JUNE IS BLACK MUSIC MONTH

 By Kenny 'Cinque' Anderson

A Black Man’s Critique of Black R&B Love Music as Romanticism

“For decades Black folks have been doing the most singing about and listening to romantic love songs, yet Black men and women for the most part aint really been seriously working on developing no loving relationships. In 2023, 44.6% of Black children lived with only their mothers.” - KenRaySun

June is Black Music Month, a time to honor the genius, soul, and sacred fire of Black sounds. Among its richest expressions, R&B music especially from the Classic Soul era has served as protests words, racial pride, cultural balm, and intimate soundtrack.

Specific R&B Black music with its themes of love, longing, heartbreak, and desire have given voice to our deepest emotional experiences. Indeed, as a child of the 1960’s and 1970’s I listened to all the classic soul love songs.

Yes, I listened to the love songs of Motown artists, Aretha Franklin, Issac Hayes, the Isley Brothers, Earth Wind & Fire, Roberta Flack, Barry White, Newbirth, Teddy Pendergrass, Chaka Kahn, Maze, LTD, Phyllis Hyman, and many-many others.

The older I got I remember asking myself, that Black folks make more love songs than any other people in the world, but where is the love between Black men and women? Had being caught-up in listening to love songs became an unrealistic substitute for working on love?

From my perspective as Black folks we must culturally critique popular Black love music over the decades and its impact on how we imagine relationships, especially romantic love.

Over the decades Black R&B love songs have often promoted romantic relationships as emotional utopias; spaces of escape, completeness, even redemption.

However, this fantasy love music comes at a cost! It can condition us to crave a version of love that is unsustainable, idealized, and detached from the realities of Black life.

The Black Love Fantasy Within the Harmony

Black Romantic R&B love songs provides us the fantasy that love is simple, natural, and transformative; that once you find "the one," everything else falls wonderfully into place.

Black love song lyrics seduce us into believing that love is a balm for brokenness, a cure for loneliness, and a shortcut to emotional wholeness.

The fantasy becomes dangerous when it teaches us that relationships should feel like a constant high ‘ecstasy’. That if love is hard, it must not be "real." But deep, lasting love is not about butterflies and ballads, it’s about emotional repair, truthfulness, accountability, shared struggle, and inner growth.

This idealized romantic love becomes a kind of drug, one that numbs us from confronting our trauma, our dysfunction, and the everyday pressures of being Black in an anti-Black society.

The Irony of Black Love Songs: Singing the Love Dream While Relationships Were Nightmares

The truth is that many of these Black singer icons who sang those timeless love songs voices we still adore were themselves locked in deeply troubled relationships, unable to live out the very ideals they recorded.

It’s no small contradiction when you are a realistic mature Black person that many of the Black R&B legends who gave us these love anthems couldn’t sustain love in their own lives:

*Marvin Gaye, the prince of sensual soul, whose duets with Tammi Terrell defined Black love, was in a volatile marriage with Anna Gordy and later had a deeply toxic second relationship that inspired his album Here, My Dear.

*Bobby Womac, whose admitting voice brought was “I Wish He Didn't Trust Me So Much,” was plagued by allegations of infidelity and many troubled relationships.

*Teddy Pendergrass, the king of seduction, had multiple public relationships and personal struggles, including the tragic accident that changed his life.

*David Ruffin of The Temptation’s whose romantic ballads are immortal, he battled with drug addiction and his relationships were notoriously toxic.

*Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, sang of empowerment and passion but endured abusive relationships and deep personal turmoil.

The above list of Black celebrity singers could be extended going on and on! These artists lived complicated, painful, often heartbreaking love lives which calls into question the very narratives of everlasting, redemptive love they popularized.

Their personal lives didn’t match the fantasies they sung and yet we continue to consume those fantasies without critique.

Black Love Music Bypasses the Reality of Racist Oppression

Black romantic R&B often ignores the structural realities of Black life: economic hardships, racist policing, mass incarceration, inter-generational trauma, and mental health disparities.

These racist produced realities press on Black relationships like heavy weights and yet in most love songs, they are either invisible or irrelevant.

This romantic Black love escapism bypasses both external stressors and internal wounds. It tells us that love will heal everything without addressing:

*The pressure of Black men to perform masculinity without vulnerability.

*The unhealed wounds from childhood that haunt our emotional lives.

*The struggle of Black women to be loved beyond labor and survival.

*The mistrust and miscommunication born from systemic racist oppression and promoted divisiveness along with misplaced anger.

In ignoring these truths, the music sets us up for failure. We come to relationships with sky-high expectations and no skills for how to sustain them. And when the fantasy breaks, so do we.

Though this is a critiquing article it isn’t a call to silence Black love music, it’s a call to deepen it. We need more R&B love songs that tells the whole truth about Black love. That acknowledges the pain, the struggle, the trauma, and the growth.

Black love music that honors not just the beauty of connection but the very hard work it takes to keep that connection alive. That sings about the challenging labor of love, not as an escapist fantasy.

In real life, Black love is not magic it’s a challenging, sacrificing, and loving maintenance. Black Love is not a soulful lullaby, it’s a committed struggle, a classroom, and a healing practice.

Real Black Love Ain’t a Fantasy—It’s a Fight to Overcome Challenges!

Romantic R&B love songs has given us some timeless genuineness and surrealness —but also dangerous illusions. As we celebrate Black Music Month, let’s not just press play on the classics love songs.

Let’s press pause and reflect on these love songs with emotional soberness. Let’s love with our eyes open. Let’s build love that doesn’t depend on perfection or escape, but on commitment, self-awareness, and shared transformation.

Because love, like Black political freedom progression ‘self-determination’, is not a feeling, it’s a choice! And like any struggle worth fighting for love demands more than harmony. It demands truth!

The following are some Black Music Month provoking questions reflecting this article for readers:

1. Why do we continue to idealize romantic love in music when real-life relationships rarely reflect those ideals?

2. How has R&B music shaped your expectations of what love should feel and look like?

3. What does it say about our culture that we crave love as escape rather than love as shared struggle?

4. Why do we rarely hear love songs that deal honestly with trauma, mental health, and healing?

5. How do economic stress, racism, and gendered oppression show up, or fail to show up in our favorite love songs?

6. Can we truly sustain love without addressing our internal wounds and family legacies?

7. Are we addicted to the feeling of love more than the practice of love?

8. How might our relationships change if our music centered honesty, growth, and conflict resolution over fantasy and seduction?

9. What are the consequences of using romantic love as a replacement for community, therapy, or spirituality?

10. What responsibility do artists have to reflect the real emotional lives of Black people—not just their desires?

11. How can we raise the next generation of lovers to desire love rooted in truth, healing, and liberation?