#NowListening to a new record, just dropped yesterday, from Zo! and Tall Black Guy. Album is called "Expansions" -- and as expected, so far, it's top notch!

If you're looking for uplifting grown-folks R&B/soul, light house, etc., they're always a good listen.

Plus, plenty of great collabs: Raquel Rodriguez, Darien Brockington, Jazzy Jeff, so many more.

Good chance this is my daily player for a minute.

Here's "High On Your Love" w/Brockington and Jazzy Jeff on the turntables:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIZVcruiaw8

#soul #hiphop #Zo #TallBlackGuy #randb

"(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher" is an #RAndB song written by Gary Jackson, Raynard Miner, and Carl Smith. It was recorded by #JackieWilson for his album #HigherAndHigher (1967), produced by #CarlDavis, and became a Top 10 pop and number one R&B hit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmdZgmFh32U

"It's All Right" is a 1963 song recorded by #TheImpressions and written by the group's lead singer, #CurtisMayfield. The single was the most successful chart entry of the group's career. "It's All Right" was one of two top-ten singles for the group on the Billboard Hot 100, and the first of six number ones on the Billboard #RAndB chart. It also reached No.1 on the #CashBox R&B chart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1LLwC7N1h8

Song of the Moment: Kool & The Gang – “Celebration”

http://aeschtunes.com/2026/02/07/song-of-the-moment-kool-the-gang-celebration/

#Music, #KoolAndTheGang, #80s, #80sMusic, #1980s, #1980sMusic, #RAndB, #PopMusic, #AeschTunes

"Send My Love (To Your New Lover)" is a song recorded by English singer-#songwriter #Adele for her third studio album, 25. It was written by Adele, #MaxMartin and #Shellback, with the latter two also handling its production. The song was first sent to mainstream radio on 13 May 2016 and then released to #digitalFormats on 16 May 2016 by #XLRecordings as the third single from the album. "Send My Love" is a #pop and #RAndB song with an uptempo, rhythmic sound.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv7VAQ4kj14

"I Can't Get Next to You" is a 1969 #single recorded by #theTemptations and written by #NormanWhitfield and #BarrettStrong for the Gordy (#Motown) label. The song was a No. 1 single on the #Billboard Top Pop Singles chart for two weeks in 1969, from October 18 to October 25, replacing "#SugarSugar" by #theArchies and replaced by "#SuspiciousMinds" by #ElvisPresley. The single was also a No. 1 hit on the Billboard Top #RAndB Singles for five weeks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDasi1jiqRs

"Endless Love" is a song written and co-produced by #LionelRichie and originally recorded as a #duet between Richie and singer/actress #DianaRoss for the soundtrack to the coming-of-age film of the same name, starring #BrookeShields. In this #ballad, the singers declare their "endless love" for one another. It was covered by #LutherVandross with #RAndB-#pop singer #MariahCarey, and also by #countryMusic singer #ShaniaTwain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsqDoz2Co4o

"End of the Road" is a song by American #RAndB group #BoyzIIMen for the Boomerang #soundtrack. It was released in June 1992 by #LaFace, #Arista and #Motown, and is written by #Babyface, Antonio #LAReid and #DarylSimmons. It is written and composed in the #key of #EflatMajor and is set in #timeSignature of 12/8 with a #tempo of 75 beats per minute. The song achieved domestic and international success. In the United States.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDKO6XYXioc

“You get what you measure”*…

Matt Stoller takes the occasion of Trump’s selection of Kevin Warsh to head the Fed (“an orthodox Wall Street GOP pick, though he is married to the billionaire heiress of the Estee Lauder fortune and was named in the Epstein files. He’s perceived not as a Trump loyalist but as an avatar of capital”) to ponder why public satisfaction with the economy is so low (“if you judge solely by consumer sentiment, Trump’s first term was the third best economy Americans experienced since 1960. Trump’s second term is not only worse than his first, it is the worst economic management ever recorded by this indicator”).

Stoller argues that we’re mesuring the wrong things (or, in some cases, the right things in the wrong ways)…

… the models underpinning how policymakers think about the economy just don’t reflect the realities of modern commerce. The fundamental dynamic is that those models were constructed in an era where America was one discrete economy, with Wall Street and the public tied together by the housing finance system. But today, Americans increasingly live in tiered bubbles that have less and less to do with one another. Warsh will essentially be looking at the wrong indicators, pushing buttons that are mislabeled.

While corporate America is experiencing good times, much of the country is experiencing recessionary conditions. Let’s contrast consumer sentiment indicators with statistics showing an economic boom. Last week, the government came out with stats on real gross domestic product increasing at a scorching 4.4% in the third quarter of last year. There’s higher consumer spending, corporate investment, government spending, and a better trade balance. Inflation, according to the Consumer Price Index, is low at 2.6.% over the past year. And while official numbers aren’t out for the final three months of the year, the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow forecast shows that it estimates growth at 4.2%. And there are other indicators showing prosperity, from low unemployment to high business formation, which was up about 8% last year, as well as record corporate profits…

… Behavioral economists and psychologists have all sorts of reasons to explain that people don’t really understand the economy particularly well. But in general, when the stats and the public mood conflict, I believe the public is usually correct. Often, there are some weird anomalies with the data used by policymakers. In 2023, I noticed that the consumer price index, the typical measure of inflation, didn’t account for borrowing costs, so the Fed hike cycle, which caused increases in credit card, mortgage, auto loan, payday loans, et al, just wasn’t incorporated. The public wasn’t mad at phantom inflation, they were mad at real inflation that the “experts” didn’t see.

I don’t think that’s the only miscalculation…

[Stoller goes on to explain the ways in which “consumer spending” doesn’t tell us much about consumers anymore, about the painful reality of “spending inequality,” and about the obscure(d) problem of monopoly-driven inflation. He concludes…]

… Finally, there’s a more philosophical point, which I don’t think explains the short-term frustrations people feel, but is directionally correct. Do people actually want what the economy is producing? For most of the 20th century, the answer was yes. When Simon Kuznets invented these measurement statistics in 1934, financial value and the value that Americans placed on products and services were similar. A bigger economy meant things like toilets and electricity spreading across rural America, and cars and food and washing machines.

Today? Well, that’s less clear. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the second fastest growing sector of the economy in terms of GDP growth from 2019-2024 was gambling. Philip Pilkington wrote a good essay last summer on the moral assumptions behind our growth statistics. There is no agreed upon notion of what makes up an economically valuable object or activity, so our stats are inherently subtle moral judgments. Classic moral philosophers like Adam Smith believed in the “use value” of an item, meaning how it could be used, whereas neoclassical economists believed in the “exchange value” of an item, making no judgments about use and are just counting up its market price.

Normal people subscribe on a moral level to use value. Most of us see someone spending money on a gambling addiction as doing something worse than providing Christmas presents for kids, but not because of price. However, our GDP models use the market value basis. Kuznets, presumably, was not amoral, he just thought that our laws would ban immoral activities like gambling, and so use value and market value wouldn’t diverge. But they have.

It’s not just things like gambling or pornography or speculation. A lot of previously unmeasured activity has been turned into data and monetized, which isn’t actually increasing real growth but measuring what already existed. Take the change from meeting someone at a party to using a dating app. One is part of GDP, the other isn’t. Both are real, but only one would show a bigger economy.

Beyond that much of our economy is now based on intangibles – the fastest growing sector was software publishing. Is Microsoft moving to a subscription fee model for Office truly some sort of groundbreaking new product? It’s hard to say, while corporate assets used to be hard things like factories, today much of it is intangibles like intellectual property.

A boomcession, where the rich and corporate America experience a boom while working people feel a recession, is a very unhealthy dynamic. It’s certainly possible to create metrics to measure it, and to help policymakers understand real income growth among different subgroups. You could start looking at real income after non-discretionary consumer spending, or find ways of adjusting for price discrimination.

But I think a better approach is to try to knit us into one society again. The kinds of policymakers who could try to create metrics to understand the different experiences of classes, and ameliorate them, don’t have power. Instead, the people in charge still use models which presume one economy and one relatively uniform set of prices, where “consumer spending” means stuff consumers want.

I once noted a speech in 2016 by then-Fed Chair Janet Yellen in which she expressed surprise that powerful rich firms and small weak ones had different borrowing rates, which affected the “monetary transmission channel” the Fed relied on. Sure it was obvious in the real world, but she preferred theory.

Or they don’t use models at all; Kevin Warsh is not an economist, he’s a lawyer and political operative, and is uninterested in academic theory. He cares about corporate profits and capital formation. That probably won’t work out well either.

At any rate, we have to start measuring what matters again. If we don’t, then we’ll continue to be baffled that normal people hate the economy that looks fine on our charts…

The models used by policymakers to understand wages, economic growth, and consumer spending are misleading. That’s why corporate America is having a party, and everyone else is mad. Eminently worth reading in full: “The Boomcession: Why Americans Hate What Looks Like an Economic Boom,” from @matthewstoller.bsky.social (or @mattstoller.skystack.xyz).

* Richard Hamming (and also to the article above, see “Goodhart’s law“)

###

As we ponder the pecuniary, we might recall that it was on this date in 1958 that Benelux Economic Union was founded, creating the seed from the European Economic Community, then the European Union grew.

On that same day, Philadelphia doo wop group The Silhouettes started five weeks at the top of the Billboard R&B chart with their first single, “Get A Job.”

https://youtu.be/ysKhbaLyIFw?si=obKAiTS4gb6n4cQB

♬️ SLIDE at DNA Lounge starting now!
https://www.dnalounge.com/calendar/2026/01-31.html?utm_source=sp_ma
#dnalounge #slide #hiphop #randb #edits #top40 #sanfrancisco

♬️ SLIDE at DNA Lounge tonight: Sat Jan 31, 9:30pm!
https://www.dnalounge.com/calendar/2026/01-31.html?utm_source=sp_ma
#dnalounge #slide #hiphop #randb #edits #top40 #sanfrancisco

“Will You Love Me Tomorrow” is a composition by Gerry Goffin and Carole King and was first recorded by The Shirelles in 1960.

https://aeschtunes.com/2026/01/30/song-of-the-moment-the-shirelles-will-you-love-me-tomorrow/

#Music, #TheShirelles, #60s, #60sMusic, #1960s, #1960sMusic, #RAndB, #AeschTunes

https://companydata.tsujigawa.com/press-20260128-001/

沖縄を拠点に活動するシンガー／ミュージシャン Naz Yamada が、デジタルシングル 「You are the one」 を 2026年1月28日（水） にリリースすることを発表した。本作は、一途でありながら矛盾を抱えた恋心をテーマに描かれたR&Bナンバーで、Naz Yamadaならではの憂いを帯びた歌声と繊細な感情表現が際立つ楽曲となっている。

■プレスリリース配信元-エヌ・キューブ・エンタテインメント株式会社
https://companydata.tsujigawa.com/company/2360001006925/

#NazYamada #Youaretheone #RandB #プレスリリース #PressRelease #企業情報

"I Wanna Know" is a song by American #RAndB singer Joe. It was written by Joe, Joylon Skinner and Michele Williams for his third studio album #MyNameIsJoe, which was released on April 18, 2000, while production was helmed by Joe and Tony Nicholas, featuring additional credit from Timmy Allen. It also appeared on the #soundtrack to the film #TheWood (1999). Released as the lead single on November 7, 1999, it reached number four on the US #Billboard Hot 100.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSD7qJm1Dr0

Song of the Moment: Surface – “The First Time”

"The First Time" was released as a single from Surface's 1990 album, 3 Deep. The single was released on October 11, 1990, and peaked at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on January 26, 1991.

http://aeschtunes.com/2026/01/26/song-of-the-moment-surface-the-first-time/

#Music, #Surface, #90s, #90sMusic, #1990s, #1990sMusic, #RAndB, #AeschTunes

Get It – Get It is an album by Ike & Tina Turner released on Cenco Records circa 1966. The album contains two previously released singles. "Strange," written by Billy Preston was released from Ike Turner's own label Sonja Records in 1964,[2] and a live version of "I Can't Believe What You Say (For Seeing What You Do)" was released from Kent Records in 1964 - Wikipedia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwuhxLEm8_A&list=RDwwuhxLEm8_A&start_radio=1

#IkeandTinaTurner #Soul #RandB #60spop #Music

"Too Hot" is a song recorded by the American band #KoolAndTheGang for their first #Platinum-selling 1979 album #LadiesNight. It was written by George Brown and Kool & the Gang and produced by #EumirDeodato and Kool & the Gang. The #GoldCertified single reached number five on the US US #Billboard #Hot100 and number three on Billboard's #RAndB survey in early 1980. #RecordWorld said that the song "offers a midtempo pace with delightful keyboards & vocals."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02HMrJEFf3M

Song of the Moment: Janet Jackson – “Love Will Never Do (Without You)”

"Love Will Never Do (Without You)" was released as the seventh single from Janet Jackson's 1989 album, Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814.

http://aeschtunes.com/2026/01/19/song-of-the-moment-janet-jackson-love-will-never-do-without-you/

#Music, #JanetJackson, #90s, #90sMusic, #1990s, #1990sMusic, #PopMusic, #RAndB, #AeschTunes

"That Girl" is a song by American #RAndB singer and songwriter Stevie Wonder. It was the leading single from Wonder's album-era 1982 greatest-hits compilation, #StevieWondersOriginalMusiquariumI, as one of four new songs from the collection. The song spent nine weeks at number one on the #Billboard R&B singles chart, the longest time a Stevie Wonder single spent at the top spot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eagQKwVendA

"I Thank You" is a song written by #DavidPorter and #IsaacHayes originally recorded by #SamAndDave, released in early 1968. The single was Sam & Dave's final release on #StaxRecords, reaching No. 9 on the #Billboard Pop singles chart and No. 4 on the #RAndB chart. Shortly after its release, Stax severed its distribution deal with #AtlanticRecords and Sam & Dave, who were actually signed to Atlantic and loaned out to Stax and began recording for Atlantic proper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCYK4Di8lhs