Hip-Hop’s Marvin Gay, the man who put the R in R&B, or my personal favorite, the prince of pillow-talk. No matter the moniker, there is no debate, R. Kelly is likely the biggest influence on modern day R&B. Imagining a world without R. Kelly would result in an imagined world without the likes of The-Dream, Trey Songz, Miguel or even Usher. With a natural likening to the original sensual tune-makers of the 1970’s and 80’s like Gaye and Isaac Hayes, Kelly donned his R&B roots beneath a Hip-hop cloak. He wasn’t the first artist in his subgenre which was termed, “new jack swing’, but he was definitely the one who brought it to the pop-culture forefront in the 90’s.

In 1993, R. Kelly changed R&B music forever when he released his studio debut, 12 Play. Sex is all over music and media in general today. Sex sells, as they say. But sex didn’t always sell music. That was thanks to the collaborative efforts of all R&B artists in decades past. R. Kelly was certainly one of these pioneers. Not worried about hiding behind metaphors or toned down realities, he said everything in black and white for all to hear. No need to try and interpret what it was that Kelly was talking about, it was sex, plain and simple.

This is where he shines. Uninhibited by any sort of mental restrictions regarding what is right and what is wrong to talk about. The album starts and ends with Kelly’s soothing crescendos delivered with the strongest sentiment of passion. By the time he was done with them, these R&B elements seemed to be intrinsically related to Hip-hop. The pitch variations and harmonic melodies put in the same room as boom-bap and funk; lock the door and throw away the key. When you hear Kelly’s voice crumble beneath its own weight and intensity saying, “My mind’s tellin’ me no. But my body, my body’s tellin’ me yes!”, gold is struck.

Dirty and perverse, yet not at all. Kelly makes making love constantly sound better than acceptable, he makes it sound necessary. Sexual meaning is found in almost every millimeter of this project’s architecture. There are moments like ‘Freak Dat Body’ and ‘Back To The Hood Of Things’, where Hip-hop makes headway over R&B to switch things up stylistically and they take away from the audible caressing Kelly does on the rest of the album while remaining catchy and worthwhile.

Apart from these moments, he has compiled a playlist of sex songs for any moment with 12 Play. Its relevance will never fade. Looking beneath the incredibly sexual natured exterior of each track you will find love and care. Kelly is a romantic at heart, an incredibly sexual one. His songs are held together by his equally sexual tone and a fantastic delivery of each note. He is capable of shifting the focus from light-hearted love to dirty, secretive sexual exploits and fantasies while making them both sound equally sensual. Seriously, if this album hadn’t come out months after I was born, I would seriously consider its conception as being a reason for mine — it is that sexual.

Ultimately, it ends up being in Kelly’s straightforwardness and simplicity that he succeeds, rather than abstractness. The concept is no more than creating good sexual music and in that respect is has more than succeeded. The only thing missing from the album now, is a bed.

Music can be terrifying. Eminem has proved this over the years with his specifically branded shock rap style. Admittedly, the terror emitted through his projects stands somewhat aloof from that of other artists that have their lyrical roots planted strictly in realism. In 1995, only a year after Nas’ realistic hip-hop masterstroke, we got an album that perhaps trumped Illmatic in its depictions of street life in American ghettoes. I can think of very few albums more deserving of the title, The Infamous, than Mobb Deep’s terrifyingly realistic second album.

The album had as much or more gangster bravado than any album had before or has had since. It was as if Prodigy and Havoc were on trial before a jury and asked to fully describe what it was like to grow up in their neighborhood without any reservations. The era was rife with gangs, which meant beef between crews and the constant dread of looking over your shoulder for those involved. This dread is foreboding throughout this project. On the track, ‘Q.U. – Hectic’, Havoc lays down a beat that opens like a gun barrel being pushed in your face. It is unexpected, full of questions and unrelenting.

From there, the lyrics take form as something of a Queensbridge gangster’s manifesto. Drugs, violence and fear run rampant over the track, leaving a lingering filth in the air. The entire album contains a certain grit that haven’t yet been attached to a hip hop album. “Life isn’t the game that it seems to be.” This lyric perfectly sums up what the duo was trying to convey with this album; that life isn’t some fairy tale where you play by the rules and survive. In their world, fighting directly correlates with surviving and its perspective is primitive and extremely frightening.

The beats lend themselves perfectly and come across as the ambient noise of the time-period and literal geographic location. Extremely distorted synths, lazily slow bass-hits and hi-hats all combine to sound like something that crawled up from beneath the Queens city streets. The album is alive with the sounds of death, both lyrically and instrumentally. Cinematic is the perfect way to describe Prodigy’s rhyme style. You can picture him jetting down back alleys, trying to get home and warn his homies about their impending doom. It paints a picture for sure, just not a very pretty one.

Even ‘Drink Away The Pain’, a song that starts out sounding something like a hood love story ends up as a pessimistic worldview allegory. The duo tells their story in the only way it should be told. No cover-up, concealer or masks. By the end of each song, you suddenly are capable of looking at the world differently and that is a powerful thing for music to do. It is a hood-horror story to any and all outsiders but even scarier when you stop to think that this is just another day in the life for them. To try and imagine a person other than a cop, feeling like they have to wear a bulletproof vest on the day-to-day challenges your perspective.

That is perhaps this album’s biggest strength, not any of its individual parts, but the fact that altogether it is a very challenging listen when you actually try to hear and feel it. It is a book in rhythmic audible form and is both un-relatable at times and profoundly relatable at others. You certainly think twice before putting yourself in their shoes for each song, as it is sure to be a dark journey. Regardless of how depressing the final product may be, there is no denying that it is fantastic music all around. From production to writing, everything is top-grade material. If you like your music descriptive, bound in realism and with a dark storm cloud ever-looming above it, then this is one of the greats. If not, still it remains, one of the all-time greats.

Stripping something down to its bare essentials is often used as a way to explain something being done much simpler or equating to lesser. I think the the beauty of this phrase is much more prevalent than most would suggest. It is a way of saying that you can create the same outcome with less, or making do with what is given, nothing more. I think one of the greatest examples in music of a time when something was stripped down to the bare and ended up sounding like everything but was on A Tribe Called Quest’s album, The Low End Theory. In 1991, Hip-hop was finally reaching its potential as a genre at that time period. Artists were experimenting freely with their sound and pushing the envelope all around. It was really the middle of a golden era. While progression was in the forefront of most artistic minds at the time, A Tribe Called Quest was thinking back. Back to what hip-hop really started as, back to jazz, back to bass and back to lyrics.

There is no other way to say it. This album is a classic. It set the pace for the next decade of hip-hop music. The beats were a simple methodical combination of jazz and bass. The lyrics were complex and the rhyme schemes were dizzying yet incredibly focused. The group had all the essentials: Q-tip, the rapper with a soothing and direct voice that seems almost too easy to listen to and not mention a super-sized dose of lyrical ability. Phife Dawg, the Robin to Tip’s Batman. A perfect compliment and addition to Q-tip’s skills often lending to the songs where Tip may leave something out. Where Batman typically thinking of an abstract solution to a problem can be relative to Q-tip’s lyrical approach, Robin jumping in and charging head on can be equated to Phife’s knack..Finally Ali Shaheed Muhammad, the DJ/producer behind the sound, the vibe creator.

Every song is minimal and created with a similar intention in terms of production, yet they  all offer something completely different. A stand-up bass, plenty of drums and a lineup of brass horns and phones ready to go. This is that bareness that exudes confidence in the project. The rhymes are able to fall within every track’s beat-groove and all the bassy hits mirror the punch of the final syllable in the bar. Plain and simple, it is top-notch rhyming that could pass as classic even without the beat. The rhythm is in the verbal flow and it mutuality with the beat only proves to extend the album’s listenability into a whole new beautiful realm.

The lyrics span from abstract and intellectual to comedic and punchy. It is music not catered to hip-hop outsiders yet its appeal shows otherwise. The words depict a level of skill not often evident in most popular music yet it was all a perfectly fitted puzzle of an album that formed drew a picture anyone can vibe with without feeling alienated from the common genre tropes found in hip-hop. It gets political, speaks on social issues like date rape yet retains a completely upbeat sound throughout its entirety. Nothing is dumbed down, simply stripped to its basic parts. It is intuitive and shows how little it actually takes to create something that not only keeps pace with everything else, but pushes it all forward in terms of the effort put into it. The beats, the lyrics and the overall construction of the LP are all evident of the fact that The Low End Theory must have been to create some high end music.