Check out ExpressMiluakee.com's article on Trey below! Trey headlines the Milwaukee Theatre on Saturday, Feb. 25, at 8 p.m. with special guest Big Sean. Click HERE to get your tickets now!
The last half-decade has been a transitional one for contemporary R&B. One of the dominant forms of American pop music throughout the '90s and the early 2000s, the genre has since been squeezed out of pop playlists, supplanted by trendy, European-inspired dance-pop. While some of R&B's most commercially savvy singers like Usher and Chris Brown have adapted, Trojan-horsing their way onto pop radio through Euro-pop synths and club beats, Trey Songz has taken the opposite path. He's redoubled his commitment to purebred R&B, dedicating the bulk of his 2010 album Passion, Pain & Pleasure to traditional ballads and slow jams. His audience is no doubt narrower for that—even after a four-year hot streak of huge urban-radio hits, he's still only an incidental presence on Top 40 playlists—but as he sees it, he's part of a movement of R&B artists who are making the best out of the genre's diminished commercial standing.
"I think R&B is being reignited right now," he says. "You've got Miguel, who's a new guy who came with a special sound; you've got Mary J. Blige, who's always going to be on the radio; you've got The Weeknd on the underground, which has this following that's amazing; you've got Frank Ocean and his sound and his crew; and Ne-Yo, who is still around doing great music. So I think we have an opportunity to make the R&B charts look R&B again. What we really have to take responsibility for as R&B artists is ensuring that this style of music stays alive, because it's so easy to do the pop thing. It's so tempting to try to get the biggest record you can, but that's not what R&B is about right now."
Songz wasn't always an artist that fans would have pegged to become one of R&B's esteemed torchbearers. His first albums were largely unimaginative, and he was widely dismissed early in his career as an R. Kelly knock-off, but he's become a more daring, innovative singer as his star has risen. It was his free 2009 mixtape Anticipation that truly announced him as an artist with a unique vision. It didn't attract much notice at the time, but the mixtape's shadowy, spaced-out production was miles removed from the bright gloss of commercial R&B. It was an oddly prescient release, foreshadowing some of the more austere and off-kilter sounds that Drake and The Weeknd would later popularize.
"I stumbled upon this mood and I just loved the way it felt, and how soulful and deep and dark it was," Songz says. "So as I finished one song, I would sit with my producers and we would mold more songs around that mood. We ended up creating this dark, moody place. When you listen to Anticipation, you just go to that place, and you're there from the time the music starts to the time that it ends. It's seamless."
Anticipation was released as a prelude to Ready, the 2009 album that announced Songz as one of R&B's A-listers. As the singer's career took off, it seemed like the mixtape might remain a one-off fluke, but last November he followed it up with a sequel, Anticipation 2. The new mixtape expands on the warped sounds of its predecessor, while paying frequent homage to Marvin Gaye.
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