R&B.
Rhythm, soul, and feeling.

Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis built their Minneapolis Flyte Tyme empire after being fired by Prince in 1983, while Babyface and L.A. Reid founded LaFace Records in Atlanta in 1989. Together, these two production camps defined the sound of 90s R&B from opposite philosophical starting points.

In late 1971, Curtis Mayfield wrote Super Fly as a reckoning with a world he knew firsthand, drawing on his own Chicago childhood and a period of personal upheaval to produce nine songs that out-argued the film they accompanied. The album's moral weight begins with "Little Child Runnin' Wild," which Mayfield confirmed contained the details of his own life, and it was recorded at RCA Studios in Chicago with a live ensemble that included guitarist Phil Upchurch, bassist Joseph "Lucky" Scott, and arranger Johnny Pate.

Between 1977 and 1979, Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers made three Chic albums for Atlantic Records that redefined what a rhythm section could do in popular music. From the Gold-certified debut through C'est Chic and Risqué, Edwards' bass playing anchored some of the era's most consequential recordings, including "Le Freak," Atlantic's biggest-selling 7-inch single of all time, and "Good Times," whose bassline became the foundation for the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" and inspired Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust." Edwards died in Tokyo in 1996 at 43, but the groove he laid down has never stopped moving.

In July 2015, the premiere of the "Ojuelegba" remix on OVO Sound Radio brought Wizkid's Lagos-rooted Afrobeats track to a global audience, with Drake and Skepta adding verses that deepened rather than redirected the original's emotional core. Produced by Legendury Beatz and drawn from Wizkid's 2014 album Ayo, the song had already won Song of the Year at The Headies 2015 before the remix amplified its reach. The collaboration stands as one of the clearest examples of how a specific, place-rooted song can travel without losing what made it matter.

Frank Ocean's Blonde (2016) was built across Abbey Road, Electric Lady, and Henson Recording with a rotating cast of producers including Malay Ho, Om'Mas Keith, Pharrell Williams, James Blake, Jon Brion, and Rostam Batmanglij. The album's sonic identity — fragmented, deliberately thin, built around disorientation — is announced in the first seconds of opener "Nikes," where Ocean's voice is pitched up several semitones before dropping to its natural register.

Rich Harrison, a Washington D.C. native steeped in go-go music, built the sonic identity of early 2000s R&B through vintage funk percussion rather than digital polish. His productions of Beyoncé and Jay-Z's "Crazy in Love" (2003) and Amerie's "1 Thing" (2005) trace a single, physical argument about where the drums belong.

On January 24, 1967, Aretha Franklin recorded two tracks at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals before an altercation ended the session. Producer Jerry Wexler then flew the Alabama rhythm section to Atlantic Studios in New York, where Franklin, her sisters Carolyn and Erma, and saxophonist King Curtis completed the album. Released on March 10, 1967, *I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You* reached number one on the R&B album chart and number two on the Billboard 200, and produced two chart-topping singles in "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)" and "Respect."

TLC’s “Waterfalls,” released May 29, 1995, and produced by Organized Noize, nearly went unreleased after Clive Davis refused to back the video. Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes wrote a note on a poster board to convince L.A. Reid to fund it. The song became the first number-one single to reference AIDS, spent seven weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and won four MTV VMAs including Video of the Year, making TLC the first African-American act to receive that honor.

Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” recorded at Electric Lady Studios in 1972 and released as the lead single from Talking Book, is built on eight layered tracks of a single Hohner Clavinet model C, functioning simultaneously as lead, rhythm, and texture. That compositional choice explains why the song remains impossible to replicate and eternally alive on the floor.

Bernard Edwards, co-founder of Chic, wrote bass lines so melodically distinct and rhythmically precise that they simultaneously launched hip-hop, inspired Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” and became the production template for disco’s post-1979 afterlife. His 1979 groove on “Good Times”, voted the greatest bass line ever by Bass Player Magazine, is the connective tissue running through three genres that claimed no relationship to each other.