But mostly "Mind of Mine" emphasizes signs of complexity: the elaborate synth swirls that float through "She," for instance, or the careful layering of soft-funk guitar lines in "Bordersz," one of several cuts co-written and produced by Malay, who's best known for his work on Frank Ocean's Grammy-winning "Channel Orange" album.
It was the soft, futuristic funk closely tied to disco that ruled hip hop's early days on record, to the exclusion of the hard James Brown beats so beloved of the first b-boys.
There's a great bit where, in one of the album's many interludes, Knowles' mum Tina delivers a brilliant, clear-headed speech on how celebrating blackness isn't anti-white that segues straight into Don't Touch My Hair ("... when it's the feelings I wear"), a Sampha-assisted soft electro-funk throb that nails the reclamation of black identity.
And he'd risen again in the public eye in recent years: in 2014, Prince released "Art Official Age," and he followed that in 2015 with a pair of albums, "Hit n Run Phase One" and "Hit n Run Phase Two," which stepped warmly into the soft-thump funk, inventive, borderless jazz, and rallying sentiments that have been taken up by pockets of younger R. & B. acts.
(A&M/Octone) Playing a scrubbed-clean mix of R&B, light funk, soft rock and power pop, the airless and exceedingly popular Maroon 5 sounds like everything, and it sounds like nothing.
Dam-Funk, who is from Los Angeles and whose real name is Damon Riddick, is a passionate advocate of '80s funk — softer, more bulbous and frillier than its older cousins, teeming with a tender masculinity.
RAM's sound design is less indebted to techno and house than to funk and soft rock, for both good and ill.
This second charabanc jumps around just as much as his first, taking in reggae, a piano ballad, soft rock and vocoder funk.
We can't all be blessed with the ability to sermonise about underage pregnancy and drug addiction with lines like: "What about the junk head/ Could have gone the whole way/ Lighting up the stage trying to get a deal/ Now he's lighting up the wrong way/ Something for the pain!" That right is preserved for those who can combine rapping with singing, and blend funk with soft rock.
Several critics observed that Off the Wall was crafted from funk, disco, soft rock, jazz and pop ballads.
