The Best R&B Songs by White Singers in the 2000s

Watching Justin Timberlake and Robin Thicke dominate the VMAs and rack up hits on both pop and urban radio, it’s easy to forget that the R&B game rarely embraced white artists throughout the ’90s. But things clearly changed in the 2000s (2000 - 2009), a pivotal era for white musicians experimenting with so-called rhythm and blues music.

The massive, unprecedented crossover of hip-hop and R&B into the mainstream during the late ’80s and ’90s had produced a generation of white children reared on music by black artists. Corny teen pop artists grew up, and looked to contemporary R&B as a way to express themselves as adults. British singers raised on neo-soul embraced retro ’60s R&B sounds in compelling ways. Pop producers across the world took black music and fused it with everything from electro to country. You could call the songs on this list “blue-eyed soul,” but the truth is that they’re too musically diverse to fit under one umbrella, just like R&B music at large. And yet they are all somehow distinctly R&B songs.

Genres of music are a lot like race—if you look too closely, you realize the categorization doesn’t really exist. It’s all a human construct, and focusing on the blurred lines between borders makes everything seem like one in the same. And while race may be a myth, it’s scientific fact that we’re all African if you trace your DNA back far enough. And really, all modern American pop music is rooted in blues and jazz music.

So what’s R&B? It’s not just all pop music, because there is most certainly a lot of terrible pop music that R&B would never claim as its own. But the answer is simple: R&B is pop music done so right that everyone recognizes themselves in it. You can just feel it.

With that said, here are the The Best R&B Songs by White Singers in the 2000s.

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The Best R&B Songs by White Singers in the 2000s