Part of Culture in Motion — an ongoing series examining who defines culture, how race is interpreted, and how both are reshaped over time.
My R&B education came from Brandy and Monica, Whitney Houston and Xscape, Jodeci and Keith Sweat, Gerald Levert and SWV, Destiny’s Child. Artists whose voices were the instrument — not the software, not the pitch correction, not the studio architecture built around a limited range. Artists who could walk onto a stage with nothing but a microphone and prove, in real time, that everything you heard on the record was real. That standard is not nostalgia. It is the preservation of a genre. And it is the standard I bring to every conversation about whether R&B is actually having a moment — or whether it is having a marketing moment dressed up as one.
By that standard, two of the three women being honored at Billboard’s 2026 Women in Music Awards pass without question. Kehlani and Teyana Taylor are the real thing.
I watched Kehlani perform “Folded” on the Jennifer Hudson Show last night — her Grammy-awarded hit, live, no net. It sounded like she was in the studio. Not because it was polished, but because her voice is that instrument. There is no gap between the record and the room when Kehlani sings. The control, the vulnerability, the effortless navigation of range — all of it present and accounted for in real time. You cannot fake that. The artists I grew up on couldn’t fake it either, and neither can she. Teyana Taylor operates from the same place, though the texture is different — rawer, more jagged at the edges, the kind of voice that carries lived experience the way a scar carries a story. When she harmonizes, you don’t just hear the notes. You feel the weight behind them. Both women are carrying something the genre needs more of — proof that R&B at its best is still a vocal art form.
Mariah the Scientist is a more complicated conversation. She is undeniably striking, and her commercial moment is documented — “Burning Blue” topped Rhythmic Airplay, gave her the highest-charting album of her career, and earned her Billboard’s Rising Star honor. The culture has spoken. But when I apply the same standard I apply to everyone else on this list — the standard of Brandy, of Whitney, of the artists who built the genre — I hear something that doesn’t fully hold up. The tonality is flat. The range is narrow. And when an artist is constructed primarily in the studio, the question the genre has to ask itself is whether that construction serves R&B’s long-term preservation or works against it. The voice has always been the proof. It still should be.
None of this diminishes the broader moment. Leon Thomas, Giveon, Lucky Daye, Nia Sultana — the artists making R&B feel urgent right now are doing it the same way it has always been done, by putting something real on the line every time they open their mouths. As Alex Isley’s Latest Release Leans Into Restraint examined, the artists doing the most interesting work in this space are the ones committed to the voice as the primary instrument — not the loudest voice, not the most technically acrobatic, but the most honest. Isley, like Kehlani and Teyana Taylor, understands that restraint is only powerful when the foundation beneath it is real.
R&B is having a moment. Two of the three women at the center of it are exactly who the genre needs right now. The third has the industry’s attention — and that is worth something. But the genre’s preservation has never been built on attention alone. It has been built on voices that, when the lights go up and the studio falls away, can still make a room go still.