Following our Billboard staff-picked list of the 100 greatest songs of 2000, we're writing this week about some of the stories and trends that defined the year for us.
Here, we look back at R&B at the turn of the millennium, and how after a half-decade, the burgeoning neo-soul movement reached a long-awaited critical and commercial breakthrough -- which was also, unfortunately, the subgenre’s peak.
If you chart modern R&B’s course on a map, you’ll notice a giant fork in the path around the year 2000. Actually, it was more of a massive roundabout, leading to an increasingly segmented space where whichever music didn’t sonically match mainstream radio would be sidelined for most of the following 20 years.
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