Gallant: How The New R&B Saved My Life

By Paul Casey

Brainwaves living in stills / Your nightmare’s just floating on film, babe
You found it in the white lies, back of your mind
You know it’s not the same reel that you dusted off before
So set it in a tape deck / Put it in a VCR / Show me how you got in this predicament
Did the Devil let you down? / I could tell you it’s the apex / I could tell you it’s the Alhambra
Take another shot of your adrenaline / Pray you’ll get that far
—Gallant, “Manhattan”

I have previously defended R&B as a genre intent on raising lowdown human behavior to high art. These are the songs that will make you human, even at your lowest. As suicide prevention, the new R&B is beautifully capable. There is something in the way this new wave of artists combine a bleak outlook with a compassion for those who find themselves on the bottom. The best R&B has an urgency that implores the listener to engage in human behavior.

Nothing solidifies a musical relationship like bad times, and the last six months have been unreasonably hard. The song “Manhattan” by Gallant is one reason why I am still alive nearly halfway through 2015. No joke. Shape up; you’re nearly there. When I question my inability to stop defending bad people/great artists, I think of songs like “Manhattan.” It expresses a low state immediately and with precision. The harmonies and high vocal lift you up and keep you a viable human being. It is a marvel of a song.

In an ideal world everyone would acquire human partners to provide what this song does. I failed to do so a long time ago. This music is not merely to my taste, it provides something I can’t get anywhere else. “Manhattan” has an unconditional love to it that was gladly received amid plans to end my life. The song made me feel shameful that I was willing to throw away a life that had such wonderful things in it. It also made me hopeful.

R&B covers a wide spectrum of human experience. In my experience it is best at bypassing the brain and making the listener feel. The things that it makes the listener feel should be appreciated more. There is no better music for navigating the complex and worrisome human states. We should always be suspicious of people who say things like “I like good R&B,” usually fixated on that one Marvin Gaye album where he is slightly political.

Good R&B is good music in 2015, whether it comes with its Rap relations or locked into the bedroom. Sometimes the people who make it are bad, sometimes they are good. This is another reason why R&B is positioned to drag a person out of a nervous breakdown and put them back together. It is a genre of contradictions. Elegant things make coarse and coarse things made elegant. Nasty people creating beautiful things.

Gallant is one in an encouragingly large number of musicians seeing R&B through a new golden period. His Zebra EP was my favorite music of 2014 and his two new tracks “Open Up” and “Talking In Your Sleep” are among my favorites of this year.