News & Updates

"AMH, a Philadelphia-based DJ, producer and half of the U+Me+RnB party, informed his followers early on that he wouldn’t be going live as often during the quarantine. Although he has been able to evade some of Instagram’s new restrictions by transitioning between songs that could potentially be flagged, as well as playing his own remixes during sets, he still has to deal with the platform’s other restrictions and trying to retain viewers as a result of his live streams getting flagged. 

“I want to say DJ’ing online has really happened in the last like five years, and that’s primarily from people using Youtube,” he said. “We’ve never seen anything like how IG Live is and Twitch — Twitch is amazing. Being able to be like, ‘OK everybody, I’m going live,’ and then sit back and DJ.” 

“Of course, we can bring the energy from what we’re doing — that’s a part of my skill set,” he continued. “But trying to bring it online is hard as hell when it’s cutting us off and the energy is taken away just like that.” He also shared positive sentiments about Twitch, noting that he would prefer to live stream with a bigger setup than just his phone or his laptop. A couple of months ago, AMH joined fellow Philly DJ Bobby Flowers for his party HIPS, a celebration of Black music that took place on Twitch to raise money for the Minnesota Freedom Fund. The set was equipped with a green screen and visuals. 

Milan has also taken her talents to Twitch. 

“I think we all started off with IG Live, just because D-Nice made it such a popular thing,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong — DJ’ing streaming…it’s not something that’s fairly new. It’s just more popularized now considering that we are in a pandemic.”

According to Milan, AMH, and Townes, the only pushback is getting their followers to navigate from their Instagram to another platform. 

Another common frustration among DJs is that they have to adhere to these Instagram guidelines even though there is no monetary gain involved, having to rely on donations from their followers whenever they stream. 

FOR THE R&B LOVERS: FOUR YEARS OF U+ME+R&B WITH DJ HBK & DJ AMH

Written By Rahman Wortman

February 27, 2020

Recently hip hop artist Young MA sparked up a conversation with a tweet about how the lack of R&B causes today’s music to be unbalanced. And with music mogul/icon Diddy promoting on Instagram that the revival of his hit television series Making The Band is going to bring R&B back it’s easy to see how unappreciated R&B music has become. It’s making a comeback with the help of the new generation of R&B acts like SiR, Ari Lenox, Lucky Daye, Summer Walker, Arin Ray, Snoh Alalegra and many more but it’s not balanced with rap music that same way it was in the ’90s. Back in the days rhythm and blues music used to dominate pop charts alongside hip hop but once trap music and alternative R&B started to become popular very quickly traditional R&B had to take a back seat. You can make an argument that the music industry took a hit with the traditional sound of R&B fading away, but the night scene definitely took a couple of hits with it being gone because it took away the interaction part that comes with going out to a party. Once the music started to change DJs started taking R&B out of their sets and the night scene no longer looked as fun as it once did back in the day. It clearly missed good R&B music and that void in Philly was something DJ HBK and DJ AMH planned to fill with their event U+Me+R&B.

There are three things that make the bond between these two DJ’s strong as pure vibranium coming straight out of Wakanda. They both made names for themselves as dope DJs in college, DJ HBK at West Chester University and DJ AMH at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. They’re both members of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity Incorporated and they both have a strong love for R&B music. R&B parties are becoming quite popular throughout the country, something AMH learned when he went to Los Angeles and attended one for the first time. When he came back he and HBK thought there should be no reason why they couldn’t pull one off in their hometown of Philadelphia. By collaborating with their good friends at 6ix8ight, Nas and Jaime, these four gentlemen have created an quarterly party called U+Me+RnB, an event that has the ability to bring nostalgia to the ears of those who grew up on timeless R&B music and provide the right atmosphere to make it comfortable for everyone in attendance to interact with one another throughout the night. “Sweet Love” will take us back to watching our mothers cleaning up the house on a Saturday morning when you were young. Joints like “Candy,” or “Before I Let You Go,” the Frankie Beverly and Maze version, will make everyone forget that they’re strangers and get in formation to do the Electric Slide. Last Sunday these two gentlemen provided their city with another great experience by celebrating U+Me+RnB’s 4 year anniversary. Before the two prepared to celebrate, I sat with both DJ HBK and DJ AMH to talk about their humble beginnings, how they created U+Me+R&B by collaborating with 6ix8ight and why paying homage to a genre they grew up listening to means so much them.

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