Tank, a veteran singer with a decade and a half of R&B hits, remembers the moment when rappers took over the airwaves.
"Bone Thugs-n-Harmony are the Jesuses of melody rap," he says. "What they did was theirs at the time; nobody could touch it, so nobody did. But when Nelly came around [in 2000] with hip-hop fully infused with melody, that's when people started to take notice.
This article originally appeared on www.rollingstone.com: R&B’s Changing Voice: How Hip-Hop Edged Grittier Singers Out of the Mainstream