All I can tell you is that Nostalgia Ultra is straight up the best RnB shyt I've heard in like...7 years. Or whenever it was that RnB/soul fell off the cliff.
Channel Orange is straight trash. I guess if you're into that rambling Stevie Wonder shyt maybe it's hot. But it aint Nostalgia by a long shot.
Nostalgia was funky and soulful. Almost every beat had that groove you could dance to while hearing some thoughtful lines. "Strawberry Swing" has
the best writing I've heard in an RnB track in many years. That track blew me the fukk away.
Somewhere along the way, RnB cats forgot that you can sing about more than just love, relationships and girls. There's tons of other stuff to sing about. One of the greatest soul records is "Inner City Blues." Frank Ocean had tracks like "We All Try" talking about belief systems, and made it sound fly as hell.
and you wanna compare him to the fukking Weeknd?
shyt... the first verse of Novacane was probably a top 5 verse for that year.
I don't know a single RnB artist since the mid 2000s that has a collection of songs as good as "Strawberry Swing", "We All Try", "Novacane", "Songs For Women" and "Swim Good." Even songs I'm not fukking with like "Dust" are dealing with far more interesting ideas than any new RnB cat, or rapper for that matter.
