There’s a deep divide, if not an outright schism, in R&B right now. After years of easy overlap with the pop charts, the genre is rapidly falling out of favor with Top 40 radio. To adapt the most commercially savvy R&B artists are purging more traditional urban aesthetics in favor of the flashier, faux-Euro dance-pop of David Guetta, will.i.am and Taio Cruza style that urban radio formats haven’t embraced. If there’s an upside to so many R&B singers going house, though, it’s that it has spurred a back-to-basics movement from the R&B singers uninterested in chasing those pop trends, and that’s meant a whole lot more work for one of hip-hop and R&B’s great producers, Salaam Remi.
An introvert in a genre that favors oversized personalities, Remi never achieved the fame of Timbaland or Pharrell Williams, though you can probably hum a couple of his songs. Cutting his teeth during hip-hop’s golden age, he produced Ini Kamoze’s 1994 hit “Here Comes the Hotstepper” and The Fugees’ 1996 breakthrough “Fu-Gee-La,” as well as the entirety of Blacksheep’s little loved but occasionally brilliant sophomore album, Non-Fiction.
Raw, quietly imposing and often laced with an ever-so-slightly off-kilter reggae accent, Remi's signature sound had grown dated by the turn of the century, yet the producer continued to find work. Remi became a crucial collaborator for Nas, whose early century critical comeback he assisted with tracks like “Get Down” and “Made You Look,” and Amy Winehouse, whose sound he shaped with extensive production on both of her albums.
Where there’s pressure on most urban producers to stay with the times, Salaam Remi is now in demand precisely because he hasn't modernized his sound. He never abandoned old-school beats, so he’s the logical, go-to producer for rap and R&B artists looking capture an old-school feeland lately, there are a lot of those artists.
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Remi was prolific last year, contributing fine work to albums from Big Boi ("Follow Us"), Cee-Lo Green ("Bodies") and Jazmine Sullivan (her current hit "10 Seconds"), but his golden achievement was Miguel’s “All I Want is You,” 2010’s most striking R&B hit and a testament to the limitless potential of a great beat, a great singer and a sad sentiment. With its grimy, bare-bones beat and muted mix, "All I Want is You" is a stark rejection of high-gloss Top 40 techno-R&B.
Though Remi's sound remains grounded in the '90s, he has continued to refine and tweak it, experimenting with ever bolder arrangements. “Spray,” an unreleased Trey Songz track that leaked online last week, tests how far Remi can push it. It’s a throwback to New Jack Swing, though few New Jack Swing beats were actually as wild as this.
By the producer's own account, he's been busy in the aftermath of the success of "All I Want is You." "So much New Music Coming," he tweeted last week between studio sessions. "The 1st 2 weeks of the year have been great..gon do this 26 mo times." That's welcome news, especially coming from a veteran talent who could have so easily been left behind by the music industry over a decade ago.
