“Where Do You Go When the Radio’s Down?”: Black Women Experimental Pop Artists, “Alternative R&B,” and the Simultaneous Dissolution and Persistence of Musical Genre

Abstract

Since the early 2010s, the musical genre “Alternative R&B” has been used to describe artists who combine R&B songwriting and vocal delivery with electronic music and production. Meant as a means for music writers to grapple with both the ongoing evolutions of R&B and the synthpop and synth R&B revivals of the decade, the category Alternative R&B has become a catch all for Black artists who sound even remotely influenced by R&B—and for Black women artists in general. This article traces Black women experimental pop artists’ complex relationship to the moniker Alternative R&B through grounding this apparent siloing within a context of the past 100 years of Black women in American popular music. By tracing the disidentification with “Alternative R&B” of contemporary experimental pop artists FKA twigs, Tinashe, and Dawn Richard, it calls for a re-evaluation—and dismantling—of racialized musical genres.