But the type of love embodied by the Obamas was once a lyrical staple of R&B. The songs of Smokey Robinson and Gamble and Huff in particular were almost poetic and certainly nuanced in their celebration of romance and transcendental love in black America. The golden age of such grown-up love songs was the 1970s when vocalists - Marvin Gaye, Teddy Pendergrass, Phyllis Hyman, Minnie Riperton and others - imbued their evocative lyrics with a knowingness and vulnerability long absent in today's R&B.
While the rise of acts such as Mary J. Blige and R. Kelly set new templates for modern R&B, the hardness they appropriated from hip-hop stripped the genre of its transcendency. Blige and her platinum-selling disciples, namely Keyshia Cole and Jazmine Sullivan, sing with tears and venom of a love they're not really ready to receive.
Meanwhile, the male singers generally express their love through the acquisition of material things. The women on their arms must be as fly as their cars. The sad thing is that they usually see the two as one and the same.
