Top 10 People Who Most Helped Ruin R&B

He started to combine R&B with hip hop and pop regularly, and his songs (and songs he wrote for others) usually followed a simple, very similar formula. The production in most of his songs was almost identical.

He also had a habit of using autotune, even for singers who didn't actually need it. Many of his lyrics were lazy and lacked true thought. They were all very surface level. To top things off, he never had a strong voice in the first place, and by 2011, his sound had already become outdated.

Rico's famous tag in the beginning of every song he was a part of was "I think this one's for the radio," and man, he wasn't lying. Most of the songs he wrote and produced sounded like they were trying so hard to be hits, combining hip hop or pop with R&B, just like The-Dream, and they lacked true soul.

His approach to songwriting and production was even more formulaic than Dream's. Very short verses, choruses consisting of excessive repeated words or phrases. However, unlike The-Dream, Rico at least had some pretty nice moments early on. "Your Love" by Pleasure P, for example.

Thing is, these were never the songs that would become hits, and some of his best work was unreleased. Many of his beats sound almost identical to each other.

He definitely helped to blur the lines between R&B, hip hop, and pop, and obviously introduced autotune into R&B.

Also, I would even make the argument that he paved the way for guys like The-Dream to come into R&B and be embraced. While he definitely had some good songs early on, they were never the songs that were released as singles. He was more known for singing hooks on other people's songs, which helped to hurt true R&B artists in the long run. Instead of getting an R&B singer to sing hooks, now rappers would just call T-Pain or Akon instead.

Yes, I said it. Keith Sweat.

Keith lowered the bar for singing talent in R&B, because let's be honest, the man had an awful voice. He couldn't hold a candle to real singers like Johnny Gill, Gerald Levert, and Aaron Hall.

Secondly, many of his songs were very formulaic and sounded way too similar. Apart from the hits that everybody remembers, much of his discography was interchangeable, and his lyrics were very basic and poorly written.

Okay, this one's controversial, but hear me out. While he definitely had some great stuff, he also:

1. Helped to combine hip hop with R&B, and he pushed the "R&B bad boy" persona heavily. He made it seem as if, as an R&B artist, now you had to compete with the rappers, and you had to be more "raw" or edgy to be respected.

2. He was horribly inconsistent. 12 Play isn't as great as you remember. The songs that were good really were good, but the other half of the album, with him trying to be a rapper, doesn't hold up as well. There were many far stronger R&B albums from this time, but this one always gets put up on a pedestal for some reason. This goes into my third point...

3. People treat him as if he's God-like, which is disrespectful to other R&B singers and artists who were just as good, some even better. People act as if R&B belongs to him, or that other R&B can never come close to him. I argue the point that if you were to take him out of the genre completely, R&B would still be great. In fact, in some ways it may be better.

4. Kelly helped to popularize the overly profane and graphic lyrics in R&B we hear today, and helped to take the love and soul out of the music.

5. He made it too much about hits. When people call him the king of the genre, one of the first reasons they give as to why is because "he's got a lot of hits." In my opinion, this is harmful to true R&B music.

6. His influence is undeniable, but that isn't necessarily a good thing. It can be argued that Kelly helped to influence some of the modern artists, like The-Dream or Eric Bellinger, who feel more like they're just trying to make hits rather than actually produce any soulful, true timeless music.

He wasn't as harmful as the others, but he did play a small part by mixing R&B with crunk in the mid-2000s.

Because of this, you had people accepting acts like Ciara as legitimate R&B artists, when really they were more like pop stars making R&B-flavored music.

He started out with promise, but even by his second album, and definitely his third, he veered heavily into pop and EDM, and eventually hip hop. Yet, people still treated him as if he was a top-tier R&B artist, and he was still labeled R&B just because of the color of his skin.

He also helped to further normalize using autotune regularly in R&B, as well as, later in his career, the quantity over quality approach to releasing music.

He was another one who redefined what an R&B hit would be in the mid to late 2000s, and not in a good way.

He also helped to mix R&B with hip hop and pop, to the point where a song like "Break Up" was able to become seen as an R&B hit. To this day, it is Mario's second biggest hit after "Let Me Love You," even though Mario has many far better songs that never cracked the top 20.

This one is also going to be controversial. While he definitely had some solid moments early on, it's undeniable how much he blurred the lines between R&B and hip hop.

He also normalized hip hop producers producing R&B. By the mid-2000s, it was hard to tell if his music was pop, hip hop, or R&B anymore.

This is an obvious one. He also started to mix hip hop and R&B together regularly, making both feel overly polished. The hip hop records started sounding too "soft," and the R&B had to have a hip hop edge to it.

He also made it normal for an R&B act to sign to a hip hop record label, which worked well for some artists. However, this ultimately hurt true soul music in the long run.