The R&B singer put out ‘Elevation’ last week, but the release was overshadowed by a conversation about Tank’s sexuality
But Tank was in high spirits by the following Wednesday. “You know what’s crazy?” he asked, with an “R&B Money” hat — his label name — pulled tight over his head, while he munched on a Cronut. “They’re like, ‘Oh, he’s just stirring this [controversy] up because he’s got an album coming out.’ I didn’t do this.”“I’m not that good,” Tank agreed. “The internet,” he sighed, “what can we do?”
Internet shit-storms are now commonplace, but Tank is in a rare situation for anyone in pop music: At age 43, he’s coming off the biggest hit of his career: “When We,” a detailed chronicle of a sexcapade delivered in surges and slow drips, was certified platinum last year. And it’s had a two-year-long tail — the track still got played close to 600 times last week in the radio format known as “Adult R&B.
Tank’s platinum breakthrough came after a pointed recalibration. “How people hear has shifted, with the mainstream becoming more simplified,” he explains. Vocal dexterity is not prized in R&B the way it was when Tank emerged in the early 2000s — the glass-cracking falsetto and wordless ad-libs that open one of his biggest singles,So in 2015, Tank took stock of the landscape and “had the tough conversations.
Once again, Tank’s rejection of the man-in-the-mirror approach to singing has paid off. “Dirty” is among the top 15 most-played songs of the year at Adult R&B radio, with over 33,000 spins. As of this week, “I Don’t Think You’re Ready,” is Top Five in the format. Still, there is more work to do. Much of the audience that listens to Adult R&B — “I Don’t Think You’re Ready” reached around seven million people last week — does not stream, so it can be tough to turn those listeners into paying customers. “The R&B grind is a different grind — it’s just not the same as hip-hop,” Tank says. “It’s a very different chart position, a different radio landscape. The idea of [rappers] going door-to-door isn’t the same — they can skip a few steps.
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