For Valentine’s Day, Editor Aaron is taking us on a provocative pilgrimage to the realm of the slow jam.

Like many of you, I have a catalogue of workday music playlists that I cycle through depending on my mood. There’s the bouncy jazz rap one for irritability, the nostalgia-fueled post-pop-and-elder-emo one for wistfulness, ’70s country for despair, ‘80s hardcore for defiance, and math rock for ennui (most of my moods are bad). Lately, though, I’ve found myself returning to the same freaky-deaky well: the slow jams playlist. It’s perfect for these cold February days, a needed blush of ardor during the palest, bleakest, lamest time of year.

But hey: what exactly is a slow jam? In simple terms, it’s just a downtempo song with soul or R&B influences and romantic, even erotic, themes, but there’s not really an extant music-theory definition beyond that, and “soul-influenced” can mean a whole lot of things. Having downloaded a few sheet music charts for slow jam songs, there’s no particular melodic theme that unifies any of them, and there’s not even a shared meter: Al Green’s “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” creeps by in syrupy 3/4 time, while SZA’s “Snooze” is a bouncy 143 beats per minute in 4/4 — but both of those songs are indisputably slow jams. You know a slow jam when you hear it, because, like soul, or blues, or hip-hop, it’s broadcasting its connection to century-old traditions in Black music at the same time as it’s creating new ones.

Those traditions stretch back further into history than you might think. Suggestive genres like hokum and dirty blues, repped by talent like Ma Rainey, were addressing the winkier side of sexuality in the 1920s. So-called “blue light” parties, where basements were bathed in dim colored lighting perfect for young couples slow-dancing to doo-wop and primordial slow jams, were going on as early as the 1950s. (The blue lights were typically doused or flashed to warn amorous teenagers that parents were en route.)

A 1962 article from the Chicago Defender, a Black community paper that played a key role in the Great Migration and the civil rights movement, may contain the first use of the “slow jam” term, in reference to two particularly steamy tracks: Tommy Hunt’s "Parade of Broken Hearts," and “Three Precious Words” by the Edsels. The ’60s was the heyday of Motown and Stax and Chess — and arguably a high point of American soul music — so we shouldn’t be surprised that this was an era with no shortage of sexy, pleading bangers, from Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” to Jr. Walker’s “What Does It Take (To Win Your Love),” to Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “Hurts So Bad.” It was also an era where crossover appeal reached an inflection point; Billboard did away with their dedicated R&B chart for several years beginning in 1963 because of the amount of cross-pollination between it and the Pop Singles chart.

Along with the civil rights struggles that defined the decade, the tail end of the ’60s ushered in the Black Power and Black Arts movements. The NCAA Image Awards debuted in 1967. “Soul Train” hit TV screens in 1970, first as a local Chicago show, then nationally a year later. This larger societal embrace of Black culture helped create a period when slow jams really began to cook. This is when you see the emergence of the holy trinity of early ’70s sexiness: Roberta Flack, Al Green, and Marvin Gaye. Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” dropped in ’71; Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” in ’73; Flack’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love” in ’74. (I’d also be really remiss in not mentioning honorary slow-jammer Barry White, who in 1973, before a single note of his signature tectonic baritone voice hit the airwaves, composed what might be the most sultry, titillating instrumental song ever recorded, “Love’s Theme.”)

By 1976, enough of a slow jam critical mass had been reached for a sprawling, disparate body of work to be collected and presented as a discrete genre. That year, WHUR, a Howard University-owned station in the Washington, D.C. area, debuted a weekly evening show called Quiet Storm — the name taken, by the way, from the sultry Smokey Robinson song of the same title. Quiet Storm oozed self-assured, unapologetic Black sexuality, broadcasting not only the Gayes and Flacks and Greens, but other songs cut from the same cloth: “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time),” “That Loving Feeling,” “Me and Mrs. Jones,” “No One Can Love You More,” and many, many others. The show would grow from a weekly outing to a five-hour nightly phenomenon, spurred along by velvet-voiced Howard student Melvin Lindsey and WHUR station manager Cathy Hughes — who’d later become a huge deal in her own right as the founder of the media empire Urban One.

Juilliard ethnomusicologist Fredara Hadley, in this piece for Vox, makes the case that the popularity of the Quiet Storm format, a classy, upscale, sexy voice for Black intimacy, was tied to the mid-’70s rise of a rapidly professionalizing Black middle class. If the slow jams of the ’50s and ’60s belonged to a young, urban Black population raised in cities like Memphis, Chicago, and Detroit, the ’70s represented those kids becoming a generation of adults who’d seen at least some of the fruits of the civil rights movement, who were educated, sophisticated, and increasingly suburban. As the ’70s wound on, dozens of Quiet Storm shows popped up on radio stations throughout the country, catering to the tastes of this new demographic and influencing further slow jam tastemakers.

One of those was Kentucky group Midnight Star, who in 1983 further codified the music style, by dropping their signature track “Slow Jam.” Like other, non-slow jam greats — “The Monster Mash,” “Play That Funky Music,” Tenacious D’s “Tribute” — it’s a song about another song, and hooooo-boy, is it a sweaty one. Co-written by a young Babyface and Sidney “Uncle Jamz” DeWayne, it’s easy to see why the song lent its name to an entire genre: it’s a spicy paean to intimacy, and to the power of a song to inspire and facilitate it.

Here’s where “Slow Jam” begets Slow Jams, and where it becomes a household phrase, thanks in no small part to Kevin “Slow Jammin’” James, an original Quiet Storm DJ who takes credit for popularizing the term. Inspired by Midnight Star, James founded his own show called — duh — Slow Jams, and worked for Capitol Records curating a series of compilations of the slowest, jammin-est music he could. James currently runs Original Slow Jams for Snoop Dogg’s Cadillacc Music internet radio. (I turned it on just now, and playing was — I swear I’m not making this up — the song “Love Song,” a 1988 refresh of the exact same themes visited in “Slow Jams,” by the exact same group, Midnight Star.)

The ’80s brought us more slow jams by nascent talents like Teddy Pendergrass, Luther Vandross, Sade, Anita Baker, and the like, who continued the soul-influenced smoothness — but the decade also introduced a tasty, eclectic hybrid of R&B and hip-hop called New Jack Swing. While New Jack’s first blush of offerings were up-tempo, danceable numbers (Keith Sweat’s “I Want Her,” Guy’s “Groove Me” ), the crop of talent it elevated would go on to make some of the most memorable slow jams of the following decade. In other words, the hard edges of “Rhythm Nation” and “Motownphilly” would be sanded off into, respectively, “That’s the Way Love Goes” and "I'll Make Love to You" as the ’90s bloomed … and Keith Sweat would go on to make soooooo many slow jams. This is the era that gave us iconic additions to the genre by Silk, Jodeci, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, SWV, En Vogue, Ginuwine, and Toni Braxton … and you’ll forgive me, the Gen-X kid who shuffled awkwardly to these songs at school dances, for going a little generational-chauvinist and thinking this was a slow jam golden era.

A Tucson radio DJ named R Dub would probably agree with me on that. He was reportedly inspired as a teenager by the Troop song “All I Do Is Think of You,” and in 1994 started a show called Sunday Night Slow Jams. In the intervening 30 years, that show has since exploded into a bona fide empire, with a show that airs on 250 stations in 17 countries, a call-in segment, and R Dub’s own 24-hour channel on IHeartRadio. (When I checked that one, it was playing “Let Me Love You,” by Mario.) Decades in, R Dub remains a tastemaker and advocate for the slow jam, and a champion for new artists. In 2013, he appeared on “Shark Tank” with Brian McKnight to promote slow jams, and he trademarked the term “slow jams” itself. (You can check out his empire for yourself at slowjams.com.)

In my case, adulthood, kids, career, and inattention have conspired to render me less well-versed in the slow jams of the millennium, but I still know a slow jam when I hear one. It’s Ne-Yo’s “So Sick,” and Alicia Keys’ “If I Ain’t Got You.” It’s Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love,” Ella Mai’s Boo’d Up,” and the Weeknd’s “Die for You.” And OH MY GOD is it ever Ciara’s “Body Party” and the utterly brazen “Neighbors Know My Name” by Trey Songz. (It’s also, obviously, the slow jam ouroboros that is Twista’s “Slow Jamz,” which in three and a half minutes namedrops about a thousand of the same artists I’ve taken all this space to write about.) These are all songs that embody celebration of intimacy, with zero pretentions tacked on, despite how musically complex they may be — songs that you can slip into easily. And that’s sort of the beauty of a slow jam: the only barrier for entry is your own inability to give yourself over, figuratively, and in some cases literally, to the jam.

In the aforementioned Vox video, original Quiet Storm DJ Melvin Lindsey makes the point that the success of that format, and of slow jams in general, is that it’s not bound to any particular era, nor does it belong to any one generation: “Quiet Storm allows you the flexibility, because it’s all about the music and the mood, not necessarily the time.” The same slow jam vibe flows through songs separated by more than half a century, by everyone from Jr. Walker to SZA. Anybody and everybody can enjoy those songs in equal measure if the mood is right.

The story here is how that mood has persevered, not only because it highlights the geographic and economic path of the Black experience in America for the last 75 years, but also because it makes a strong argument for the importance of Black-owned and -operated media. There wouldn’t be a slow jam story to tell without the Chicago Defender, or without Motown, or Howard University and Cathy Hughes. There might not be the household-phrase “slow jam” without Babyface and Uncle Jamz to write it down, and Midnight Star, and Monica, and Jamie Foxx, to sing about it so very convincingly. It’s taken a hell of a lot of Black talent to keep that mood going for so long, in a way that has (literally!) fueled generations.

Music writer Danielle A. Jackson, in an essay that reflects on her own parents’ love affair with slow jams, puts it this way:

“These soft, tender soundscapes are, for me, tightly woven with images of black intimacy. Of two black people tuning into themselves and each other. When my mother paints the picture with her memories … they are images that demand humanity in a way we may not realize is a demand. They insist on the body, on its flesh and blood. They gather and soothe the nervous system. They allow for a tender masculinity. They are obsessed with survival, generations, and continuity.”