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About this Song
R&B’s global spread over the past several decades has never been a process of erasure for local musical traditions, but rather one of mutual influence, where global genre conventions are shaped just as much by the artists who adopt them as those artists are shaped by the formal structures that define the genre. Too often, conversations about global popular music frame transnational forms like R&B as a homogenizing force, erasing the unique cultural perspectives that artists from outside the genre’s origins bring to their work, but that framing ignores the core truth that any musical genre is a living, changing entity, shaped by every creator who picks up its conventions to tell their own stories.
