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Contemporary R&B: Slap is Extinct

#21
This got me thinking Dr, Is their ANY form of current pop music where the Electric Bass is important in the mix?

It sure isn't like Motown, or the early Jazz rock of the Steely Dan, Chicago, and the Michael McDonald Doobies, or Disco, or even Classic rock like Zeppelin or the Allman Brothers. The electric bass is almost a non instrument in most current pop records (outside of some country) and the way they do mix it when they have a bass player it might as well not even be there.
 
#22
mdiddium said:
I just bought the 2007 Erykah Badu "Amerykah Vol. 1," and heard a couple of slap/pop licks thrown in. No prominent grooves completely slapping, but those particular riffs did grab my attention, so I thought I would post the relevance here (I'll have to look up who the bass player is, haven't read the liner notes yet).

Anyway, yeah, I agree that's it's sort of passe for right now, but you never know when it could be used to great effect.

For example, anyone see the Youtube clip about Steely Dan cutting "Peg?" They specifically didn't want Chuck Rainey to slap on the tune, so he just turned around so that they wouldn't see him slapping through the studio glass on every chorus. For me, that's one of the elements that makes the tune, and even Donald Fagen and Walter Becker had to admit that it helped better the song. Given that is an old song now, but it's the same "no slap" attitude that was eventually turned around.

So, maybe if we are sneaky, we can bring slap back into the mainstream!
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For those that haven't seen it:



What bass was CR playing on that one?

And I like the EQ there. Slap doesn't have to be all trebly all the time.
 
#23
burk48237 said:
This got me thinking Dr, Is their ANY form of current pop music where the Electric Bass is important in the mix?

It sure isn't like Motown, or the early Jazz rock of the Steely Dan, Chicago, and the Michael McDonald Doobies, or Disco, or even Classic rock like Zeppelin or the Allman Brothers. The electric bass is almost a non instrument in most current pop records (outside of some country) and the way they do mix it when they have a bass player it might as well not even be there.
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I still hear some tasty bass in r&b. I really like the new Raphael Saadiq and RobinThicke CDs.

The decline in slapping is ironic for me at a personal level. People who have met me at GTGs or music stores probably think I am very slap happy, and I do slap alot when I am just fooling around. The catch is that I have never slapped very much when I am actually doing a gig.The two players that really captured my imagination when I was young were not slappers. They were Bernard Edwards and Anthony Jackson. Bernard, of course slapped in later Chic, but the bass work that made him famous was all finger style or faux pick playing.
Anthony Jackson, of course, famously rejected slap. Of course I loved Larry Graham, Marcus Miller, Louis Johnson, etc. but in my heart, I love fingerstyle or even pickstyle playing. I look forward to hearing new Bernard Edwards' or Jerry Jemmotts in the future.:)
 
#24
I actually played some slap on a R&B session today but I don't know if they will use it. Many producers and songwriters,particularly young ones,don't really know the variety of sounds you can pull out of a electric bass.There are so few real bass parts in contemporary R&B anyway just booming tuned 808's.Now the neo-soul movement in the '90's brought back BASS parts but slapping wasn't a big part of it.
 
#28
Maybe I listen to different music?? not much on the radio but lots of what I am hearing is a lot of real bass. Even though I am not a fan of Beyonce she seems to have some great basslines. Deja Vu, me myself and I, and etc. But I listen mostly to stuff branded "neo soul" lots of different tone. Not much slap. But I disagree with the comments that the mixes are bad cause they dont sound like the 60's. Most people have better radios. my little JBL travel headphones can reproduces a low b without distortion at high volumes and I can still tell the instruments in the mix.

But back to slap. you dont hear it as much as when the bass came back to black music. With Erykah badu and Maxwell and so forth. But its the trend. Just be thankful people want to hear bass and there are so many of us making a new living in session work. Hopefully I can get some of that.
 
#29
mrniceguy715 said:
Maybe I listen to different music?? not much on the radio but lots of what I am hearing is a lot of real bass. Even though I am not a fan of Beyonce she seems to have some great basslines. Deja Vu, me myself and I, and etc. But I listen mostly to stuff branded "neo soul" lots of different tone. Not much slap. But I disagree with the comments that the mixes are bad cause they dont sound like the 60's. Most people have better radios. my little JBL travel headphones can reproduces a low b without distortion at high volumes and I can still tell the instruments in the mix.

But back to slap. you dont hear it as much as when the bass came back to black music. With Erykah badu and Maxwell and so forth. But its the trend. Just be thankful people want to hear bass and there are so many of us making a new living in session work. Hopefully I can get some of that.
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+1, I hear some great basslines, just no slap. Deja Vu is a great example. That Estelle song, "American Boy" is another example. I love slap, but I can live without it being dominant. When it is time for it to come back , it will.:)
 
#30
I don't think that it's disappearing, I just think that the majority of bassists out there nowadays don't slap much at all and not only that, the music doesn't call for it.

Has anyone heard Jill Scott's latest live CD? That CD is full of R&B goodness. Adam Blackstone on bass, fretless everywhere. Full of fingerstyle.

Most bassists are the younger guys where it's normally about pulling off some rediculous fill on the tail end of a bassline. Can't do that slapping, right? Not only that but Neo Soul has taken over. With laid back slow grooves why slap?

It will eventually return one day....
 
#32
DWBass said:
I'm gonna slap 'til I can't slap no mo'! The current state of 'radio' r&b is a sad one! These home brewed studio producers using samples, beats and synths are killing music! I really don't listen to the radio these days anyway! The music sounds the same. The singers sound the same with the exception of a few! Here today, gone tomorrow. Whatever happened to long term careers like Gladys, Tina, Stevie, Luther, etc???

As far as slap bass, it's pretty prevelant in Gospel and smooth/contemporary jazz and is still quite a staple in live local music scenes! Definitely going strong in my neck of the woods!
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+111111111
 
#34
DWBass said:
These home brewed studio producers using samples, beats and synths are killing music!
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:hyper:YES! Was listening to a radio show today featuring a sound engineer who was saying exactly the same thing. Everything seems to be done with ProTools-esque programs to the detriment of creative ingenuity and actual talent developement. The number of new bands whos' vocals sound fantastic on record because of digitised-smoothing...then when it comes to an actual live show...they sound like tom cats being repeatedly fed into a mincer. It's the same with guitar/bass effects where everything is digitally modelled until you can make a guitar sound like a piano at the hit of a switch with NO idea of what is going on. *breathes*
 
#35
thetawaves said:
:hyper:YES! Was listening to a radio show today featuring a sound engineer who was saying exactly the same thing. Everything seems to be done with ProTools-esque programs to the detriment of creative ingenuity and actual talent developement. The number of new bands whos' vocals sound fantastic on record because of digitised-smoothing...then when it comes to an actual live show...they sound like tom cats being repeatedly fed into a mincer. It's the same with guitar/bass effects where everything is digitally modelled until you can make a guitar sound like a piano at the hit of a switch with NO idea of what is going on. *breathes*
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that's probably why it all sounds the same, too.... there's a finite number of plugins;)
 
#37
Dr. Cheese said:
That's not a very good argument. You have mentioned artists who were active over a fifty year period. Just think, neither Chris Brown or Destiny's Child were born when Fats Domino was at his peak. (Heck, I wasn't born and I am old enough to be Beyonce or Chris Brown's Dad.:eek:) No contemporary music sounds the same after fifty years. Also there is no style of music where all of the artists sound the same.
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Its a good argument, you ignored a bit part of my premise.

"Lawrence Cohn, author of Nothing but the Blues, writes that rhythm and blues was an umbrella term invented for industry convenience. According to him, the term embraced all black music except classical music and religious music, unless a gospel song sold enough to break into the charts."

Basically any popular black artist that isn't religious, jazz, or classical is marketed as R&B. Chris Brown, And Usher, have more in common with pop artists than Marvin Gaye, who you did not mention at all because the gap is no longer 50 years long like you say.

If R&B is a genre, what in elements in R&B are close to exclusive to R&B. What do Fats Waller, Marvin Gaye, and Destiny's Child have in common musically that is found scarcely everywhere else? Other than the fact that they're popular African American artists.

If R&B is
 
#39
AlphaMale said:
Its a good argument, you ignored a bit part of my premise.

"Lawrence Cohn, author of Nothing but the Blues, writes that rhythm and blues was an umbrella term invented for industry convenience. According to him, the term embraced all black music except classical music and religious music, unless a gospel song sold enough to break into the charts."

Basically any popular black artist that isn't religious, jazz, or classical is marketed as R&B. Chris Brown, And Usher, have more in common with pop artists than Marvin Gaye, who you did not mention at all because the gap is no longer 50 years long like you say.

If R&B is a genre, what in elements in R&B are close to exclusive to R&B. What do Fats Waller, Marvin Gaye, and Destiny's Child have in common musically that is found scarcely everywhere else? Other than the fact that they're popular African American artists.

If R&B is
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Since you want to argue, we can. I did not ignore Marvin Gaye to make my argument stronger. Marvin Gaye died well before Chris Brown was born and Beyonce and Usher were toddlers, so the idea that the music bridges a long period of time still applies. Furthermore, Marvin Gaye was a pop artist. Think about all of the singles he released for Tamla prior to gaining artistic freedom in the early 1970's. Even after he gained freedom and started multi-tracking his voice, he still turned out a bunch of great pop like After the Dance, Got to Give It Up, and Sexual Healing. As for Fats Waller, you are the first person I have ever known of who called his music r&b. Most critics I know of considered him part of the jazz or the swing era since his peak was in the 1930's, well before early versions of r&b like jump blues were created.

As for Lawrence Cohn's opinion, I respect it, as I respect yours. I don't, however, agree with it. I think that r&b is a very broad category like rock or country, and over the years, there have been very distinct movements within the genre like Soul, Funk, and Neo-Soul. I will agree with Cohn to a degree that r&b is a bit of a catch-all term, but I feel that popular Black music is distinctive enough that it deserves its own category.
 

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