Crystals & Silica

7 songs

This list is for the "odd stuff", urban music that without a face to attach it to would be difficult to categorize. “R&B” and “rap” have become catch-all descriptors for many black artists. “Alternative” (or worse, “hipster”) is often affixed to those terms when musicians embrace sounds that fall outside the confines of “urban” music, a radio format initially designed to boost underplayed artists that’s since become a holding pattern for them. Nowhere is history’s rigid racial divide made clearer than in Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip Hop chart—specifically, in its name. It evolved from such monikers as Harlem Hit Parade and Race Records Juke Box in the ’40s, to variations of R&B and Soul Singles in the ’60s and ’70s, to Hot Black Singles all the way up until 1990, remarkably. Essentially, genre terms can now be used to create modern-day race records: music defined on who it’s made by and supposedly for, and who it’s distinctly not. at the end of the day its all Crystals and Silica, music that really knows no race.