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ChilledSoul Vol. 19: Hip Hop/R&B Mix

Thirty-two tracks balanced on the line between hip-hop and R&B at the moment when that line stopped meaning very much.

Stream rnb and hip hop mix 2000-2007 part 2 by Marco Marc 2 | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

ChilledSoul Vol. 19: Hip Hop / R&B Mix

The premise of this volume is a distinction that was already dissolving when it was made. By the late 2010s the separation between rapping and singing had become a matter of degree rather than of kind, and the most interesting records were the ones that refused to choose.

What holds the set together is production rather than genre — a shared preference for muted drums, jazz-derived chords and vocals mixed into rather than on top of the track.

What to listen for

Robert Glasper's "Gone", with Cordae, Bilal and Herbie Hancock, is the most significant thing here. Glasper's Black Radio project put jazz musicians and hip-hop artists in a room as equals rather than as guests, and having Hancock on the track makes the lineage explicit.

Brent Faiyaz's "Trust" is the template for a whole subsequent decade of R&B: vocals low in the mix, production hazy, emotional register deliberately withheld.

Snoh Aalegra's "Bad Things" with Common is the best-sung record on the list, and Masego's "Flight 99" is the most fun.

Terrace Martin's "Think of you" with Kamasi Washington is the Los Angeles jazz connection, and worth following into both men's own catalogues.

Little Dragon's "Pretty Girls" and Rhye's reading of "A Whiter Shade Of Pale" are the left-field inclusions, and the Rhye is genuinely strange.

Chloe x Halle's "who knew" is early enough to be interesting, and Brandy's "Say You Will" is the veteran entry that shows how comfortably she fits this context.

Emotional Oranges, UMI, Sabrina Claudio and Tay Iwar represent the wave of artists who built audiences without radio at all.

Go deeper

Robert Glasper's Black Radio (2012) is the album that made this whole category possible, and it won a Grammy for doing so.

Terrace Martin's Velvet Portraits and Kamasi Washington's The Epic are the Los Angeles side; Tom Misch and Jordan Rakei are the London equivalents.

Listening note: the tell that a record belongs to this moment is where the vocal sits. Once producers stopped pushing the voice to the front of the mix and started treating it as one instrument among several, the old distinction between a rap record and an R&B record became a matter of how many words were in it. Listen for that placement and the whole set reads as one genre rather than two.

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