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About this Song
For every genre that travels across borders to take root in new cultural contexts, there is a body of work that redefines what the form can hold, reshaping its core assumptions to reflect the specific contexts, histories, and lived realities of the communities that claim it as their own. This is particularly true of R&B, a genre that has evolved far beyond its mid-20th century origins in the United States to become a global language of creative expression, adapted and reimagined in nearly every region of the world, each bringing a distinct set of cultural reference points that expand the genre’s scope far beyond what even its earliest pioneers could have imagined.
