Brian McKnight Calls Diddy’s ‘R&B is Dead’ Theory Silly, Music is Genre-less

Diddy‘s view that classic R&B music is a thing of the past upset a lot of artists, but don’t include Brian Mcknight in that group — he’s confident it’ll live on … just by a different name, possibly.

The R&B vet got candid when we saw him at LAX this week … dismissing Diddy’s comments while offering some big-picture insight on music’s ever-changing landscape.

Brian actually makes several interesting points regarding music’s transformation. For starters, the “Back At One” singer says it’s silly to compound generations of musicians together and compare any of them.

In fact, Brian thinks music should go genre-less as a whole and doesn’t even consider his own music to be R&B … a pretty shocking admission in itself! He compared himself to singers like Marvin Gaye and The Four Tops and how their “R&B sound” differed from his.

One more really interesting take — Brian says today’s music’s different because today’s artists probably don’t have sex the same way as he or Motown greats did, so their music reflects that!!!

He even likened the analogy to sports … pointing out how hard it is to compare stats from different eras.

Ironically, Brian released what he calls his “final” album back in 2020, so technically this is a retiree’s perspective.