luv neo soul!

I don't like or dislike it. The label is basically meaningless. Some artists are consistently described as "neo soul" Other artists are only sometimes described as such. Still other artists who could be described as such are not.

It's marketing department BS.

I dig Neo Soul and have no problem with that label. The funny thing about the Neo Soul label is that when the genre itself was making noise (and money) the artists didn't have any issue at all having their music or themselves labeled Neo Soul. It was only when the genre started to wane is when you heard them start to turn on the title.

The first and most vocal was Raphael Saadiq, who is pretty much the Godfather of Neo Soul. After he came out against the label, a bunch of other artists did the same thing. You can best believe that if the genre picked up some steam and became lucrative, those same artists that shun that title would be right back labeling themselves Neo Soul; even artists that aren't considered Neo Soul would start calling themsleves that.

coltrane3 said:

I don't like or dislike it. The label is basically meaningless. Some artists are consistently described as "neo soul" Other artists are only sometimes described as such. Still other artists who could be described as such are not.

It's marketing department BS.

I echo everything but the first sentence. I like certain artists like Angie Stone, Jill Scott,

Anthony Hamilton, and Indie Arie who define the term loosely. I agree wholeheartedly

that it's just marketing B.S.

A little bit here and there. A lot of it is terribly boring.

I deplore the vast majority of it.

KoolEaze said:

deebee said:

God, yes. That's the aspect of it that irks me, too.

I have to admit, though, that around the time that the first D'Angelo and Badu albums came out, it all felt like a breath of fresh air. (Well, maybe not 'fresh' air, per se. More like the air in a basement bar renovated to look kind of like an old jazz club, filled with incense and aromatic oils, making it all feel terribly good for you, when, really, you kind of hoped to be hit in the face by the funky scent of weed and bodies in motion. Pleasant, in its own way, though.)

Exactly how I feel about it. Very pretentious. And that is my main reason why I stopped buying Jill Scott´s CDs and why I feel less enthusiastic about Erykah Badu or Angie Stone these days.

They take themselves a tad too seriously and rely way too much on the past...and it is not even really THEIR past. I liked all of them much more when they recycled less.....and talked less during shows.

Sometimes they act like they´re "in the know" about things that they actually know very little about, especially Erykah Badu. Luckily she´s changed a bit in that respect.

I still like most of the artists in this thread but, unfortunately, they all seem to burn out much faster than most of their heroes from the past.

Yeah, I know what you mean. The 'in the know' side of it can all be a bit irksome, I agree, especially as it feels like songwriters like Stevie Wonder or Curtis Mayfield seemed to have a much better handle on the situations they were offering commentary on. Mind you, I also put that down to the moment we, as opposed to that older generation, are living through - where the kind of vibrant, radical social, political and cultural movements have died down and been replaced by a fairly lightweight and safe new age-iness, which, when you boil it down, is all part of the 'me, me, me' culture it thinks it's resisting! [/rant]

Some of the more recent stuff is good, though. I liked the first New Amerykah album a lot, and I thought it felt quite on point with its commentary, and honest about its own shortcomings. There's a bit where a spoken voice says something like, "I don't know what has to change but I know something has to change!" Tbh, I much prefer the honesty of taking that line than trying to convince people you've got it all figured out, and if they just follow you in lighting some incense and aping a bit of Buddhism, all will be well.

[Edited 7/18/10 2:48am]