency of that answer. Has your dad reacted to the double album?

Yes. We ate at my parents’ house on Mother’s Day and I got to play them the whole album. My dad is my number one fan though. He’s over the moon. He was the one that said, “Look, you’re different from me. You gotta do it the way you do it.” On Father’s Day, for the first time, he preached and I was able to sing in Baltimore. We did a service together. That was really special on Father’s Day.

It’s like that was the culmination of who you are as an artist and a person.

It’s really special. And like, you know what I’m saying? That’s a nice end of a chapter. That’s why I don’t know. It’s like I don’t wanna mess it up. I certainly am not gonna block it. I love music. I’m a creative. I can’t not create, but I have a dream to own a hotel. I eventually plan to do a festival in Bogalusa, Louisiana. I’m still independent, and it takes so much to put into these things, especially today, to get people to pay attention, and we’re cutting through the noise. I would love to put that energy into other things. I don’t wanna be limited to music. I love music, but let’s not just box ourselves in.

Not for nothing, we’re all a little bit of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. We all have that duality in us.

Facts! That’s the whole point. I wrote this book called Why Can’t I Sing About Love? In the foreword, my dad was like, “Look, when I was courting your mother, I wasn’t listening to ‘Amazing Grace.’” Like, let’s be honest. The dichotomy of who we really are is a little bit of both, and art should reflect life.

Where are the bridges? Long gone are the days when everyone understood the power of a mid-song melody or pitch shift that would elevate songs to a new level. The verses and choruses of a superb R&B song are like rooms you spend all your time in. They feel at ease. You are aware of the locations of the furnishings, how the lights operate, and what to expect upon entering.

But the bridge? The bridge is the staircase. It’s the part of the track where the walls completely drop, the key changes, and the artist decides to take you somewhere you didn’t know you needed to go. It is the emotional peak of the record, the exact moment where the singer stops being polite and just lets the raw truth rip.

As streaming algorithms started dictating how music was written—demanding shorter tracks that loop quickly on TikTok and never cross the three-minute mark—the bridge was one of the first things the industry threw overboard to save time.

In an interview with Revolt TV after her Grammy win for ‘Folded,’ singer Kehlani recalled a story she heard Missy Elliott tell. “She wrote that the label stopped calling her to executive produce R&B albums because they didn’t want too much singing. So now, getting to see that everybody’s coming out like, 'Wait, you guys want us to flex again and sing and do three-minute songs and bridges and key changes?’ It’s going to be a great year for R&B.”

The Anatomy of the Switch-Up

To understand why the bridge matters, you have to look at how it actually functions during a song. It isn’t just a random third verse or a filler section to pad out the runtime. It is a calculated structural pivot that completely alters the track’s DNA.

If you’ve been paying attention to the underground R&B scene out of London, you know Kwn is a master at using the bridge to completely flip the perspective of a song. Take her track “Back of the Club.” In the early parts of the record, she sets the vibe. A slow jam made for when the lights tone down at the club. Towards the bridge, we get an atmospheric tone. The whole structure of the song flips. The production thins out, her vocal layers multiply, and the melody shifts gears entirely.

What makes this shift so brilliant is that it wasn’t even part of the original plan. The song’s producer, ZEEK, went on TikTok to pull back the curtain on how that moment came together, admitting that he originally didn’t envision a bridge for the track at all.

“The bridge to me is very important, because when I first sent this off I didn’t think of a bridge,” ZEEK explained. “But once Kwn said that she wanted a bridge, I’m like, ‘So she’s really tryna take this record up!’”

For ZEEK, answering that call meant drawing on his musical roots to build something that felt fresh yet deeply grounded. As a musician who grew up in the church, he knew exactly how to manipulate chords to elicit a genuine emotional response without overcomplicating the track. He wasn’t trying to overproduce it or show off with unnecessarily complex runs, but he knew the moment demanded to be distinct.

To pull it off, ZEEK and Kwn focused on a chord progression that felt familiar yet completely unexpected. As ZEEK put it, they wanted to come up with chords that would be “palatable” to the average listener but still offer “something that we weren’t used to hearing in R&B at the time.”

It hooks you with a melody that makes sense to your ears, but it twists the progression just enough to shock your system. By forcing that church-reared musicality into a modern, secular club record, Kwn and ZEEK proved that the bridge is still the ultimate weapon for taking a song from a casual vibe to an absolute masterpiece.

The Holy Grail of the Breakdown

Of course, we can’t talk about the resurgence of the bridge without honoring the absolute blueprints of the craft. And if we’re talking about vocal arrangements that can bless your ears, we have to talk about Michelle ‘The Bridge’ Williams.

During Destiny’s Child’s DC3 era, Beyoncé and Kelly Rowland were the heavy hitters who held down the front-facing hooks and the verses, but Michelle was a weapon in disguise exactly when the song needed to rise.

Think about “Cater 2 U”, “Survivor”, or “Girl.” When Michelle comes in on the bridge, the entire atmosphere of the track shifts. Her tone has this distinct, textured warmth—a little bit of gospel grit mixed with pure, velvet soul—that completely blows the roof off the record.

In fact, Michelle’s bridges are so legendary that they have achieved a sort of mythical, core-memory status among R&B fans. Even if we’ve spent the last twenty years singing the wrong words. She jumped on social media in 2025 to clear up a decades-long lyrical epidemic, writing:

“Y’all have been butchering the lyrics of my bridge in ‘Cater 2 U’ for years, and I’m sick of it!”

The fact that fans have spent decades passionately shouting whatever phonetic sounds they thought they heard speaks to the sheer power of her delivery of the bridge. When Michelle stepped up to the microphone, the literal vocabulary mattered less than the emotion.

Why We Need the Melt

A great bridge sticks because it’s a complete sonic pivot. It breaks the rules of the very song it’s inside of and gives you a moment of pure, unexpected awe.

Look at “Darling, I” by Tyler, The Creator featuring Teezo Touchdown, my personal favorite. The track is already a gorgeous, colorful exploration of fluid desire and rejecting the nature of commitment. All while bouncing along on this high-vibrational rap beat.

But when the bridge hits, the entire track slows down and melts into something completely otherworldly. Tyler leaves and Teezo strips away all the frantic energy and just sinks into that lush harmony: “Keep fallin’... Darling, I.”

In an X post back when his album CHROMAKOPIA debuted in 2024, Tyler posted his favorite moments. Noting, “the bridge of DARLING I is just…” among his others on the album.

It’s supposed to be an experience that completely sweeps you off your feet, leaves you a little bit exposed, and makes you feel entirely alive, so that you just have to keep repeating it.

Jamari Shelton is a Chicago-based entertainment writer and pop culture enthusiast covering breaking celebrity news, television, film, reality TV, and the internet moments everyone can’t stop talking about. She recently graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in Broadcast Journalism, and is passionate about telling stories that inform, entertain, and spark conversation.

If you turn on the radio right now or scroll through the latest streaming playlists, you’re bound to notice a very specific, very icy trend. Everybody is detached. We have tracks dedicated to text messages left on read, songs bragging about how easy it is to replace a partner by tomorrow morning, and late-night anthems celebrating the art of the situationship. It’s clever, but is it getting played out?

Whatever happened to just begging?

Think about the R&B we grew up on. Like Jodeci’s ‘Stay’. He sang, “I’m sorry I left you, I left you crying. Since you’ve been gone, I’ve been all alone…Please, baby, I’m begging for you to stay at home,”

While my mother played the song every day, it made me feel like I was going through a devastating divorce at 10 years old and about to beg my husband not to leave me.

There was a time when music was anchored by an absolute, unashamed willingness to look pathetic for the sake of love. We had grown men in oversized suits sliding across the floor in the pouring rain, crying out for another chance…just like Boyz II Men's ‘On Bended Knee’.

We had vocal powerhouses screaming at the top of their lungs because the thought of their person walking out the door was quite literally the end of the world. There was no pride. No ego. Just raw, unfiltered yearning.

Once more, take a look at Boyz II Men. When Wanya screams, “I’m down on my knees, begging you, please,” you feel the sheer desperation in his throat. Or look at someone like Usher during the Confessions era. He built a monument to accountability and heartbreak, laying his flaws completely bare on the table because the thought of losing what he had was too much to bear.

Now, the dominant mode is self-preservation.

It’s a reflection of how we date now, sure. We live in an era of endless options and hyper-independence, where showing too much interest is seen as a tactical error. But R&B is supposed to be the one safe space where we get to drop the armor. It’s supposed to be the place where we admit that we are lonely, that we are hurting, and that we actually need someone else to survive the night.

When you strip that yearning out of the music, you lose the soul of the genre. Tank, one of the literal blueprints for 2000s R&B, stated in an interview with The Breakfast Club, “Men…You have to fall back in love with the idea of making love to a woman. You have to study a woman…in order to do this thing the right way,”

But if you look closely at the underground and the edges of the mainstream, you can see that people are getting tired of the cold shoulder.

In an X post, a user posted, “You know why 90s rnb is the best! They knew how to yearn! BRING BACK YEARNING! BEG FOR IT AGAIN !”

The appetite for real, heavy-chested emotion is starting to claw its way back.

The Cool-Guy Routine

Look at an artist like Giveon. When he reveals his signature baritone in “Heartbreak Anniversary,” it feels heavy. He sings, “I get like this every time. On the days it feels like you and me, heartbreak anniversary,” He’s letting you see the wound in real-time.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Giveon stated, “I was learning how to cope with heartbreak.”

Along with artists like Giveon, we have Brent Faiyaz and Bryson Tiller. Artists who’ve practically mastered the art of modern toxicity, but with a crucial twist: beneath all the slick talk and the player persona, there is a lingering sense of paranoia and isolation that feels incredibly honest.

But eventually, the facade cracks, and the cool-guy routine completely fails them.

On his 2026 album ‘Icon’, Brent Faiyaz sings “Maybe it’s a little bit rushed, but I’m falling in love. Hope that’s not too much, but this isn’t a crush,” Continuing to sing about the woman he’s with, even ‘fell down from heaven’. He’s dying to know how she feels and if it’s anything like how he does.

A complete surrender and a twist from ‘Gravity’ featuring Tyler, The Creator from his 2021 album WASTELAND. Here he sings, “Is you gon’ stress me out and cuss me out? I had my fair share of women; feelings don’t catch me now.”

It’s a beautiful moment of vulnerability from an artist who usually wouldn’t want to settle. It proves that no matter how hard you try to stay numb, feelings always find a way to force you back to your knees.

Screaming Into the Mic

We can’t talk about yearning without talking about SZA. SOS wasn’t a massive, record-breaking piece of art for nothing. It resonated because she was willing to scream her ugliest, most insecure thoughts directly into the microphone. When she sings about wanting to kill her ex, or admits that she’d touch fire for him three or four times, that’s a pure version of love.

Sometimes it feels good, sometimes it doesn’t. “You stay on my mind, I can’t regret any time spent with you. And I still wonder if you notice me, yes…I don’t wanna be your girlfriend. I’m just tryna be your person.” She sings on “Notice Me” from her 2022 hit album SOS.

Yearning isn’t dead, but it has definitely been hiding out in the shadows, waiting for us to get over our collective fear of looking stupid. Because at the end of the day, no matter how many protective walls we build around our hearts, nobody actually wants to live in a world where nobody cares.

That makes us feel like love is something worth falling apart over. And the moment more artists realize that vulnerability is a superpower, not a weakness, R&B is going to start feeling more like home again.

For more on yearning, read our Yearning Issue cover story with soul singer Baby Rose.

Jamari Shelton is a Chicago-based entertainment writer and pop culture enthusiast covering breaking celebrity news, television, film, reality TV, and the internet moments everyone can’t stop talking about. She recently graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in Broadcast Journalism, and is passionate about telling stories that inform, entertain, and spark conversation.

“You who dwell in the gardens, the companions listen for your voice; let me hear it!” – Song Of Solomon 8:13

I. Da Faith

Can you hear it? This is the sound of a man playing an instrument that he’s mastered since he was sixteen years old; self-taught, a musical prodigy, the latest in a long line of artists involved in a practice that many have likened to heresy.

The Song Of Solomon is an outlier in the Bible. In a part of the text that is best known for its terrifying miracles and violent retribution, comes a section tailored with tenderness, an extended poem dipped in double entendre, blurring the line between the sacred and the sacrilegious, the profane and the profound, the ecstatic and the erotic.

It’s a tradition that has been carried into popular music for over a century. Think of Al Green and Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke and Whitney Houston, Tina Turner and Marvin Gaye, Prince: divided souls accused of having split loyalties between gospel and R&B.

This is the legacy that two sibling pairings fell into. The first pair (Donald “DeVante Swing” DeGrate Jr. and Dalvin “Mr. Dalvin” DeGrate) were a couple of preacher’s kids who went down a path that their father left behind. Meanwhile, the second pair (Cedric “K-Ci” Hailey and Joel “Jojo” Hailey) hailed from a tribe so talented that, outside of the Winans and the Clarks, could possibly be considered as the gospel equivalent of the Jackson family. Together, the world would come to know this band of brothers as Jodeci.

II. Da Fame

Following the release of their first album ‘Forever My Lady’ in 1991, Jodeci started touring all around the country, enjoying the perks of being newfound celebrities. However, after every performance, they would hang out backstage and hold auditions to invite equally-talented, like-minded individuals to their crew.

One of the first people to benefit from this initiative was a young Melissa “Missy Misdemeanor” Elliott as part of an all-girl group called Fayze (later renamed as Sista). Unwilling to leave her people behind, Missy brought Timbaland & Magoo along as a packaged deal.

After that was Ginuwine, Sugah (which consisted of Susan Weems, Rolita White, and a teenage Charlene Keys who would later be known as Tweet), as well as Stevie J and Playa (which consisted of Smoke E. Diggelera, Digital Black, and a gifted singer/songwriter in Static Major).

This would form the core of the “Swing Mob”, along with soulful singers such as Renee Anderson and Virginia Williams, plus underrated R&B producers like Chad “Dr. Ceuss” Elliott (no relation) and Darryl Pearson.

By 1993, you could already hear some of this creative collective’s contributions on Jodeci’s 1993 sophomore release ‘Diary Of A Mad Band’ with Chad and Darryl co-producing a few tracks while Missy and Timbaland occasionally operated as background features.

However, it wouldn’t be until 1994 that DeVante Swing would move his mob from a house in Teaneck, New Jersey, to a studio/apartment complex in Rochester, New York.

III. Da Funk

Similar to how The Dungeon Family was formed from the red clay of Rico Wade’s Georgia basement, the “Swing Mob” was christened underground as “Da Bassment Cru” by the bass of some thumping subwoofers installed inside a renovated church vault. A melodic crucible where its inhabitants did nothing but eat, drink, and sleep music.

With DeVante bankrolling this whole endeavor, his vision was to create a record label that was synonymous with a specific type of sound: Stax, Philadelphia International, Motown. If everybody played their cards right, then the basement of Dajhelon recording studio would be the modern R&B equivalent of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue.

From the little that (officially) came out of these sessions, you could see DeVante’s dream closely becoming a reality. Da Bassment is where Missy honed the skills that would carry her to both the Songwriters and Rock & Roll Halls of Fame. Da Bassment is where Timbaland refined his drum pattern and experimented with a variety of different sounds that would usher in a new sonic future. Da Bassment is where Ginuwine, Tweet, and Static Major would learn from the best on how to become their own stars.

H-Town’s “Part Time Lover” was made in Da Bassment. Jodeci’s “Freek’n You” was made in Da Bassment. Ginuwine’s all-time strip club and baby-making anthem “Pony” was made in Da Bassment. Although, it would be that song, in particular, which would lead several members of Da Bassment Cru to sprout up from the underground and discover a different route.

IV. Da Fall

Like several figures in the Bible, the fall of Da Bassment was precipitated by at least one of the three P’s: pride, power and paranoia.

While there have been interviews with several members of Da Bassment Cru talking about where it all went wrong, Sugah’s Susan Weems seems to provide the most detailed account during her conversation with Njs4ever.com.

It can, arguably, be traced to two events: (i) Jodeci’s tour with Bad Boy in 1995 and (ii) the arrival of Suge Knight.

Although everyone seemed to have a positive experience on the tour, the success of Bad Boy artists like The Notorious B.I.G. and Faith Evans made it starkly apparent to Da Bassment Cru that (outside of a couple placements on a few movie soundtracks) they had almost nothing to show for all their ingenuity and hard work. It was also the moment when other music industry executives took notice of the sheer amount of talent within the group and started picking their favorites (such as Ginuwine, who was able to sign a record deal with Sony/550 Music based off what they heard on “Pony”).

Simultaneously, the arrival of Suge Knight signaled a noticeable shift in DeVante’s behavior, as well as allegations of a hostile and toxic working environment (as colorfully described by Stevie J during an episode of Drink Champs). Others, however, would attribute the character change to a violent robbery DeVante experienced roughly around the same time.

Nonetheless, the camaraderie that once held the crew together gradually seemed to dissipate which led to several members disappearing one-by-one. First was Sista, who were said to have been dropped by DeVante after Elektra shelved their debut (4 All The Sistas Around Da World). Next was Ginuwine who, as mentioned above, left on his own accord. Then it was Timbaland & Magoo and Playa a few years after that (signing directly with Def Soul instead of through DeVante’s production company).

Sugah was one of the last original members to leave (around the year 2000), but their contributions would later prove to be the most consequential.

V. Da Friends

A demo tape. That was all that remained from Timbaland and Missy Elliott’s time in Da Bassment. However, that was all they would need to find the person who would change their lives: Aaliyah.

After the traumatic experience and ensuing scandal that arose from the creation of her first album, ‘Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number,’ Aaliyah was in search of a new direction. Something completely different, something that she could call her own.

In comes entertainment lawyer Louise West, who sent Aaliyah’s team a copy of Da Bassment’s demo tape with Sugah’s “Sugah & Spice” being the last track. When you hear the song, it’s easy to understand why Aaliyah gravitated towards it and how it became the template for her ground-breaking second album ‘One In A Million’: the laid-back, almost G-Funk-like beat; the playful innuendos that betray the inhibitions of an innocent heart.

Out of the ashes of Da Bassment came the rise of the “Superfriends” and the foundations of the modern R&B landscape. While we didn’t get the next Motown, we got something very close. We got Missy Elliott bringing in Afrofuturism with an inflatable black bodysuit. We got Timbaland populating tracks with cricket noises and baby coos. We got classic records from Tweet, Ginuwine, Playa and Magoo.

For almost a decade, the Superfriends ruled the airwaves, dominated the TV screen, and played a significant part in what many consider to be the last golden age of R&B.

Unfortunately, it felt all too brief with the sudden and tragic death of Aaliyah, the gradual decline of labels like Goldmind and Blackground, as well as the typical in-fighting that occurs after years working together in a highly stressful and volatile industry.

But, as the saying goes, “history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes”: the unique, unpredictable nature of time.

VI. Da Future

Can you hear it? Almost thirty years after its inception, it’s the sound of Da Bassment come alive again. Originator and innovator, finally collaborating together, the epitome of a full circle moment.

In a personal essay, I likened sampling to time traveling, calling it “an infinite feedback loop of inspiration and adaptation, generating something new with each iteration”. That’s how it felt when I listened to Sonder for the first time.

Similar to Da Bassment Cru, it wasn’t a specific song that introduced me to Sonder’s music; it was a curated compilation courtesy of Soulection Radio.

Over the course of two hours, I heard the past, present, and future of R&B, playing side-by-side. I heard familiar voices take on an ethereal quality as samples sustaining the soul of a sensational sound.

If Jodeci sang with the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament, threatening to bring the house down with their horny harmonies, then Sonder soothes with the cool, calm conviction of the New Testament, heralding in a new chapter in the gospel of R&B. That transition is Da Bassment’s legacy.

Without Da Bassment, T R A P S O U L, and the sub-genre that followed, does not exist. Without Da Bassment, OVO Sound and its resounding regional influence does not exist. Without Da Bassment, trailblazing artists like Kehlani, Syd, and Victoria Monét do not exist.

Like the best songs, one can look back at all of this and see nothing more than a series of coincidences but, if you read between the lines, you’ll find something more akin to divine design.

Further Listening

[1] Da Bassment Cru, Da Bassment Demo Tape (Discovered By Static Major Is Music & Curated By Confessions Of A Curly Mind)

[2] Sonder, Show #324, Soulection Radio

Further Reading

[1] Lauren Du Graf, The Gospel Of Jodeci, Oxford American

[2] Erin Scherer, The Show, The Afterparty, Da Bassment, 585 Magazine

[3] Natelegé Whaley, ‘Aaliyah’ 25: 14 Modern R&B Songs Inspired By Aaliyah And Static Major, Scene Serene

[4] Chris Williams, Origin Stories: Missy Elliott and Timbaland, Red Bull Music Academy

Frank Ocean changed everything with a Tumblr post.

But the music did the real heavy lifting. Just a boy, a car, and the internet that was heavily anchored to the ‘Tumblr’ aesthetic.

When channel ORANGE arrived in the heat of July 2012, I still remember where I was. I was 8, but I was old enough to understand what music meant to me. I had been diagnosed with depression, and music and writing were there to save me. Track 2 - Thinkin Bout You, was on my mind every day. I played it religiously. I remember one time I forgot the name of the song and went crazy trying to sing it to my cousin to help me find it.

But the album as a whole cracked open a door: for an album to be considered genre-bending and for Black artists to be open about their sexuality.

Just six days before channel ORANGE was set to drop, instead of a standard press release, Frank took to his Tumblr page on the Fourth of July and wrote a letter under a post titled “thank you’s.” The note wasn’t a calculated PR stunt. It was a beautifully written confession about falling in love with a man when he was between 19 and 20 years old.

In a hip-hop and R&B landscape that was still deeply uncomfortable with anything outside the heteronormative lines, that missive felt like an earthquake. The internet caught fire, but the reaction wasn’t the usual gossip—it was a massive wave of support that ended up giving a whole generation of people the courage to finally tell their own stories. By the time the physical CDs hit shelves through Def Jam a couple of weeks later, that letter was printed right there in the album booklet, making it a permanent part of the art.

I knew nothing about love at 8 years old, but hearing the album made me ecstatic about having a crush. It seemed like so much fun when you’re older and can relate.

What made the album a foundational pillar for LGBTQ+ visibility in Black music wasn’t that it was loud or preachy. It was the fact that Frank allowed queer romance to exist with the same cinematic, everyday beauty that straight artists had enjoyed for decades.

Before this moment, LGBTQ+ themes in mainstream urban music were often treated as a punchline, a taboo secret, or a tragedy. For example, Detroit rapper Eminem would often throw around offensive LGBTQ+ language in his music. Songs like ‘Criminal,’ to name one.

Frank completely flipped that script. He gave queer love a soundtrack that was undeniable, forcing a historically rigid industry to nod its head to stories it used to ignore.

LA Times music writer Gerrick D. Kennedy called it “the glass ceiling moment for music. Especially Black music, which has long been in desperate need of a voice like Ocean’s to break the layers of homophobia.” For ages, Hip-Hop and R&B operated under a strict code of hyper-masculinity and rigid heterosexuality.

You couldn’t say queer love stories wouldn’t sell, because channel ORANGE was a critical and commercial juggernaut. It debuted at number 2 on the US Billboard 200 chart, with 131,000 copies sold in its first week

Yet, despite the media trying to paint him as a political martyr or a neat little symbol for a movement, Frank resisted the easy labels. He didn’t want to be a talking point. He just wanted to write about his life, noting in his letter that he wrote the album simply “to keep myself busy and sane.” By refusing to let his identity be sensationalized, he did something even more radical: he made queer desire feel normal, everyday, and deeply human.

Love Without Posture

Take Durand Bernarr. If you’re like me and have been tracking him since he collabed with Kaytranada on “Freefall” (my plane take off anthem), and you already know he’s been in the music world for a minute. On that track, he sang about the terrifying, thrilling rush of letting your guard down and just dropping into love, but he did it with an effortless lightness that felt like a breath of fresh air.

What makes Durand such a massive force for LGBTQ+ representation in modern R&B is that he refuses to give you a sanitized, radio-friendly version of queer life. He even described himself as “the version of Little Richard that religion did not get to.” It’s a heavy statement, but when you think about it, it makes total sense.

For decades, Black queer pioneers had to tuck their identities away, camouflage their lyrics, or let the industry turn their flamboyance into a spectacle while stripping away their actual humanity.

Durand is avenging that history. On tracks like “Prepared,” he’s singing about “heated fellowship” between two men, casually debating who is going to submit to whom. He’s filling a void for a community that has spent years dancing and crying to love songs that weren’t actually written for them.

And the industry is finally forced to catch up to his fly. When he took home a Grammy this year for his album BLOOM, it wasn’t just a win for an independent artist who has been grinding on the road for over fourteen years; it was a massive moment of cultural visibility. Standing on that stage, he brought his full, unadulterated self into a room that historically didn’t know what to do with artists like him.

As he told Out Magazine afterward, it was about witnessing intersectionality being celebrated.

Pleasure on Our Own Terms

Victoria Monét, who has been holding down the foundations of modern R&B for years behind the scenes before stepping fully into her own spotlight. On tracks like “Touch Me,” she’s exploring the friction of attraction, the way a specific look from across the room can make everything else blur.

Her pen captures the nuance of bisexuality and fluid desire without making it a spectacle for the male gaze, which is a tightrope that Black women in music have had to walk for far too long.

During her JAGUAR II tour, I got to see her live at the Chicago House of Blues, where she performed one of my all-time favorites, ‘(F)riend (U) (C)an (K)eep’. Her performance included a deeply intimate and sensual moment between her and another Black female dancer.

What makes Victoria a vital anchor for representation in R&B is how beautifully normal she makes fluid love feel. When she officially came out as bisexual on X back in 2018 in a rant, she just let her fans in on her truth, later telling Gay Times, “If I should be successful, I don’t want to be successful based on someone’s imaginary view of me.”

She’s been extremely open about her bisexual identity through her music. In her 2019 song “Monopoly,” featuring Ariana Grande, she sings: “I like women and men.”

Historically, the music industry has treated bisexual women like an exotic fantasy tailored for straight men, but Victoria completely strips that toxic dynamic away. When she sings about wanting a woman, it’s not for the cameras. The identity belongs entirely to her.

Look at the remix of “Touch Me” with Kehlani, also her former partner. They mapped out the heat of a connection with a level of care and mutual respect that you only get when two women truly see each other.

Even with ‘Hate the Club’ from Kehlani’s 2020 album It Was Good Until It Wasn’t. While it was long after their relationship had ended, Kehlani sang “Drunk when I call you Monet, begging you to walk me out. Say you miss, well, I need proof. I came all this way to see you.”

By the time she swept the Grammys for Jaguar II, it felt like a massive victory for the community. She wasn’t just winning for her incredible pen or her live arrangements; she was winning as a fully visible, unapologetically bisexual Black mother who refused to compromise her identity to get to the top.

Jamari Shelton is a Chicago-based entertainment writer and pop culture enthusiast covering breaking celebrity news, television, film, reality TV, and the internet moments everyone can’t stop talking about. She recently graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in Broadcast Journalism, and is passionate about telling stories that inform, entertain, and spark conversation.

Baby Rose painted it herself as a kid, because she loved Elton John and figured if she was going to fall in love with an instrument, it might as well have a personality. By then, she’d already been writing poems in composition books she’d hand to her aunts, who are English teachers. Her tight-knit family was the type that threw talent shows every Thanksgiving and Christmas and expected you to get up there. Her mother started as a songwriter and then, in what Rose calls “a random side quest,” managed a hip-hop artist, which meant there were producers in the living room and Triton keyboards within arm’s reach. Her dad promoted parties in Washington D.C. and played her Roy Ayers, house music, and acid jazz on the drive to school. Her great-aunt — who she counts as a grandmother — ushered at one of the biggest churches in New York, sang in the choir, and was always, always humming hymns.

“Foundationally, all of these ingredients really formed my psyche around music,” she tells me. You can hear every one of them.

Her 10,000 Hours

When she moved to North Carolina at twelve, she brought the piano with her. Her mom started driving her to the studio to record the ideas she’d been writing in the foyer. She didn’t put anything out for the world until around 2017, on SoundCloud — but there were ten years before that. “Music the world will never hear,” she says, the stuff that got her over the fear of performing and made her fall in love with being in the room. “It’s been a long time coming, for real.”

I keep coming back to that, because that’s what separates good artists from great artists in my opinion. Some artists are cool. They make their music based on what’s trending, what’s being played on the radio or in the clubs. They are comfortable with letting a label exec or producer tell them what’s good and what’s not. But there are those who have done their research and studied the craft. They’ve got the references from the ‘60s and ‘70s and beyond in their bones — and that music is always ten times better.

Baby Rose is the second kind, and she’ll tell you who’s in her musical family tree if you ask. Donny Hathaway, Amy Winehouse, Tina Turner, Stevie Wonder, Janis Joplin, Marvin Gaye, Frankie Beverly, and “North Carolina’s own” Nina Simone. She doesn’t just love them, she studies them — where they were, the feeling tones, the pain. “There’s a lot of pain behind a lot of that music,” she says, “but there are also stories of people who have overcome.” She looks at the already-open doors and asks what she can take and bring forward.

And then she says the thing that makes everything else make sense:

She thinks a renaissance is coming to meet the moment — pointing to artists like Thee Sacred Souls, Olivia Dean, and a whole class of musicians doing it the long way. And she’s grateful to be putting out this new album, YEARNALISM, in 2026, in that company. “God’s timing is impeccable.”

The Art Of YEARNALISM

Here’s where it gets interesting. All of her releases before YEARNALISM (multiple EPs and two albums) were, by her own account, for her. “They were all about me, and if you like it, I love it.” This one is different. “It feels like more of an offering to the whole current state of what’s happening,” she says. “Let’s not numb ourselves. I know it feels hard. But you gotta feel through it.” She’s talking about vulnerability as a kind of strength, love as ammunition — all the things that sound like clichés until you’re the one who has to live by them. “Now I feel like, dang, this feels like a deeper meaning than I intended,” she admits, and she sounds a little surprised by it, which is the best part.

The album title YEARNALISM is, for my money, the best one I’ve heard in a long time, and the origin is perfectly of-the-internet. She saw a meme that said something along the lines of “I majored in yearnalism” and dropped it in as a placeholder on her working files for the album. Her manager KJ looked at it and said, "That’s the title.”

“Yearnalism” is a play on journalism: documenting desire in all its forms, using her platform to show what yearning actually looks like. “It’s cheeky and cute and great, and an entryway into something that has more depth.” Because the bigger point is real. “Everything right now reflects late-stage capitalism if we’re gonna be real. Every man for himself. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. We’re forgetting, inherently as humans, the need for community, the need for each other. For love. For our own sanity.”

And here’s the flex underneath it: these are some of the simplest, most direct, least metaphorical lyrics she’s ever written, and she’s proud of that. “When I pray, I ask God to make things extremely simple for me,” she says. “So now I’ve made things extremely simple for myself to understand. And, you know, giving that as an offering to others, too.”

Though it’s not being released until July 10, I’ve heard the entire project and can confidently say it’s one of the albums of the year. Remember that family tree I mentioned earlier? It’s a perfect concoction of those inspirations, coupled with Baby Rose’s one-of-one, smoky voice and tone. It’s bluesy, it’s funky, it’s soulful, and it’s very much needed right now. Songs like “Dressed In Metal” and “All My Love” are bound to become fan favorites upon release. This music is healing and encouraging and meant to be felt.

Analog Cousins

The two YEARNALISM features, Leon Thomas and Elmiene, weren’t random selections. They were kinship; two more people pulling live instrumentation and analog warmth back into the room. Rose and Leon first connected during a jam session for his album MUTT, and she didn’t even know the song was making the tracklist until he told her they were leaving it exactly as it was. That album went up for Best R&B Album at the GRAMMYs and won. “That’s when I really had to trust the process,” she says. “Leon is an instrumentalist, a producer, an arranger, a singer. He understands every side.” When “Friends Again” — now her biggest song to date — came back from him, she was floored. “He understood the assignment so well. The yearning, the adlibs, everything.”

She met Elmiene at Tom Brenneck’s studio, the producer behind “Friends Again.” Elmiene was working with Tom and needed help writing something. She jumped in on sight, told him to pull up the next day, and they cut music, just playing around. Months later, she asked him to try something over what became “Is This Love,” and he wrote it with her that same night. The funny part: his first instinct was to sing it as a guy defending himself, trying to end things — should it be this hard? Rose wasn’t having it. “I told him, think back…people crying in the rain…anything to save love.” Because the whole thesis of the song — of the album — is that it can’t be one-sided. “Both partners have to want love to happen, and to last, and to make it.” She laughs. “We’re trying to save some relationships here.”

That’s also why she’s created a communal safe space called Yearners Anonymous to coincide with this album rollout. A few cities, starting in London: she plays the record, opens the floor, and people just have real conversations. “A revolution isn’t started in a big wave,” she says. “It starts with small conversations and small gatherings.” She wants people to leave having made a friend, less alone than when they walked in. And the more you talk to her, the more you understand it’s not a campaign — it’s who she’s always been. “If you know my music, you know I’ve been radically vulnerable this whole time. Yearning is not a new thing for me.” Her fans aren’t just fans to her. “They’re really friends. I just haven’t met you in person yet.”

Black Soul Reigns Supreme

I asked her about something that’s constantly a topic of conversation online: the way Black singers get filed under R&B by default, no matter what music they’re actually making. She doesn’t flinch. She nods back to redlining. Then she flips it. “Soul music birthed most of these genres, rock and roll included. When you look at the origin of a lot of these genres, Black people have been the origin.” So the reclamation happening now — Beyoncé and Shaboozey in country music, Olivia Dean walking into pop like she owns the room — isn’t a stunt, isn’t a point being scored. “It’s not a thing of sticking it to anybody. We’re just fire like that. We’re boundless.”

She’s been bluesy and soulful since she was twelve, she says; she just “had to let that catch up.” Along the way, she made pop, country, rock, and R&B, and what she took from all of it was appreciation and energy.

“Take away the words, take away the melody — what kind of emotion is that bringing forward?” She’s in service of the song. If a song calls for agitation, she’ll lean into alt and rock. If it’s meant to be more sobering, she’ll lean into folk and just guitar, nothing else. She refuses the box outright: “I’m not looking at it like, ‘I’m a young Black girl, I gotta stay here.’ No. Life is short. I gotta go crazy — if not for me, for everybody before me.”

Then she runs the receipts, laughing the whole way through. Tina Turner won GRAMMYs for Best Rock Vocal Performance and Best Pop Vocal Performance in 1985, and was nominated in R&B categories that same year. “The doors have already been opened if you do your research.” But after Tina? “Brittany Howard, okay — but that’s twenty years later.” Beyoncé won Best Country Album in 2025, and the response by the Recording Academy was to invent a whole new category for “contemporary” country music. “They were like, never again.” She laughs because that’s the move. “I have to laugh at it, as most Black people do. We make jokes out of it.” When we do something, we tend to be the best in the world at it, she points out — golf, tennis, take your pick. “No shade. It just is what it is, historically.” And then, very calmly: “I gotta pay attention to what’s of service to me, not what’s gonna bring me down. God is bigger than all of that.”

Baby Rose and Olivia Dean

At this point in our conversation, Rose drops the news to me that she’ll be joining Olivia Dean’s The Art Of Loving arena tour across the United States, and we fan out for a cool 7 minutes.

I fell to my knees,” she says. “I was literally like, are you kidding me?”

Her mom saw it coming. She used to tell Rose she’d be playing arenas one day, and Rose would push back, “Mom, that is way too much pressure. People just wanna hear me in smaller rooms, more intimate.” Her mother didn’t budge: I get that, but this is what you’re gonna be doing.

What gets her isn’t its size, though. It’s how it happened. Olivia came to Rose’s show at London’s Jazz Cafe back in 2024 — by herself, as a fan — and bought a vinyl and took a picture, back when she was still playing smaller rooms, too. Two years later, she’s selling out Madison Square Garden four nights in a row, and she’s bringing Baby Rose along. “It feels historic,” Rose says. “Two Black women doing Madison Square Garden four nights in a row.” She sits with it for a second, then finds the word she wants: alignment.

She’s ready for the room this time. Giveon took her through European arenas earlier this year, so the scale is “out of my system,” and now she just wants to enjoy it. “I’m gonna go up there, be myself, and have a ball.” Thirty minutes a night. “We could do a lot with that.”

And the kinship is the whole point. Olivia is the kind of artist Rose recognizes on sight — someone who’s done the research, who gives credit where it’s due (they bond over Carole King), who leads with “pride to the side, be the man I need.” That’s the Renaissance she keeps pointing to, made literal. Two artists who care about the process, out here restoring, in her words, a little love in the chat.

Study Yourself

I asked what she hoped people would carry away from the record, and she gave me something closer to a sermon than a soundbite.

YEARNALISM, it turns out, is partly literal. She’s been studying herself: her triggers, what motivates her, the habits she’s keeping and the ones she’s letting go of, the relationships, the things worth holding on to. She’s even rebuilt her definition of success around it. “One of my markers of success is when I look at the fact that my mom is here, my brother’s here, everybody’s healthy, and I can go home to Atlanta, to Lilburn, and just be in the sunroom. I feel successful. I feel at peace. Peace is a marker of success for me.”

She wants you to study yourself, too. To question anything that makes you numb. “The opposite of love is not hate or anger. It’s apathy. When you give up, and you stop caring about things, that’s when you’re denying yourself of love.” Anger, at least, points somewhere. It means you still want something. You still yearn for more.

We don’t get a guide for any of this, she says. “We just have podcasts and TikToks, and everybody’s a therapist, and you’re like, OMG am I doing this all wrong?” So she’s offering the next best thing: a record that asks the questions out loud, and ends — like she ended our conversation — with all her love.

Credits:
Photographer: Louisa Meng
Writer: Dante Nicholas
Executive Producer: Dante Nicholas

On Tuesday, June 2, pgLang announced its first female signee. That’s Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free’s company, and the woman is Imani Imani, and the way they announced it was by just dropping her album. No rollout. Eleven tracks, called Papercut, were out on a Tuesday, which was a bold move. But it was a move that allowed the album three days of chatter and buzz before the rest of the week’s releases caught up.

For four years, the roster was basically two cousins (Kendrick and Baby Keem) and rapper Tanna Leone. So the first woman they sign, the first artist whose whole instrument is her voice, is someone no one saw coming. It’s the most interesting move I’ve seen in a while.

Try to look her up, and the trail goes cold fast. Her name is Imani Ram; she used to go by Imani Selina, and before this week, she had zero monthly listeners on Spotify. Not a few. Zero. Her Instagram technically existed since early 2024, but most of the grid was added in the last couple of days. According to what we could find online, she hails from a small town in the Netherlands, and at one point called Amsterdam home.

If the voice rings a bell, you’re either super into fashion or super into Kendrick Lamar. Back in January 2024, an unreleased Kendrick song called “I Feel Something” played at Chanel’s couture show in Paris, and that was her on it. One of her own songs, “Snatch,” also opened the presentation. So she was scoring Chanel more than two years before she had a single track on streaming under her own name. Build it in private, say nothing, wait until the work can talk – that’s a winning formula when the music is just as good as the company you keep.

“Snatch” is on Papercut. So is “Mindgames,” which got the debut music video, directed by Keanna Williams and Neal Farmer.

I’ve had the album the same number of hours you have, so this isn’t a verdict. But my early read is: this is a great alternative-leaning R&B project that slips into cool pop (“Slideee”) and electronic sounds (“Come Together”) without losing its center. Looking at the credits reveals that she's worked with people like James Fauntleroy and Sam Dew on a couple of songs. But every song lists two names as producers and writers: Imani and her close collaborator, Daan Zinkhaan.

She’ll get explained eventually. The interviews & performances & co-signs are coming. For now, R&B has something rare: a real cold intro. Papercut is out wherever you listen. Play it before everyone tells you how to hear it.

When you ask Saint Harison what makes a song good, he talks about the 20-minute ones, the ones that are easy to write because some part of him already knows what needs to be said. He talks about working alone in a room until the right feeling shows up. He talks about his grandfather, who was in a band in the 1960s called Bryan Fisher and the Radiers. He introduced Saint to music when Saint was 7 years old, and he loved Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, and Dean Martin — the kind of raw, storied voices that made you feel something before you understood the lyrics.

He grew up on those voices. He became one of them. And now, a couple of EPs and a few terrible boyfriends later, he’s still doing the same thing he decided to do as a kid: trying to have an impact on people’s lives the way a song once had on his.

Southampton Beginnings

Saint was 12 years old. He & his mother were sitting in the reception area of a safe house for women and children fleeing abusive homes when Adele’s “Chasing Pavements” came on.

“I just thought, Oh my God. I have to write songs. I have to have an impact on people’s lives in the way that this Adele song has had on my life.“

He says it quickly and matter-of-factly. The way people talk about things they’ve long since made peace with. But let’s sit with that for a second. Because that’s the story, really — the Saint Harison story — compressed into one waiting room moment: heartbreak, a voice cutting through, and a kid deciding that music was the only reasonable response.

Years later, that kid from Southampton (a port city on England’s south coast) is one of R&B’s most compelling new voices. His debut EP ‘Lost a Friend’ quietly crossed 170 million streams. His COLORS performance of “ego talkin’” sparked a TikTok challenge that racked up over 200 million views. SZA, Justin Bieber, H.E.R., and Elton John all stopped to take notice of him early on. He’s been named Apple Music’s global Up Next artist. Rolling Stone highlighted him on their Future of Music 2026 watchlist. Saint has been primed for this moment.

But before any of the music happened, he was a teacher.

After studying musical theatre as a teen — doing gigs at Ronnie Scott’s and Troy Bar on the side, half-committed to both paths — Saint moved back to Southampton with his mom when life in London got too expensive. He was 20. He started teaching, working with young people, and building a life that made sense even if it wasn’t the one he’d imagined.

“I kind of made peace with my life as a teacher,” he says. “I didn’t really think this was gonna be my reality.”

Then the COVID-19 lockdown happened. He posted a TikTok cover of Jazmine Sullivan’s “Pick Up Your Feelings.” Jazmine herself reposted it. And then Justin Bieber found him, among others. He wasn’t ready for that viral moment (who would be?). He didn’t even have an Instagram account at the time, as teachers at his school weren’t allowed to have one.

“I had to make an Instagram,” he laughs. “And then it kind of, you know, long story short, kind of led me to here.”

He says “long story short” as if it’s simple. Like going viral a few times, meeting managers on Zoom, flying to LA to write your debut project, and becoming one of the most talked-about voices in contemporary R&B is just a thing that happens. But that’s part of what makes Saint Harison so compelling to me — there’s an absence of performance around his own story. He’s not hyperbolizing. He’s just telling me what happened with a humbleness that we all love to see in our favorite singers.

Ego Talkin

The moment things truly started to break through for Saint was with the song “ego talkin’”, which wasn’t even supposed to be a single.

He wrote it on Zoom — still in the UK, still locked down — with producers Deputy and Boy Matthews. He liked it, but he was deep in making his debut EP and wasn’t treating it like anything special. Then COLORS called and asked him to perform on their platform. He chose to perform “ego talkin” because it was the most vocally demanding thing he had, and he wanted to show off his vocals. But the night before the performance dropped, he nearly killed off the whole thing himself.

“I got the video back, and I hated it. I thought I sounded so bad, and I was texting my managers — ‘I just can’t, I can’t do it.’ And they were like, ‘Well it’s already done.’”

He watches it now, three years later, and can’t figure out what he was so worried about. That’s the thing about Saint Harison and his voice — he treats it like something he’s still figuring out, while the rest of us have already decided it’s extraordinary. The riffs on “ego talkin’” aren’t just decoration; they carry weight. Every run is a feeling that couldn’t fit inside a regular lyric.

A few friends did a riff challenge to the song. Then Tori Kelly did it. Then it became a phenomenon. “It’s so random,” he says. “Ego talkin’ wasn’t even a single. I think that can give you an insight into how random it felt at the time.”

Random, yes. But also: earned. There’s something about Saint’s voice that stops people. It’s the combination of technical precision and the emotional rawness sitting right next to each other, neither one canceling out the other. When Jazmine Sullivan reposted his cover, it wasn’t by mistake. When Elton John called him one of his favorite new artists, it wasn’t hype. It was meant to be, and meant to happen for him.

Enter: Ghosted

Ghosted — the new EP that just dropped — is named after its opening track, which Saint wrote almost immediately after the ‘Lost a Friend’ EP came out. He knew sonically where he wanted to go: raw lyrics over ‘50s and ‘60s-inflected R&B sound. Less polished, less pop-leaning, more alternative. A little less structure. A little more honest.

“The songs I spend eight hours on are shit,” he says, with the certainty of someone who’s learned this the hard way. “The ones I spend 20 minutes on are the ones that wind up on the project.”

He wasn’t trying to write Ghosted the EP. He was trying to write an album. But over three years of what he describes, with a perfectly dry laugh, as having “apparently found the worst men on earth,” the project assembled itself. Eight songs that told a story. A complete chapter he didn’t plan to write, but couldn’t stop living.

The song “Panic Room” (his favorite on the project) is actually two one-minute pieces, born from a period when even writing a full song felt like too much pressure. He’d just write fragments. Release valves. “I was writing one-minute things,” he says. “I felt so pressured by the idea of trying to write a full song right then.” The fact that two of those fragments made it onto the project intact says something about what Ghosted is doing. It’s letting the shape of feelings determine the shape of the music, not the other way around.

He wrote more of this project alone and in small rooms than anything before it. No rooms with 30 people — just him, or maybe one other person, pouring it out.

“If I step into a room where there are more than five people, I want to cry. I feel more connected to it that way,” he says. “It feels more like a real child,” he says, referring to his music. And based on the results – his single “bad” just hit #1 on R&B Radio in the US – his approach works.

Queer Identity Within R&B

It’s the Pride Issue, so we talk about it. I ask, “Being a queer artist in R&B – how have you been able to navigate the industry as your most authentic self?”

Saint points to what’s happening around him. Victoria Monét being openly herself. Kehlani. Destin Conrad. There’s been a general shift in R&B over the past few years towards being more honest about who’s actually in the room, who’s actually writing these songs about love and heartbreak. He feels genuinely proud to be part of that.

“In R&B especially, we’re seeing so many more artists just be themselves. And I feel very proud to be a queer artist in R&B. It’s something that — as you said — 10, 20 years ago we wouldn’t be talking about. So it feels very special.”

When I mention that, looking at the R&B landscape right now — Saint, Sasha Keable, Kehlani, Destin Conrad, Kwn, Durand Bernarr, etc. — the queer artists are genuinely making some of the best R&B on the planet, he says something that makes us both laugh. “It’s because gay relationships are terrible. We’re horrible people.”

He means it affectionately, the way you can only mean something like that when you’ve lived it and written about it and somehow turned the wreckage into something people across the world can relate to and laugh about later.

What’s In The UK Water?

The UK R&B thing is real. Saint knows it. He’s careful, though, not to make it sound like a new discovery. Because it isn’t.

“The UK has always had fucking incredible people. Jaz Karis, Mahalia. Even before that, there were so many people. The UK’s always had incredible R&B acts.”

What’s different now, he thinks, is recognition. And also a specific absence of it back home. “The UK has some catching up to do with recognizing R&B in general — and awarding it. I think that’s why so many UK artists move out here [to the U.S.], because people out here get it.”

He singles out Sasha Keable approximately 5 times throughout the interview, each time catching himself and moving on, before eventually admitting he’d love to work with her and is a huge fan. Also on Saint’s collaborator wishlist is Lola Young — a close friend — and RAYE, who we both agree is insanely talented.

What’s next for Saint? A fall US tour is incoming. On his vision board is a Grammy or two. He’s also thinking about acting — specifically the dark, twisted, Ryan Murphy/Donald Glover lane. ”Obviously, you probably guessed from Ghosted that I love a dark, twisted sort of show.” He notes, with a kind of gleeful self-awareness, that British actors are always the villains in American productions. He seems genuinely fine with this. I, too, am here for it.

What I hear from Saint Harison – both in his music, how he talks about the greats, and in his future aspirations – is somebody who is prepared to be around for a good time and a long time. He’s only just scratching the surface. And that makes me super excited.

Credits:
Photographer: Quieto Carlos
Executive Producer: Dante Nicholas
Writer: Dante Nicholas

India Shawn says that she keeps coming back to this particular Rick Rubin quote: “Don’t play to win, play to play.” She drops it mid-conversation, in the way you mention something that has rearranged a thought you’ve been carrying for years. It stuck with her because she’d been doing the opposite for so long — grinding towards a goal, trying to break through, measuring the music against the moment it was supposed to produce. Subject To Change, her new EP via VANTA Music, is what happened when she started playing to play.

She’s unhurried when we talk, leaning back like someone who stopped checking the clock a while ago. There’s a specific kind of ease that comes from having nothing to prove to anyone – and India has that. And it makes sense once you know the road she’s traveled to get here. Writing songs for artists like Chris Brown, Monica, and Keri Hilson. Singing background for Anderson .Paak on the Best Teef In The Game tour. Working as a vocalist with Harry Styles during his Harry’s House era. The resumé goes on.

India’s voice has threaded into the mix so naturally that you may not have caught it unless you already knew to listen for her. She has been, for a long time, one of those artists that the music industry and R&B fans love quietly — the kind they keep calling “an artist’s artist” or a “slept on fave.” IYKYK. And it’s true, but it also doesn’t pay nearly enough.

Her latest project, ‘Subject To Change,’  is out now, and it hits hard. Six tracks. Every one of them sounds like an intentional decision she made for herself. The quiet chapter is over.

India’s Origin Story

She grew up in Los Angeles, with her mother as the praise and worship leader at their church. That’s where she learned to sing — not just the technical part, but the part that matters: how to mean it. When her family moved to Atlanta during high school, she carried that foundation into a city that was on its way to becoming the center of the musical universe. Atlanta gave her the work ethic, the network, and a new community of writers and producers. Everybody was figuring it out at the same time. She talks about that era with a warmth that means it impacted her greatly. “I feel like I really became a musical professional in Atlanta,” she says. “And now I’ve taken everything I’ve learned, and I’m back in LA. The environment of LA is felt in my music.”

Before Origin, her debut project, she wrote for others as part of a collective called Full Circle. She was good at it — placing plenty of songs and building a real working reputation in the industry. But writing for someone else means learning to disappear into their vision, and after long enough, that starts to feel like a trade that you didn’t fully agree to.

“Writing for others just affirmed that I wanted to write for myself,” she says. “I was providing a service in that era, and I just wanted to love what I was making. I wanted it to mean something to me. And then when I wrote those songs that meant something to me, I wanted to keep them for myself.”

So in 2012, she did. Origin arrived independently — ten tracks, with star musicians like Hit-Boy and James Fauntleroy in her corner. So if you were paying attention from jump, you know India was somebody to take seriously. The project found its people the slow way, through word of mouth and genuine feeling. Songs like “All I Have” and “Neither Do We” have that quality that the best early records have: they sound like someone telling you the truth before they knew anyone was listening. Her day ones have held those records close for over a decade. They bring them up unprompted – feeling personally responsible for introducing them and India to the world.

“That’s one of my favorite albums of mine. I think it’s a classic. I think it is me at the core.” She pauses. “If [fans] have been with me from the beginning, they see the growth. They also see that I’m the same girl in a lot of ways.”

She is. That’s the thing you notice sitting across from her. Whatever India Shawn has been becoming, she has been becoming it for a long time.

Playing The Long Game

In 2013, Solange put India’s “I’m Alive” on her Saint Heron compilation project — a co-sign from someone who appreciated the interesting thing before the interesting thing had a name. In 2015, she released ‘Outer Limits,’ her collaborative EP with James Fauntleroy. The EP mapped out a cosmic, unhurried version of alternative R&B that made it feel like trends didn’t matter. There was touring with Free Nationals, a Grammy performance with Harry Styles, and Anderson .Paak’s whole tour circuit…India was, and still is, booked and busy. She was everywhere serious music was happening, even when her name wasn’t the one on the marquee.

What kept her going, she says, was the people.

She mentions 6LACK, Anderson .Paak, and then arrives at the name that changes the whole shape of the convo: D’Mile. “D’Mile has been everything. He’s such a creative support in helping me to shape my sound and discover new sounds I want to explore.” She says working with D’Mile has been a safe space for her: to experiment, to fail, to have fun. And that’s rare for women in the industry.

“I always tell him – if it wasn’t for him, I probably wouldn’t still be singing.”

She lets that sit. It’s not a dramatic statement — it’s a practical one. What D’Mile, whose VANTA Music label she is now signed to, has built with India isn’t just a production partnership. It’s a room where she could fail without it costing anything, where the work could be fun again. “It’s been the perfect situation,” she says. “He just makes it so easy to show up.”

D’Mile describes his approach simply: he listens. “Even before we start working, if we’re in the room just talking, I’m starting to think — is that a song?” he says to me in a conversation via Google Meet. “I try to really get to know whoever it is I’m working with.” With India, that familiarity has compounded over the years. “In some ways, it gets easier and easier to hear the music in her personality.”

To me, there are certain artists that I know instantly after hearing for the first time that they belong at the upper echelons of the “industry.” They deserve the budgets, the visuals, the awards, the fanfare. India Shawn has always been one of those people to me, though it’s been a long grind to get to the moment we’re at now.

I asked D’Mile why he thinks that is.

“I think for a while, timing wasn’t fair for Black artists doing R&B unless you were also doing EDM or pop,” he says. “People were also just set on who they loved at that time.” We both agree that the streaming era has allowed consumers to expand their palates and not rely on being told who’s hot by radio DJs or popular figureheads (like we’ve seen in decades past).

But something was shifting underneath all of it. D’Mile points to a specific moment he felt the ground move. “One of the things that started making me realize it was time for real music to come back was Childish Gambino’s ‘Redbone,” he says. That was a moment where R&B and soul music weren’t just being accepted again — they felt needed. The window that India had been patient enough to wait for had finally started to open.

Before We Go (Deeper), her 2022 project on Epic Records, was a full expression of that — with Anderson .Paak, 6LACK, Ambré, Cory Henry, and Unknown Mortal Orchestra as features, with India’s voice at the center of it all. The album got the attention it deserved from the people who knew.

She’s not bitter about the time it took. She’s also not going to pretend it didn’t sting. She made great music. The moment wasn’t ready. She kept making great music anyway.

Everything Is Subject To Change

The new EP Subject To Change started with a playlist. India sat down and pulled together everything she actually loved, and listened until she could hear what was missing from her own music. Then she brought it to D’Mile and the label. “This is what I’m chasing.”

“I wasn’t hearing it in my music,” she says. “Because I was still very much doing what people expected of me, or just what was easy to do.”

“Kill Switch” came out of that session of honesty — though not without some coaxing. D’Mile had brought in two members of Mamalarky, an alternative band whose sound he’d been drawn to, and when he walked into the studio, they were already noodling with an idea. “I think India that day kind of didn’t even want to go there,” D’Mile recalls. “She wanted to do something different. But I think she just couldn’t hear it yet.” He heard it. They stayed with it. India came back the next day with her collaborator Varren Wade, and the first lyric that came to her mind (the chorus) told them exactly what the song should be about.

“It just flowed,” D’Mile says. “Whether it took a day or two, it felt easy throughout.” The final record has D’Mile on drums, Livvy from Marmalarky on guitars, and Michael on keys — a full live session that you can feel in how the song breathes.

The song opens on acoustic guitar before dropping into a psychedelic soul-rock pocket. A groove that doesn’t announce itself, it just arrives, builds, and crashes into greatness. India’s voice sits in the center of immediately amazing lyrics. It’s about the moment before something changes between two people — recognizing the pull and choosing not to cross the line, protecting what’s real over what’s possible. A specific feeling rendered with great care. Exactly what India Shawn has always been best at.

“Kill Switch is definitely probably my favorite on the project,” she says — and the “definitely probably” is worth noting. It’s exactly how she talks; loose and precise at the same time. D’Mile agrees. I agree. “It was one of the first ones we finished and felt really, really good about.”

“Cotton Candy Blvd.” is an instant standout for its slow-burning, groovy nature. India and Lucky Daye trade verses and vocals like they’ve been doing this for years. Fans have been asking for this collaboration out loud for a while, and the record rewards their wait. You can hear the pleasure and the fun in it.

“The song is sweet, but it’s got depth. It’s the tension before the kiss, the invitation and the promise.”

The rest of the EP earns its range. “Marmalade” kicks things off as Track #1, and it’s the one that gets bodies moving — 70s warmth and dancefloor intimacy. “Til Infinity” makes me feel like I’m driving through California on a 75-degree day with blue skies and birds chirping. “Multiplicity” closes the project on a more complicated note, a sharper accounting of what it costs when someone wants too much of you. The EP covers real emotional ground without rushing any of it.

“I have been so hard on myself,” she says, “pushing toward a goal, wanting to win, wanting to break through — that I haven’t really had as much fun as I wanted to have.” Something lands in her face when she says it, less like a confession and more like a fact she’s done fighting. “Subject To Change is a lot of different sounds and emotions. It’s an experiment. And it is the first time I really played.”

She’s not playing to win. She’s playing to play. Word to Rick Rubin.

And that’s the thing about this EP that I love — you can actually hear someone who’s just making something they loved. It’s a different sound. Looser. More alive. Groovy, for lack of better adjectives.

Let The Groove Get In

Near the end of our conversation, I tell India that we’re calling this The Groove Issue. “I love that,” she says immediately. Then, after a beat: “First of all, I hear groovy music. Bops and jams.” She smiles. “But also, it feels like I’ve found this comfortable place in my career. And we’re definitely giving ‘70s, so — it’s groovy.”

D’Mile, for his part as label exec-producer-friend, wants people to see what he’s watched happen up close. “For the fans from day one, I want them to see the growth she’s had over the years,” he says. “The fact that she is still doing it. She’s not quitting.” He pauses. “She’s different from the person I knew, but in the best way!”

India Shawn has never been a mystery. The same artist who made “Be Myself” in 2012 made “Kill Switch” in 2025 — same instincts, same honesty, same refusal to make music that doesn’t mean something to her first. What changed isn’t who she is. It’s that she stopped leaving room for anyone else’s version of that.

On our way out, she mentions offhandedly that she’s been listening to a lot of 1970s soul lately — Minnie Riperton, Syreeta, the stuff that takes its time. “Music that trusts you to stay with it,” she says. So with that being said, let the groove get in.

Credits:
Writer + Creative Director – Dante Nicholas
Photographer – Breyona Holt
Stylist – Cedes Sanders
Hair – thedimeeffect_
Makeup – CHERIEBEAUTY
Video Director – Jai Casso

The British-Canadian-Nigerian is returning with a new EP entitled “Crush”, digging more into her lane within the Pop and R&B landscape and further cementing her place among the best in music.

From her influences of Michael and Janet Jackson, to Mariah Carey, and Madonna, to Kali Uchis and Kaytranada – Essosa’s music blends both old and new sounds to create a mix of nostalgic moods and new perspectives.

This sound can be felt in her first EP, Essie’s World, which spawned the viral hit “Waste My Time.” Delivering smooth vocals over production that felt reminiscent of the best of the Neptunes, Essosa started to craft her own signature sound with that first project.

“I made Essie’s World in the span of three months; it was my first time ever in the studio all the time. I just felt like the world was my oyster.” Essie’s World felt like a peek into where Essosa is going in her musical journey, while Crush is further putting her stamp on her place in pop and R&B music.

To do that, she made sure this new Crush EP was made without any outside noise. It also has a larger backing of support that should help take the rising star further beyond the scope of Essie’s World.

“I came in with a vision before, but now having a team to help execute that as well. Everyone is on board, and everyone is like how do we execute this in the best way possible?”

The Crush singles, like “Touch bby”, “Signs”, and “He’s Not All That”, dig deeper into the main ethos of her new EP.

The EP blends sweet R&B and Pop melodies, conveying the emotions of having a crush and processing the ups and downs, as in the centerpiece, “Missing U”.

Drawing on a sound similar to “Together Again” by Janet Jackson, the song tells a story of reflection and resetting after a situationship in limbo. This song, along with this EP, carries motifs inspired by Essosa’s life.

“It was really in the time when I met someone and thought, okay, this is actually a bit stable. I felt girlie, which is where the whole pink girly thing across the singles came from.”

Adding to this new EP, Essosa recently wrapped up supporting Rochelle Jordan on her “Through the Wall” U.S. and Europe tour, spreading her artistry to new listeners. One of the things she learned while on tour with Jordan was resilience and how her music can speak to new audiences.

“I noticed how songs connect with people. So, how do upbeat or catchy songs connect with people? It made me want to know how I can keep making music that connects with people, especially in the context of life.”

Having found this initial connection with “Waste My Time” (which spawned over 70 million streams and over 19,000 TikTok videos), her new EP Crush goes beyond the timeline and takes listeners deeper into Essosa’s world.

There’s a question that follows Ambré everywhere she goes, one she’s answered in interviews and probably in her own head more times than she can count: What kind of artist are you? R&B? Soul? Alternative? The label-seeking is understandable. She has a voice that could make you cry in a grocery store. She’s a Grammy Award-winning songwriter who co-wrote tracks on H.E.R.’s debut. She’s been on Roc Nation’s roster since 2019. By most conventional metrics, she fits neatly into a category. And yet…

“I’ve never been an R&B artist,” she says plainly, the kind of plainly that makes you realize she’s said this before and means it. “I have R&B songs. But you can listen to any of my projects and hear all types of sounds and genres.” She’s not being difficult; that’s an accurate statement.

Welcome To The 504

India Ambré Perkins grew up in New Orleans. She was born there, shaped there, and proud of it in a way that runs so deep it informs the titles of her projects.

When she talks about New Orleans now, she doesn’t settle on easy nostalgia. “It’s some stuff that I grew up knowing,” she says, “and then there’s stuff that I learned as an adult about New Orleans that I put into my music.” That distinction matters to her. The city isn’t a costume. It’s a continuous education, something she’s still unpacking, still discovering, still folding into the work.

The Reluctant Musician

She didn’t plan any of this. That’s the part people might not expect from someone who has quietly become one of the more compelling voices in contemporary R&B. The sheer accidental-ness of it.

“I never really made a decision to do music,” she says. “People were just telling me I was good at it.” One of the biggest among them was her sister, who kept pushing her to record, to put things out, to let people hear what she was doing. Ambré didn’t even like her own voice for a long time. “I always loved music,” she adds, and you believe her. It’s just that loving music and deciding to stake your whole life on it are two different conversations, and for her, the second one happened gradually, almost by default.

She played trombone in the marching band. Sang in the school choir and at church, which, for many Black artists from the South, is where the voice gets its first dose of real training. She taught herself production and how to record. By the time she started making real songs at 17, the foundation was well in place. She just didn’t know she’d been building it.

Her influences are the kind that tell you something real about a person. Brandy. André 3000. Frank Ocean. Prince. Stevie Wonder. Tame Impala. D’Angelo. The canonical and the niche, the feeling and the craft: it’s basically a blueprint for how she makes music today. She moves fluidly between worlds because she’s always lived in all of them at once.

The Journey to Now

Before the “blow-up," there was a writing camp. In 2014, producer Swagg R’celious found Ambré on Instagram after one of her early SoundCloud tracks started moving. He invited her to a session for a then-unknown artist named Gabriella Wilson, who the world would come to know as H.E.R. Ambré wrote two songs at that camp: “U” and “Changes.” Both made the album. That album won Best R&B Album at the 2019 Grammys.

Over the years, her pen would show up on Kehlani’s “Water” and “Honey”, Chlöe x Halle’s “Forgive Me,” and across a sprawling list of collaborators that reads like a who ’s-who of the last decade in R&B.

Pulp arrived in November 2019, the same week Roc Nation announced her signing. The EP was ten tracks of something genuinely hard to categorize: psychedelic, lush, emotionally direct, guitar-forward in a way that surprised people. Roc Nation co-president Omar Grant compared her to a modern-day Tracy Chapman. Ambré called it “a psychedelic coming of age story.”

Then came 3000° in 2022, and “I’m Baby.” The duet with Jvck James became the song her name travels with now. Confident, sensual, deceptively simple. The whole EP was a love letter to New Orleans, with her mother’s voice woven between tracks. 3000° was a direct nod to Lil Wayne and Juvenile’s classic Louisiana rap touchstones. “The name is a direct homage,” she told Rolling Stone at the time. That impulse, to honor where you come from while doing something entirely your own, is basically the throughline of her whole career.

Learning To Play

In 2025, Ambré joined Leon Thomas on The MUTT Tour, and she went to learn. Not just to perform or get her name on a bill, but to absorb something new. What she came back with was a deeper obsession with musicianship: the kind Prince had, the kind that makes an artist dangerous on stage because their relationship with their instrument goes all the way down.

“One thing I learned from Leon on tour was his musicality and stage presence,” she says, drawing a line between him and her love for Prince. “They both play almost every instrument. That’s something I’ve been wanting to experiment with and do more of myself. Leon is someone I’ve been friends with for years, so to see his journey is very inspiring. It felt like great practice for me every night. I was sharpening my skills.”

If you’ve ever seen her perform with a guitar, you know she doesn’t play around. At the Atlanta stop on the MUTT Tour, Ambre was up there making people in the front row fall in love. The guitar was part of it. The physicality of it, the way it turned performance into something lived-in and real. The instrument thing isn’t a gimmick. It’s a direction she’s been moving in for years now, and what’s coming next reflects that.

The word “genre” came up in our conversation, but only in the context of not being defined by it. “Black artists are constantly boxed into this R&B label,” she says. “If you sing, you’re just R&B.” She’s not mad about it, but she’s clear. “I’m not a person who likes to define myself by genre.”

She’s been making music that moves across sounds since Wanderlust in 2015. Her upcoming album, led by the single “She,” is a continuation of that refusal. And based on the album preview we’ve heard, it’s the fullest expression of it yet.

What Ambré Wants You to Feel

Ask her what she hopes people take from the era that’s coming, and she doesn’t give you a tidy answer. She gives you the full list.

A world she created. That framing is intentional. Ambré doesn’t talk about music like it’s a product. She talks about it like it’s a place you go…like somewhere that holds you. “I see entire images,” she’s said before. “It’s like a whole movie, and I see scenes. I’m a storyteller.”

The next chapter of that story draws from somewhere deep and specific: the spirituality of D’Angelo’s Voodoo, the way that record moved not just sonically but ceremonially. Like something you didn’t just hear, but also experienced. That energy is in the room when she talks about what’s coming. You can feel it without her having to name it.

The past few years have been a deliberate recalibration, a shift toward intention. “I’ve been focused on being intentional with my words and what I put out into the world,” she says, “and being true to the way that I see myself, not how the world sees me.” That’s the work underneath the work. The craft of it, sure, but also the harder project: learning to trust your own perception of yourself over everyone else’s.

It’s the kind of thing that sounds simple and takes years. But Ambré has put in her 10,000 hours.

When she introduced herself at the start of our conversation, there was something easeful to it. Unhurried. Like someone who has stopped needing to explain themselves and started just being themselves instead. Incredible new music (with some incredible features) is on the way. The vision is locked in. Whatever box you were about to put Ambré in before, leave it. She doesn’t need it.

Credits:

Writer + Exec Producer – Dante Nicholas
Photographer – Jhalin Knowles
Stylist – Paris Cole
Creative Director – Dante Nicholas + Jhalin Knowles
Video Director – Dale Roberson
Photo Assistant – Makayla Howard
Consultant – Cedes Sanders

All instrumentalist and producer Kaelin Ellis needs is a drumset and some time to bring an R&B track to life. His latest single, “Hello.Morning,” featuring Madison McFerrin and SWEATA, is one of many tracks that showcase his ear for simple but effective instrumentation.

The “Hello.Morning” cover art features a photo of his parents on their wedding day. His first release of 2026, Kaelin is intent on capturing his roots and journey as a musician, producer, and human being in the music he’s making.

Kaelin first found his love for music playing when his dad bought him a small CB drum kit. He spent his childhood playing while his dad was on the keys, conducting the choir in church. “Growing up in church, you play not to honor yourself, but to honor something far greater than you,” he recalled in an interview with In The Writers Mind.

Sonically, you can find rhythm and blues, funk, soul, jazz, and more in his music. Kaelin has collaborated with everyone from Lupe Fiasco, Joyce Wrice, Saba, Jazmine Sullivan, and Mick Jenkins to the K-pop group Exo. In a time where a lot of music can sound the same thanks to AI, he leans into musicianship to connect with listeners.

A Kaelin Ellis live show is full of surprises and plenty of stank-face-approved moments. He’ll go from making you swing your hips to dance tracks “Come and Get Me” featuring Iman Europe, to blowing your mind with an electrifying drum solo to Denzel Curry’s “Ultimate.”

In 2025, Kaelin released two full-length projects, OFF BEAT and Chrysalis. In the midst of releasing two projects in one year, he toured the world, playing shows in Los Angeles, New York City, France, London, and beyond.

“It’s almost like trying to shoot jump shots after not having shot a jump shot in a long time,” Kaelin said about diving back into performing. He feels both the excitement and the nervousness of performing for a live audience again.

With the release date of his next project, Vol. XI: PATH approaching, he’s been reflecting heavily during his time off the road. On his IG, you can find snippets of a much tinier Kaelin Ellis banging on a drum set as his dad cheers him on behind grainy VHS footage.

“I got disconnected from my roots a little bit, and I recognized from that video of my dad talking to me when I was a little kid that everything I experienced is not random at all. It wasn’t just because I had a couple of records that did pretty well or people bought my samples, literally, my dad spoke that over me.”

When I spoke with Kaelin, he was in London on his way to a meeting with another producer he met online through his Twitch community. On Twitch, Discord, and YouTube, Kaelin documents his music-making process while interacting with viewers through livestreams.

He plans to build up his online community, The MKRS Club, to provide even more resources for up-and-coming producers. Fostering community through collaboration and knowledge sharing has remained important to him. He credits his community as one of the main reasons he’s never done creating.

On his next project Vol. XI : PATH Kaelin looks forward to exploring more Caribbean rhythms. His partner introduced him to artists like salsa musician Willie Colón, whom he credits heavily for his approach to instrumentation on this next project.

When asked what’s been giving him hope about the future of R&B, Kaelin spoke passionately about wanting to see more collaboration. “I love seeing the older generation of R&B embrace the younger kids who actually sit and learn about how to really craft a song. It’s like that moment in the Tank and Tyrese Verzuz where Tyrese introduces Kenyon Dixon. Kenyon’s so tough.”

With a newfound trust in himself and the community he’s building, Kaelin looks forward to creating art that moves people to discover something new about themselves. “I make music and create it because I feel God gave me a really incredible thing to use to help somebody else.”

The National R&B Hall of Fame explores the evolution of R&B and highlights how, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, producers shaped an entire generation. As they state, “R&B started to become homogenized, with a group of high-profile producers responsible for most R&B hits”. This perspective accurately reflects how hits were crafted and styles were defined across eras of R&B, allowing the genre to remain both consistent and innovative.

The truth is, what was happening during this timeframe helped prepare the next generation and was extremely influential in the rise of hip-hop. The late 80s and 90s gave us producers like Teddy Riley, who had a way of merging R&B and hip hop, giving us lasting hits like “My Prerogative” by Bobby Brown, “No Diggity” by Blackstreet, and “Piece of My Love” by Guy. Babyface was a consistent hitmaker, giving lovers a space to be seen with timeless classics like “Never Gonna Let You Go” by Faith Evans, “I’m Ready” by Tevin Campbell, and “Superwoman” by Karyn White. The list of great producers continues with Darkchild, Dallas Austin, and the legendary duo Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, just to name a few. Let’s not overlook the fact that these greats were influenced by key figures in the R&B game: Jerry Wexler, Berry Gordy, and Quincy Jones, all of whom established a solid blueprint for many to be inspired by generation after generation.

Now, in a time where podcasting is on the rise, we have the ability to connect more with these influential figures, learning more about their stories, history, and how they contributed to the evolution of R&B and Black culture. We see these conversations on shows like R&B Money Podcast, which is hosted by Tank, a notable songwriter, producer, and singer, and J. Valentine, who is behind platinum hits; as well as Shawn Stockman’s On That Note podcast, where he is most known for being part of the legendary group Boyz II Men.

On a recent episode of On That Note, Shawn interviewed another notable R&B producer, Bryan-Michael Cox. Cox’s production career began in the late ’90s, and over two decades later, he is still contributing to the R&B landscape. He was recently recognized as one of Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Producers of the 21st century, holding the number two spot behind Jermaine Dupri. The conversation between two greats served as a reminder that R&B producers are the foundation of the genre and the translators of culture. Without the vision of producers, the genre as we know it would not exist. A producer can turn a flop into a hit, connect us to our emotions and identity, and help shape the careers of R&B superstars.

R&B production and the producers behind it do not just give us music to enjoy; they translate life experiences into words, sounds, and melodies that people can relate to, get lost in, feel deeply, and see their own stories in. It’s an undeniable gift and talent that elevates an artist’s visions and shapes an artist’s sound. They are intentional in vocal arrangements, instrumentation, layering, and timing, creating moods we can connect with while setting the tone and atmosphere. The influence of gospel music can be heard in much of what we love, as R&B producers have a way of evoking inspiration, empowerment, and hope through their work. There is a difference between a good song and a lasting song, one that continues to inspire and influence more timeless hits. The songs producers give us become part of our core memories, both individually and culturally. They orchestrate music that allows us to celebrate our loved ones, our birthdays, protest against injustice, and sing our hearts out.

R&B is not just an American genre; it influences the entire world, and producers are the driving force behind it. There are producers whose names we often hear, but we must also give flowers to the late greats and those who deserve to be amplified more. Static Major gave us timeless classics that still feel fresh today, including “Pony” by Ginuwine, “Rock the Boat” by Aaliyah, and “Cheers 2 U” by Playa. LaShawn Daniels is known for his contributions to major hits for Destiny’s Child, and the hit song “The Boy Is Mine” by Brandy and Monica. Missy Elliott creates space for women in this conversation and is notably known for her work with Aaliyah and Timbaland & Magoo. She also produced unforgettable classics, like “Free Yourself” by Fantasia and “Need U Bad” by Jazmine Sullivan. Mariah Carey is another credible producer, having self-produced major hits like “Fantasy” and “Don’t Forget About Us,” with a catalog that continues far beyond the songs mentioned.

The producers who emerged in the late 80s and 90s have evolved into the 2000s and continue to give us major hits today. We should also keep our eyes on those who are leaving a mark on today’s R&B, including D’Mile and Kaytranada, both of whom have contributed to recent work by Alex Isley, along with other notable names like Steve Lacy, who has produced for Kali Uchis, Solange, and The Internet; and Jack Rochon, who has produced for H.E.R., Kehlani, Beyonce, 6LACK, and Nija.

Today’s producers continue to show that R&B does not become stagnant or fade away. R&B sets the tone, the standard, and remains a trendsetter. When the question arises of whether R&B can last or if it is the same as it once was, we must recognize that it is not only lasting, but continuously evolving to meet the present moment while still honoring its past, and we can show gratitude to the producers and production behind it all.

Written by Courtney Clardy

Darhyl "DJ" Camper Jr. started practicing music at six. He hated it, actually. Piano lessons his parents pushed him into, and a small town in New Jersey — Mays Landing — that, by his own account, nobody comes from. “Nothing comes from it,” he told Sheen Magazine. “I’m very blessed to be one of those to come out of that.”

That was the setup, but by 11, he was all in. The rest of his story one of the steadier rises in contemporary R&B. His first placement was at 16 with Bow Wow and Omarion (“Hoodstar”), a Grammy nomination for Elle Varner’s “Refill” by his early twenties, and then a stretch of work across the last decade that includes H.E.R.’s “Focus”, Coco Jones’ “ICU,” Mary J. Blige, Brandy, Tamar Braxton, Keyshia Cole, FLO, Kehlani, and at one point, five songs charting on the Hot 100 simultaneously. Camper has been building a legacy for years. Most people are just now catching on.

Campilation, his debut album, released January 23rd, is the announcement. Eleven tracks, live piano arrangements, real bass, layered percussion — built the way that lasts. And a guest list that looks like someone threw a party and invited everyone who mattered: Stevie Wonder, Brandy, Victoria Monét, Jill Scott, Lucky Daye, Ari Lennox, Syd, Tank, Ty Dolla $ign, Tone Stith, Alex Isley, and more. He described it to us as a family reunion. “Food was definitely served,” he said. You believe it.

The Jill Scott record is worth stopping on. “OOWEE,” which also features Ty Dolla$ign, is the kind of song that sounds like it should have always existed. Scott’s warmth over a soulful hip-hop vibe that doesn’t rush itself, Ty Dolla $ign threading through. The whole thing feels like a room full of people who are happy to be in the same room. Camper talked about it like a man who still can’t quite believe it happened. “Working with Jilly from Philly was a dream come true,” he said. “The synergy was like no other.”

And then there’s “LOVE ME,” where Stevie Wonder plays harmonica. In 2012, Camper posted on Twitter: Wish I could get Stevie to play harmonica on this interlude I did, that’s the only thing it’s missing. Over a decade later, it happened — not on that interlude, but the same idea, the same dream, finally made real.

When someone showed him the old tweet recently, he covered his face with his hands. “Man, I said that?” he asked. “I was just talking to God.” That detail tells you everything about how Camper moves through the world — patient, faithful, specific about what he wants, and fully ready when the moment arrives.

For his first Grammy — Best R&B Album, thanks to H.E.R.’s debut album in 2019 — he flew his whole family from Jersey. His mother walked the red carpet with him. He still talks about it that way, like it just happened. Because some things you don’t let go of, and you shouldn’t.

What pushed him toward his own album, eventually, was watching artists he’d built move on — and sometimes stumble without the same results. “Let me keep stuff for me,” he decided. “Let me bet on myself.” That’s not bitterness. That’s clarity and vision. Campilation is the proof of concept — not just that he can make hits for other people, but that he has a perspective worth hearing directly. He sings on this one, too. Brandy is the one who cracked that open. Working with her on B7, he said, gave him confidence he hadn’t foreseen. If Brandy tells you to sing, you sing.

“Welcome to the Camp” — the tag you’ve heard on records for years without maybe knowing whose it was — turns out to be exactly what it sounds like. His studio in LA is The Camp. The community he’s building around himself, the producers he works alongside, the artists he’s carried and the ones carrying him now — all of it is the camp. “It’s no goodness of my own,” he told us. “I know who I come from. It’s not just me. It’s the camp.”

Bongo ByTheWay is that someone.

The Nigeria-born, Providence-raised, LA-based producer has been threading himself through the fabric of modern R&B for over a decade through records with Summer Walker, Ari Lennox, Jazmine Sullivan, Chloe Bailey, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, and more. And he never makes it about himself.

“I look back, and I’m like, man, I’ve been really like a heartbeat in R&B.” The realization is still fresh, even though the catalog has been building for years.

Often with music, we hear from the artist that lead the songs. But what about the producers that are bringing those classics to life? For the Producer Issue cover story, I talked to one of today’s leading R&B producers about his journey, his biggest hits, and what’s next.

Starting on Pots and Pans

Bongo’s introduction to music wasn’t through a traditional studio or a mentor with a deal. It was pots and pans, a church drum kit, and a brother who handed him Stevie Wonder records like they were scripture. “He introduced me to everything,” Bongo says. “From Stevie Wonder to D’Angelo to The Roots to Jay-Z.” By 8, Bongo was rapping. By 11, he realized that he needed beats to rap over, and couldn’t just borrow other people’s. So he made his own.

On a four-track tape recorder and a Casio keyboard, he started building music for his friends in Providence. Little neighborhood albums. No budget, all heart. That was the first version of music production for him. It wasn’t built out of being a career move, but as a necessity.

The moment it became real came later, when he started spending time at a professional studio in Atlanta with his cousin, eventually landing a placement with Musiq Soulchild. “Being around that environment,” he says, “that’s when I was like, okay, yeah…I could do this for real.”

The Texture Savant

Ask Bongo what his production signature is, and he doesn’t hesitate. “Texture,” he says. “I’m a texture savant.” He can go ‘70s soul, ‘90s R&B, contemporary hip-hop, or pop. The genre shifts, but there’s something consistent running underneath all of it. A feel. A weight to the drums when the drums need weight. A willingness to strip everything back when the song demands it.

That instinct for restraint shows up most clearly on “Girl Like Me” with Jazmine Sullivan and H.E.R. — the Heaux Tales record that he names as one of his most impactful. It arrived in the cultural moment right after Cardi B & Megan Thee Stallion’s mega smash “WAP,” and it offered a different kind of anthem for women. And Bongo made a call that still surprises him: no drums.

“I didn’t want anything to get in the way of the record,” he says. “We had live strings. I just stripped it back to really let it breathe because of what they were saying, and how amazingly they were singing it.” For a producer who describes himself as being very particular about drums, that was a significant leap. It now lives on as a definitive song on a Grammy-winning classic album, and the lesson stuck.

What the World Told Him

Bongo didn’t set out to become the go-to producer for women in R&B; it kinda just happened over time. He describes his lane as wide. He swerves genres, works across formats, and doesn’t like to be boxed in. But somewhere along the way, the pattern made itself clear. Someone told him early on that the world would eventually tell you what it wants from you.

“I looked back, and I was like, man…I’ve worked with Mariah Carey. Jessie Reyez. Mary J. Blige. Lizzo. Summer Walker. Ari Lennox. Teyana Taylor. Tinashe. Coco Jones. And More. It has consistently been the vibe. So you’d be remiss to not take note of that.”

When he works with women, the approach changes — and he’s deliberate about why. “The song has to come from their perspective,” he says. “Love and relationships have always been hot-button issues, but even more so now. Whether they want to be strong and independent, or vulnerable and loving, you have to be attentive to where each person is in their life.” He’s producing the music, but he’s also holding the space. That combination, it turns out, is kinda rare in music these days.

In the Room: Four Artists, Four Stories

JAZMINE SULLIVAN

Producing for one of the most technically gifted vocalists alive could be an exercise in pressure. Bongo doesn’t see it that way. “I don’t approach it differently,” he says simply. What he does bring is gravity — the weight and intention the record deserves. The result was a creative relationship that produced one of the best records of the last decade. For a producer who once said he’s almost never released a drumless record, stripping everything back for “Girl Like Me” wasn’t a compromise. It was the whole point.

SUMMER WALKER

“Take Me Out This Club” came together with songwriter Jozzy and was recorded at the LVRN studio in Atlanta. By the time Bongo walked in, Summer had already cut it. “I walked in with favor already,” he says, laughing. “The deal was already sealed.” What struck him wasn’t just the record — it was her focus. Summer had just finished “Heart Of A Woman,” and watching her listen back to her own work, he could see it clearly. “She’s serious about her craft.” There are more records in the vault, and Bongo makes clear he wants to keep building.

CHLOE BAILEY

“Working with Chlöe was nothing short of amazing. It was literally perfect,” is how Bongo describes working on her second solo project ‘Trouble In Paradise’ — and he means it in the most specific way. They went to St. Lucia for two weeks to lock in. The work was focused, professional, and deeply collaborative. What set it apart was Chlöe’s willingness to collaborate, even though she’s more than capable of doing everything herself. “She was super open-minded and allowed herself to be produced,” Bongo says.

“Some artists don’t have the wisdom to do that. A lot of people think they know everything. I watched her promote the records herself, pour her own money into the vision, show up as a complete artist — dancing, singing, acting, directing, the whole thing. She’s mind-blowing, honestly. She’s the epitome of an artist. Working on that album was one of the best working experiences.”

​​ARI LENNOX

Bongo and Ari locked in for two weeks in LA, and out of those sessions came “Smoke” and “Wake Up” (my personal favorite from her album Vacancy). What he remembers most is what it felt like to be in the room while she was actually singing. “When she’s in the booth hitting crazy notes, it’s mind-blowing,” he says. “Sometimes artists will get in the studio and hold back, but I was able to hear her range, the things she appreciates vocally, and she’s just so dope.”

Beyond the voice, what struck him was her as a person — she showed up to the sessions with gift baskets, grabbed things for his pets, and moved through the room with the kind of warmth that makes people want to do their best work. “We’re going to keep working for sure,” Bongo says. With records like “Wake Up”, that’s less a plan and more an inevitability.

Bring Love Back

Bongo is bullish on the future of R&B, but he’s clear-eyed about what’s held it back. Marketing, mostly — the infrastructure to get these artists in front of the audiences they deserve. A lot of the artists that Bongo has worked with are amazing, but they don’t get the support they need. But he senses a shift. “Fans are starting to appreciate musicality again in real, tangible ways, and when attention moves, money follows.”

AI has been a hot topic in music lately, especially Black music. We’re starting to see artists and songs made up completely by AI prompts. Some fans (myself included) are perplexed by the thought. Bongo draws the line at craft — not technology. “AI as a tool, I can see that,” he says. “But to completely circumvent the whole process? That’s a loss for everyone. The engineers, the songwriters, the producers, the love of the thing itself.” What you can’t clone with AI, he says, is real soul. And real soul is exactly what R&B is supposed to carry. It’s supposed to make you feel. Cry. Yearn. Lust. Emote.

His vision for where the genre goes next is simple and ambitious at the same time: innovation plus love. “When Timbaland did double-time drum fills for the first time, we were like, whoa, what is this?” he says. “That type of innovation, sonically, that’s what I’m excited about. And then, substance-wise: bring love back.” He talks about rap’s dominance creeping into R&B’s messaging for years, flattening its emotional range. He wants to reclaim the space. “We’ve been down that road. We can break away.”

Recently, Bongo has worked with Lekan, Durand Benarr, and Saint Harison, artists that he says are vocally insane and bring a much-needed texture to the genre. So Operation Bring Real Soul Back is well in the works.

ByTheWay Wednesday

Beyond the studio, Bongo has been quietly building something else with his manager and business partner Cory Ford. ByTheWay Wednesday is a monthly R&B night he co-hosts in LA — live band, curated themes, a room where Stevie Wonder might perform, and A$AP Rocky might be sitting at the next table. “You could be right next to your favorite artist and not even know it,” he says. It’s become one of the most genuine R&B spaces in Los Angeles. “It doesn’t feel pretentious. It doesn’t feel like Hollywood. It just feels like a great vibe.”

That instinct – to build community around the music, not just contribute to it – says a lot about who Bongo ByTheWay is at his core. The production credit is one thing. The intention behind it is another.

What’s coming next for Bongo is a full production slate: SiR, Lucky Daye, Muni Long, Joyce Wrice, Anderson .Paak, Jeremih, and more are still tucked away. Each one is a bet on music made by people who mean it.

“Innovation is what moves the culture forward. Sonically, yeah. But also — we gotta bring love back. That’s what I want people to remember from this era.”

He’s been the engine behind records that move people. Now Bongo ByTheWay is taking the wheel - delivering R&B from the heart and for the heart.

Bonita Jalane is Brooklyn-born, but she’s been in Atlanta for a while, so she calls herself an “apple peach,” which is one of the coolest things I’ve heard all month. Music was never really a choice for her either. Her grandfather toured the chitlin circuit. She was in a choir at five years old, traveling to Japan and Canada, and already holding notes most kids her age aren’t even thinking about. By her mid-teens, she’d decided to pursue music seriously, and not long after that, she was laying hooks for the likes of Dipset. Just casually! As one does.

Fast forward to 2025, and ‘Kept Kissing Frogs’ – the album – drops. For Bonita, frogs is an acronym. Forgive, Release, Overcome, Grow. The “frogs” on this album aren’t bad exes. They’re the hard things: depression, fear, betrayal, the stuff you have to move through to actually become yourself.

She wasn’t kissing frogs looking for a prince. That was the “work” that had to be done and the process to get where she is now. That reframe alone made me want to go back and relisten to the whole thing differently.

Her influences are thee ones. Dinah Washington, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Lauryn Hill, Etta James, Ella Fitzgerald. Bonita is pulling from people who treated singing like a calling, not a career, and you can hear that in what she does. There’s weight behind how she moves through a song. Sonically, I hear Jill Scott. I hear Teedra Moses. On songs like “Somebody”, you hear how Bonita blends modern R&B production with classic soul influence.

When I asked her which track off Kept Kissing Frogs she’d want someone to start with, she said, “That’s like separating a mama from all her kids,” which is a perfect answer. But she landed on “I Love Myself.” She talked about it like an affirmation you say to yourself when you’re running low, when you’ve been giving grace to everybody but yourself.

Her dream collab? Lauryn Hill. She reasoned that it would be healing and that a song like that could move across generations. Bonita is clearly thinking about legacy and not just virality, which in 2026 is genuinely refreshing to hear from an artist that we’re just discovering.

What she wants you to feel is nostalgia. She wants you to feel like there’s more out there for you. She’s not making music to be a soundtrack; she’s making it to remind people they have a purpose worth showing up for. Whether or not Kept Kissing Frogs does that for you will probably depend on where you are in your own process right now. But give it a real listen. Bonita Jalane is just getting started, and she sounds like she already knows exactly where she’s going.

Stream Kept Kissing Frogs now.

YAMS Magazine is built for people who take R&B personally. Keep up with Bonita Jalane at @BonitaJalane.