R&B, born out of the shift in African American life from a predominantly southern and rural existence to a predominantly northern and urban one, ultimately evolved into a black-oriented segment of mainstream commercial culture. Neither pure crossover nor purely separatist, neither as culturally integrated as rock and roll’s mythologizers might have hoped nor as transgressively nationalist as advocates of black power might have dreamed, R&B in its most mainstream guise still offered African American culture a format where black identity, no matter how it diversified and permeated, was always a
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