In 2006, when Nas rapped “Hip Hop Is Dead,” R&B lovers were left wondering if there was a coffin for new R&B music too. Although LL Cool J, Nelly and Ja Rule were successfully able to carry a tune and rap, even they knew there was a huge difference between holding a note and legitimate singing. Since the early 2000s, hip-hop has been drowning in singing rappers via vocoders or Auto-Tune, and T-Pain took a lot of the blame for it early on. Meanwhile, the majority of these sing-songy rappers could never effectively sing Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me” nor win The Masked Singer . T-Pain was one-of-one no matter who copied his Auto-Tune style. So this left R&B singers in a weird space. Should they start rapping to stay relevant, or continue to sing and just hope someone pays more attention to a genre that was slowly being ignored? So far, Chris Brown and Lauryn Hill are the only legitimate R&B singers who are equally good at rapping, with Billboard hits to back that statement up. Other R&B...
