If It’s Cool: Notes on Slow Jams, Black Masculinity, and the Possibilities of Black Pleasure in Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite

April 2, 2021, marked the 25th anniversary of the release of R&B singer Maxwell’s debut album Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite. At the time of its release, the album, which chronicles the progression of a heterosexual romantic relationship, was heralded as a thoughtful alternative to the more gratuitously raunchy work produced by other Black male vocalists of the era. Furthermore, the album, along with D’Angelo’s 1995 album Brown Sugar and Erykah Badu’s 1997 album Baduizm, has been credited with ushering in the neo-soul movement within Black popular music during the midto late 1990s. R&B has often been much maligned as “rhythm and bullshit,” a vapid genre fueled by fantasy and escapism, offering little in the way of Black politics. The denigration of R&B became particularly pronounced as hip-hop emerged as a dominant cultural and musical phenomenon. Mark Anthony Neal (2003) observes, “As hip-hop music began to demand more airplay, generate more sales, and dominate the black social imagination, it was seen as a window into the travails of black America, whereas R&B was simply seen as a ‘bunch of love songs’” (p. 3). Robert Patterson (2019) makes a similar observation regarding how R&B is taken up in relationship to hip-hop. He writes: