Photo by Eirik Lande

On March 22, 2011, I tweeted something about music. This by itself is not rare. Nor is the fact that I thought about an idea for less than a minute, cobbled together a bit of snarky wordplay, and posted something to make my insignificant number of followers momentarily think I was clever. Here’s the tweet—a lazy three-pronged trend piece in miniature, topped by a term you may now be familar with: "PBR&B." The tweet garnered a grand total of 9 RTs and 14 favorites. Not bad for a minute's work, I suppose, but not exactly remarkable. Consider me shocked and appalled, then, to learn a couple months ago that "PBR&B" had earned its own Wikipedia page.

How did this happen? In the few days after the tweet went up, a few of my music critic friends used the phrase "PBR&B" as a handy shortcut to link together a few artists. The next day at the Village Voice’s music blog Sound of the City—where I was freelancing at the time—critic Sean Fennessey used it when writing about new mixtapes from The Weeknd and Frank Ocean. "SOTC buddy and writer Eric Harvey, while aligning Ocean and the Weeknd with Tom Krell's cracked R&B strip-down How To Dress Well, cheekily dubbed this movement 'PBR&B,' the implication being that this is rhythm and blues by or for hipsters," he wrote. "Which is sort of true, but only in the way it's been presented."

From there, it kept going. The next day, Vulture published a short news item: "Hilarious New Subgenre Alert." A week later, The Awl had dubbed "PB&RB" "offensive." That August, Nitsuh Abebe compiled a list of artists who make "R&B with an indie affect" for New York magazine, onto which an editor slapped the headline "PBR&B Ten Pack." By the end of the year—the time when critics are compiling lists and looking for narratives—writers and readers were all forced to grapple with my silly little invention. The New York Post awkwardly positioned the "amusing" PBR&B in contrast to Rihanna, Chris Brown, and Will.i.am. In Slate’s year-end critic’s roundtable, Carl Wilson opted for "R-Neg-B" as "an alternative to Eric Harvey’s clever but too reductive 'PBR&B'", which itself was prompted by Katherine St. Asaph’s thoughtful observations about the term at another simultaneous critical roundtable (in which I participated) at Sound of the City.

By August 2012, Spin had already declared "the rise of 'PBR&B 2.0'", apparently triggered by Frank Ocean’s first official LP, as well as artists like Miguel and Holy Other. Then in a Complex interview a month later, How to Dress Well’s Tom Krell—one of the acts I’d initially mentioned in my tweet—was asked about the term; he (rightfully) called it "tacky." That same fall, "PBR&B" somehow made it into the scholarly journal American Speech, in an article about "the fragmented world of twenty-first-century popular music genres and subgenres." "In March 2011," the authors wrote, "Village Voice writer Eric Harvey took to Twitter to christen hipster-friendly R&B music with the clever label PBR&B. While perhaps intended initially as a joke poking fun at the absurdly narrow focus of contemporary 'microgenres,' the term has found some success since its coinage." You’re telling me.

I have mixed feelings about being linked to such a phenomenon. Don't get me wrong—it’s cool to have my name on Wikipedia, but I’d rather such an honor be for something I put a bit more time into, or, well, am actually proud of. I still think "PBR&B" is silly-if-not-catchy, though misleading yes, and even offensive to some—particularly the artists forced to suffer the indignity of having their music classified under the heading of a snarky joke.