3.Researching Genre (by David Wegierski)

The music genre for our song is R&B that stands for Rhythms and Blues. This is because we have chosen the song “The Hills “sang by The Weeknd. R&B is a mixture of elements like; rhythm and blues, soul, funk, pop, hip hop and dance. In the early 90’s R&B Artists has begun adding more hip-hop sound to their songs. In the late 90’s an artist Neo Soul has combined 70’s soul influences to the hip-hop music sound that led by artists like Maxwell, Lauryn Hill and D’Angelo. The artists Missy Elliott and Hill further blurred the line between Hip-Hop and Rhythms and Blues by recording it in both styles.

In 1995 of the biggest music events “Grammy Awards has enacted the “Grammy Award” for the best R&B Album. Additionally in the same year The Neptunes and Timbaland has set influential precedence on the music genre of R&B and hip hop music. Throughout the years the R&B genre as well as many other different genres have been improving and using much more technology and machine – made sounds. This has made the R&B sounding much better and interesting at the same time. R&B is often described a style of African America music that originates after the demise of disco in the 80’s. R&B is also been used to define the bass & rhythm however the accuracy of this abbreviation is open to discuss considering that the bass forms a part of a rhythm going along with the drums.

The lyrics that are in most of the R&B songs now a days include work, sex, drinking and mostly everyday life. Normally women in the R&B music videos are sexualised and she’s made to fit in the environment by wearing revealing outfits that shows off to the audience. However males have also been shown in the music videos wearing very revealing outfits. Also in the recent years women rappers that release their music videos seem to be breaking the stereotypical image of women being used as an object as they present themselves as a leader or main person in the video.
R&B genre usually uses different locations such as mansions, streets, fields, deserts and nightclubs. The Weeknd singer has successfully shown these sort of location in his recent new album where he either films his music videos on a desert, a big house, a street, rich estate and etc. In each of his music videos it tells a story behind another story.