Skip to main content

Victoria Monet VibeZ

Victoria Monét wrote hits for other people for a decade before anyone let her have her own. Twenty-five tracks of the most satisfying delayed arrival in recent R&B.

The songwriter who finally took the microphone

Victoria Monét McCants, from Sacramento, spent years as one of the most reliable writers in pop — most visibly as Ariana Grande's long-term collaborator, with credits across "thank u, next," "7 rings," "Break Up with Your Girlfriend, I'm Bored" and much of Grande's best material. She also wrote for Fifth Harmony, Nas and Chris Brown.

Her own releases came out steadily and quietly through the 2010s, and the industry treated her as a writer who sang rather than a singer. That changed with Jaguar (2020) and then decisively with Jaguar II (2023), which won three Grammys including Best New Artist — an award for someone with fifteen years in the business, which says more about the industry than about her.

The music is deliberately live-sounding: funk basslines, real horns, and an emphasis on groove that owes more to the 1970s than to anything on contemporary R&B radio.

What to listen for

"On My Mama" is the biggest and the best — built on a Chalie Boy sample, with a horn arrangement and a vocal that is closer to a strut than a performance. "Smoke" with Lucky Daye is the sultriest thing here.

"Experience" with Khalid and SG Lewis is the disco record, and "Jaguar" and "Ass Like That" show the humour that runs through her writing — the latter is a song about the gym, and it is funnier than it needs to be.

The interludes — "Big Boss," "We Might Even Be Falling In Love" — matter to how her albums work; she uses them as breath rather than filler.

The features map her standing: Buju Banton, T.I., Summer Walker on the "Girls Need Love" remix, and Leon Thomas on "Breaking Point."

Go deeper

Jaguar II (2023) is the album, and it is short, warm and superbly played. Her daughter Hazel appears on it and became, at eighteen months, one of the youngest Grammy nominees ever — a detail that is either charming or absurd, and probably both.

Go and re-listen to Ariana Grande's Sweetener and thank u, next knowing Monét co-wrote them. The phrasing is unmistakable once you know to listen for it.

For the funk-forward lane she works in: Lucky Daye, Anderson .Paak and Silk Sonic are the contemporaries, and Chaka Khan and Rufus the model.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more