R+P Post 3: Music genres that interest me

An artist's genre is an extremely important part of their identity and impacts their image and how they will be marketed. Audiences expect certain things from a genre and the artist has to meet these expectations in order to appeal to them.

To help decide what genre we would do for our project, I looked into my personal favourites: R&B, Pop and Hip Hop.

Below is a mindmap of examples from each of these genres.

R&B

R&B is one of my all time favourite music genres, stemming from when I was little as it was what I mainly listened to with my family. R&B originated in the 1940s and was originally used to describe all blues records. This was later expanded to include music developed from soul, jazz and gospel. With the emergence of contemporary R&B in the 1980s elements of dance, hip hop and funk were also integrated into the genre, helping to make it more mainstream.

Examples of R&B songs are:

TLC - No Scrubs

Ginuwine - Just Because

Hip Hop

Hip Hop is a very diverse genre originating in the 1970s and is tightly linked with youth culture. Stylistic elements of the genre include rapping, DJing, beatboxing and synthesised beats. The raps included in these songs tend to be very personal to the artist and broach topics such as crime. The 'New School' hip hop wave started 1983/84 with the Golden Age of Hip Hop and saw the genre become more mainstream and be incorporated into other genres such as neo soul, pop and R&B. By 1999, hip hop was the top selling music genre and today is the most streamed genre on Spotify.

Below are some examples of hip hop songs:

Sugar Hill Gang - Rapper's Delight




Eve - Let Me Blow Ya Mind ft Gwen Stefani

Pop

It is important to separate describing music as popular from the term pop music as a genre, which has its own set of distinct characteristics the same as any other style. Pop music originated in the 1950s from rock and has mainstream mass appeal. It regularly uses elements from other styles such as country, dance, folk and jazz and typically the songs are about love and relationships. The songs tend to follow the traditional verse-chorus form, reflect existing trends and by nature promote recording and technology over live performance.  

Example include:

Sam Smith - Too Good At Goodbyes

Ed Sheeran - Perfect



Following our individual research, my group came together and discussed what genre would work best for our project and in the end we decided on contemporary R&B. We felt that this would work really well for our project as the genre is gaining more and more popularity as well as being diverse enough to allow us a lot of creative freedom whilst still conforming to the genre conventions.