'That's The Way Of The World'

I think the musical genre that is detetriorated the most over the past 30 years is R&B. Just think back to the 1950s through Motown and the 1960s. Consider funk and R&B groups like Earth, Wind and Fire, Marvin Gaye and Al Green of the 1970s.

I think the decline has several components.

For one, Gaye being shot by his old man, Prince and Michael Jackson getting creepy, and Whitney Houston getting hooked to crack. Two huge factors. Gaye probably keeps writing and performing really good music through the 1980s replacing the utterly uninspiring Luther Vandross as panty-dropper No. 1.

Houston's decline doomed the genre largely as she was the queen bee and primed for another decade of dominance as shown in nailing the "Star-Spangled Banner" at the Super Bowl in the 1990s. Bobby Brown and drugs happened and now she's a ghost.

There was a brief eclipse of quality R&B with Boys II Men and TLC in the mid-1990s, but even after releasing two of the biggest albums of the decade, even they had a shelf life.

There will never be R&B groups quite like EW&F again because R&B artists are very, very disposable. There are good singers everywhere and many of them are good looking. Stick them in a studio, drop some silly beat and synth behind them, autocorrect the vocals and you'll sell a million albums to people who don't know any better, or, worse, don't care.

EW&F wrote and played their songs. Their beauty was in their instrumentation and Phillip Bailey came in with those silky smooth vocals, it was over real instrumentation that actually meant something. In the end, you can replicate John Legend, but never EW&F.