Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane: the year is 2009. Barack Obama has been POTUS for about two months and Michael Jackson is preparing for what would have been his final tour ever and Kanye West still hasn’t even crossed paths with Taylor Swift at this moment in time. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world Kelly Rowland is in France along with David Guetta getting ready to commercialize EDM music with even realizing it.
Rowland was attending one of Guetta’s shows in the south of France where he initially played the instrumental for what would become the pairs Grammy award winning ‘When Love Takes Over’. Rowland found herself so emotionally invested in the track that she asked Guetta to write lyrics to the beat. Rowland who was in between albums faced resistance from her label as they didn’t want Rowland to confuse or alienate her urban fan base. Ultimately the song released in April 2009 and became one of the first house/dance songs to chart globally. The song became a sleeper hit selling upwards of 6 million copies globally. The song’s success would inspire the direction for Rowland’s next album and she even recruited Guetta to produce the project. Rowland released ‘Commander’ in 2010 as the lead single from her 3rd studio album. The song garnered critical praise once again for Rowland and Guetta but failed to reach the commercial highs of its predecessors. Despite the mixed feedback, Rowland forged ahead and released her junior set, Here I Am in July of 2011 and the albums campaign was short lived due to not having a well performing single attached to the body of work.
Over the duration of the decade, house, dance and EDM music has become very commercialized and mainstream as the sound has evolved and developed which help push its artists and producers to brand new heights. Rihanna released the 6th biggest song this decade which happened to be a dance song (We Found Love, for those of you wondering); Brittney Spears nabbed a #1 on the Hot 100 via her feature on ‘Scream & Shout‘ and Calvin Harris sold 40 million plus records in the United States alone this decade. Even David Guetta parlayed his success to become one of the world’s highest earning DJs. But what about Kelly? Kelly’s impact on dance music was terribly overlooked and as the story often goes, the person who starts a trend is normally used to be the sacrificial lamb that nobody believes in until the next person validates the ‘coolness’ of the trend the original person started. Kelly Rowland has the ability to sing your faves favorite underneath a table, (as shown in the video below) and her brief turn as dance music’s queen could’ve marked the beginning of a new chapter for Rowland. I’ve always believed Kelly is this generation’s Donna Summer. Her tone. Her delivery. Her presence. Her range. However, I think due to dance music being taken over by a group of people who had nothing to do with it’s origins made Rowland’s R&B dried audience fearful to fully commit to an album full of dance music from the singer.
I say that to say this: Kelly Rowland…if you happen to read this, please consider a return to dance music. I think the genre is in a place to be far more accepting of a brown skinned woman today than it was when you carried the torch nearly a decade ago. You shine here (and everywhere else for that matter) and as diversity becomes more of a regular occurrence in Top 40 thanks to artists like Dua Lipa, Normani, Khalid & DaBaby I think it’s only fitting you come back and claim your rightful crown as the queen of a genre you helped make mainstream. Your talents and abilities have been overlooked and downplayed for as long as I’m comfortable with and I hope this new decade brings with it the respect your name carries.
The Sounds of Music 