Has black music lost its soul?

Estelle, currently hauling the nutrasweet-soul of 'American Boy' around the world, has attacked the state of the music industry. She said: "I'm not mad at 'em - but I'm just wondering, how the hell is there not a single black person in the press singing soul? Adele ain't soul. She sounds like she heard some Aretha records once and she's got a deeper voice - that don't mean she's soul. They keep trying to tell me in the media what soul music is and I'm like, we KNOW what soul music is."

Fair enough, Adele isn't soul music, she's Coldplay with breasts... but this little rant got me thinking. Where is all the black soul music? Now, before we begin, let me determine what I think soul music is... or rather... what soul music isn't. Soul music isn't about histrionics. Soul music isn't about a floor length mink coat. It ain't diamond earrings and showing opulence. Soul is something almost undefinable... something that can stir you and, when the mood takes, force you on to a dancefloor. Of course, I'm biased toward soul that sounds like it came from the fifties, up to the seventies. Since then, soul and funk seems to have lost it's way, and now, the nearest thing we have to that golden period is a couple of pop singers and the grooves found in certain hip hop joints. 

On this subject, Duffy, doing rather well for herself with her retro pop soul, has insisted that when it comes to soul music, the colour of an artist's skin is irrelevant. She's got a point. Surely the world has moved on a bit from the days when you weren't 'real' unless you were black? Duffy told Newsbeat:"If the talent and the desire is there, I don't really think it matters what colour you are." She continued: "We don't live in the 1950s any more, we're in a multicultural country. So no, I think that's pretty far from the truth, look around and I think you'll see that it [Black Soul] really does exist."

But does it?

I can't remember the last time I discovered a soul group that were black that didn't fall into R&B schmaltz or bling! bling! It pains me to say it, but I'm really struggling here. Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings? I like a couple of songs but I can't be certain that I'm not going soft and that, in fact, their records are a bit... acid jazz. Yuck. The closest thing to the spirit of soul that I've come across is in the releases of The Roots, Outkast, Roots Manuva and the weird bug-eyed releases of Missy Elliot. However, when it comes to the latter, she is prone to releasing some absolute turkeys.

It's not just in soul that black music has suffered. When I see some NME favoured indie band with a black singer, the positive discriminator in me leaps out thinking "Go on! Impress me! Save indie from dour jangle-o-thons!" However, what we get is Bloc Party who sound more like Elvis Costello than Jimi Hendrix. Y'see, there is a sorry absence of black artists being signed who are inventive and genre hopping. Jimi, Sly and the Family Stone, Funkadelic... were all bands that didn't give a frig 'bout what dem fool think. They got on with whatever they wanted to do, and if that meant stealing from soul, rock, country, blues, electronic artists... they did... and the world was a richer place for it.

Sadly, all the black artists that appear on the airwaves now seem to peddle the same crap as those that appeared in the 80s and 90s. It's either ballad warbling from big lunged ladies or it's some bloke comin' over all smooth. I've always looked to black artists to bring me passion and intensity... but it's not there. So who is to blame? Are there black artists out there making the music that will knock me for six, but aren't getting a chance from the recording industry? Or is black music in a state of flux, deciding what it wants to be before it brings the ruckus once more?

The Noisettes, although far from my favourite band, seem to have it right. There's definite funk in their sound and their singer is clearly a fan of both Beefheart and Grace Jones. So where are the others? It may sound weird... backward even... but black people have always been, and probably always will be, the coolest people on the planet. With that, we need someone to take a chance... a record label or an artist... to come and save music's sorry ass. Whatever the world of black music does, us whiteys copy. The Beatles and Stones did. Elvis did. Dusty Springfield did. Hell, we've even had a stab at hip-hop. Black music gave us Public Enemy and Wu Tang Clan, we returned the favour with Vanilla Ice and Eminem. Maybe black musicians are waiting for us whiteys to say sorry? Well, consider this both an apology and a rallying call. Drop the show of wealth and bring back soul power!

Mof Gimmers

Comments

[Murray]

http://www.myspace.com/dirtyfuzz

[mof gimmers]

A new Roulette pin-up right there! 'In And Out Of Love' is a killer!

Mof

[Eddie Santiago]

Great commentary on the state of soul music. Artists like Erykah Badu, Alicia, Keys, Jill Scott give me some hope that there some soul power still out there. Jimi, George, and Sly were definitely out there doing there own thing and no one today truly comes close to that kind of outspoken innovation. I write about Jimi, George Clinton and others in my book about Sly Stone. Check it out at http://www.lulu.com/content/1412956. It is also available through Amazon.com.

[PaulFuzz]

The thing is, when white folks talk about "soul music", they are generally refering to a specific sound, the sound of 7" records released between the mid 50s and early 70s. This sound mutated in the mid 70s into disco, then modern RnB, New Jack Swing etc etc, and the further away from Stax / Motown et al it sounded, the more white folks lost interest. Black folks, on the other hand, continued to buy and take an interest in this music long after it had stopped sounding like Stax records. As a rule, black folks have always embraced The New, and have always delighted in, celebrated and actively saught technology driven advances in music production, the gimmicks, tricks and hooks the digital age etc. White folks are the ones hung up on the idea of 'authenticity', 'realness', 'soul' etc etc, and consequently - associating those things implicitly with "proper" soul (ie, 50s/60s) music, it is white people who make the vast bulk of self-consciously retro / old sounding pop music, in all genres, including soul. The black artists refered to in this debate who supposedly have "soul" are just artists whose music openly reference old soul & funk records to some degree. Why is the artistry of a black artist judged on the basis of how much their music sounds like Funkadelic or Nina Simone? White folks are like: "I don't ever listen to Crunk records or Hyphy records, or any cutting edge RnB for that matter, 'cos basically I don't like 'em. But Outkast, they sound enough like George Clinton for me to get on board with." The idea that "soul music" (in the way most people understand it) is thin on the ground in 2008 is obviously true, just in the same way it is true to say that fondue sets or ration books or penny farthings are thin on the ground. Old style "soul music" fell out of mainstream popularity during the mid 70s. Black folks continued to produce incredible, forward thinking, revolutionary records, but they didn't sound like Otis Redding enough for white folks to stay tuned into. Retro, deliberately un-revolutionary, backwards thinking rock records are still churned out en mass because white kids are hung up on "retro" and "authentic" sounds, and because post 50s rock music has generally been a white affair, white kids can produce Sonics aping records and feel they are tapping into some sort of semi-authentic "white soul". When white kids produce retro music which apes traditionally black dominated music, people begin to ask questions. If you want to argue that great Hyphy records are "just today's soul music" then you could, because the spirit (or 'soul' in the mystical sense) is the same as Otis, but the music is not. On the other hand, you cannot say Alicia Keys is soulful simply because her records sound like early 70s soul music; the forward-thinking, bug-eyed power of new black American music scenes like Hyphy etc have more in common with Sly or Hendrix than Keys's records do.