‘Neo-Soul’ is a term that often gets bound around the urban music scene without much thought around its meaning and origin, so what is neo-soul music exactly? In the simplest explanation, neo-soul music merges contemporary RnB with 70s style soul, and sometimes, elements of hip hop, jazz, funk, pop, rock and African music.
In the Greek language, neo means new, fresh, recent and young; as neo-soul implies, it is modern-day soul music with contemporary sensibility – there are very few limitations on how a neo-soul artist can achieve that freshness. The genre sets itself apart from the RnB genre by the depth of the lyrical messages and the level of soul in the vocals.
As you can probably imagine, neo-soul is one of the newer genres; many believe it all started with Kedar Massenburg, an American record producer and the label executive of Motown Records from the 90s to 2004.
After attention started falling onto Massenburg, other artists outside Motown Records started pushing the neo-soul envelope themselves. The most seminal releases from the golden era of neo-soul were the debut album, Brown Sugar, by D’Angelo, and the debut album, Baduizm, by Erykah Badu, who became one of the most renowned artists in the history of the genre after working alongside Kedar Massenburg.
After the OGs of neo-soul proved the potential in the genre, more and more artists started seeing the appeal of pouring their unadulterated soul into their sounds, such as Lauryn Hill, Jill Scott, John Legend, Alicia Keys and Frank Ocean.
To this day, Alicia Keys has sold over 90 million albums worldwide and remains one of the most successful artists in history. However, neo-soul never reached the same heights as hip hop, rock, pop and indie for one fairly obvious reason. When it comes to soul music, the primary focus for the artist is the expression – not the popular mainstream appeal.
Due to the post-90s unpopularity of neo-soul, many artists have started to reject the label and distance themselves from it, regarding it as nothing more than a shallow marketing agenda. Instead, most artists of a soulful inclination prefer to refer to themselves as soul singers – no distinction to era needed.
No artist proved their distaste for the manufactured genre quite like Jaguar Wright. Her sophomore album was titled Divorcing Neo to Marry Soul. However, this was decidedly one of the least controversial things that she has done in her career – given the current outrage about her false accusations that almost became bigger than her career.
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With all that said, neo-soul certainly isn’t a thing of the past. Neo-soul music blogs are the best ways to keep track of the contemporary Neo-Soul trends and find new independent artists before they break through into the mainstream. It may not be the most popular genre in the 21st-century, but A&R Factory has infinite reserves of appreciation for breaking artists able to bleed new sonic style from the divisive genre.
Since its establishment in 2012, A&R Factory has featured many of the most promising up and coming names, including Ziyaad Luceo, Brianne Matthews, Maple Sky, Alex Tea and Second Sight.
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