soul, what the hell is it anyway?

I agree. I used to dissaprove of irony in music in a kind of Tutting Victorian Governess way, but strangely, and for no apparent reason I've been getting into it a bit lately. Must be the good weather.

what is soul? soul, i'd dare say, is synonymous with sincerity, with "meaning it." soul is making the listener believe that you feel what you say, whether it's "i love you more than words can say" or "you should be bludgeoned in your bed." and while the artist plays an important role in establishing his or her own soulfulness, soul ultimately depends on the listener, as gareth said; some people think mariah carey or michael bolton are soulful, i tend to disagree.

let's look at david bowie: if his music was all a pose and came across as such, he'd be merely a conceptual failure; but even at his most camp, he conveys to me, at least, that he believes in what he's doing and that behind all of the artifice, there is heart and -- watch out now -- soul.

is it important for music to be soulful? i think so, yeah.

I wonder if you sang a song about bowel cancer in the style of Luther Vandross, how long would it take to notice that the content was different to the usual?

as for bowel cancer sung in soul-stylee: isn't this what scott walker did? i mean, not the bowel cancer thing, but he took a traditional form -- crooning -- and applied his own lyrical bent. i played him for my father: he noticed the voice and not the words; my guess is that he wouldn't notice the words until he knew enough about the song to sing along.

Wasn't that an R Kelly b-side?

Yup. Best use of the word "soul" as an insult in well, ever.

At the moment I can't imagine Oxide and Neutrino getting as boring as the Prodigy were by the time of _The Fat of the Land_; what a sad waste it will be if they do.

To answer Tim's question: Reynolds and *Stubbs*, surely?

What was being attacked in their calls to kill "soul" were the debased, empty 80s imitators of the mannerisms and stylisations of 60s soul, such as George Michael, Mick Hucknall and Annie Lennox (all those collaborations with Aretha and Stevie). Likewise the Manics' "Motown Junk", which was an attack not on Motown itself but on the MOR artists who dressed themselves up in its clothes to make themselves look a bit more, you know, *authentic*.

On the other hand, Tim's attempts to extend a dislike of "dignity and pride" in pop (by which I assume he means the U2 / Simple Minds / Big Country 80s ethos) to a dislike of it in *anything* is a profoundly dangerous and irresponsible statement. I will not vote for any party which does *not* show dignity and pride. Much more of this and I'm off.

expectantly,

And yes, I meant Stubbs. And yes, the most recent Simple Minds album I own is _Sparkling In The Rain_ from '83, which is already a bit too grandstanding for my tastes. It's not the grandstanding of Simple Minds that I'm really referring to though. "Dignity and pride" is in many ways an expression of resiliance, and the idea of listening to music for its resiliant qualities is strange to me - resiliance is such an unexciting emotion. I'd much rather listen to Beyonce tell me she's a survivor than wade through the platitudes of an actual "survivor".

This is only a musical preference though, and besides dignity and pride in the political arena is so rare that even if I had meant it another way it would only have only been a hypothetical. For what it's worth, I would love to vote for a group with those qualities here in Australia if they in fact existed.

From a more general point of view, I'm reluctant to purge any part of the spectrum of sounds and emotions from pop - whatever usually-annoying tendency that I'd think I can live without probably has dozens of great exceptions that I love. In the light of many exclusionary blanket statements that have been made here on ILM, I kinda regret my putdowns of goth and indie and Smiths-style wimp-rock. The radio station of my dreams definitely has room for The Cure, Pavement and Morrissey.

And to "the other" Tom - sadly we seem to have yet another contributor who doesn't realise Britain has got a long way out of 1959. Whatever goes through their minds ...

The Lomaxes are NOT to be trusted on the question of roots and influence: they selected what they recorded to match their political bias, esp.in re pure survival of unspoiled and/or uncommercial "African" forms (tho the folk-purist notion that eg Charlie Patton's — let alone Robert Johnson's — music is just one step away from the abiding groundswell voice of the people is plainly nonsense, even by the somewhat skewed recorded evidence). But mid-19th century Black Gospel Choirs — eg the Fisk Singers or the Jubilee Singers — took at least much from European church-music form/harmony, probably more, as they did from field-hollers: not least because *even during slavery* a considerable degree of class stratification had already opened up in American black culture (and in argument as to how to further the struggle). OK, there must have been a continuum, but it was a LONG one, the difft ends far apart (geographically, socially: and no radio/ records yet to bust into this). And if there was traffic, it was two- way: at least some "rootsy" gospel music is less "cleaned-up" than "dirtied down" (esp. after the 50s, but probably right back to the 20s: as ref., ARC — a white-run record co., as they all were then — refused to record those parts of Robert Johnson's repertoire which they deemed "too white", eg his Bing Crosby covers).

Robin: What'd Tom do to you? He just mentioned that he didn't think Bowie had "soul". Which isn't particularly anti-British, just that Bowie did have his well known "black music" period, and Tom didn't think that it stood up. I mean, come off it.

I do think that this discussion rings false to an American precisely because on this side of the pond, "soul" means Soul Music, and "soulful" means at-least-part-Soul-Music. And suchforth. In the UK, from all this discussion, I suspect that this is some fairly meaningless marker which has lost the social context of its attendant genre. I blame the countryside. :-)

Personally I think this point - when concepts like "soul" lose the dangerous idea of "legitimacy" - is *precisely* when they get interesting.

On the other hand, this approach gets us in trouble when we have dorks like the Make*Up acting black or plagiarists like Lenny Kravitz acting sincere and it's all "soul" because somebody, somewhere has an extra-musical need for it to be soulful. Whoever mentioned Jon Spencer earlier, thanks.

As for explaining the unexplainable, I don't know. Again, point taken about the rules of critical engagement, but it seems to me that soul's universal promise to reveal more than the lyrics or music say on their face is just the logical next step from pop's universal promise that the next time you hear a song you'll like it even better than you did this time. Everything up to beauty itself is subjective, anyway.

old reliable Sam Cooke style soul: bad new shiny Autechre style soul: good

Bjut maybe it's just me I think the greatest soul band ever are Kraftwerk and Marvin Gaye bores me stiff (ho!ho!)

and so it goes, this generation (embodied by omar) turns its back on an "outdated" form of expressions, just as those to follow us will shun autechre (as some of us do today!) as an excuse to sell jeans (and perhaps they've already been used in commercials already!) and to bring back nostalgia of simpler times. this explanation could certainly be applied to nick drake -- what form of music is imbued with more "meaning" than the singer/songwriter? and yet i view him apart from the v.w. commercial and the reissues and the "renewed interest" and listen to the music and say, "yes, that nick drake was a soulful fellow."

i think some of the other posters are correct in saying that, stripped of its original context and taken as a "concept", "soul" becomes a vague, incredibly subjective and almost pointless signifier. thank God "funk" doesn't correspond with any higher principles!

Is it? :) I'm sort of curious why that is? I like yr implication of Autechre losing their soul for a next generation. This will no doubt happen. But really I hope my argument doesn't get reduced to It-sell-jeans-it-loses-its-soul. There is just something about Sam Cooke style soul that is so heavy with preconceived ideas of Great Sentiments, The Right Feeling, etc. and all I can hear is dead meaningless sound, just can't help it.

---- "this music sucks, it has no intrinsic interest except for nostalgic bores" ? ----

now I haven't said anything like this? I like nostalgia :)

i. a specific moment in black pop music between (approx)mid-50s and mid-70s. Multiple stylistic offshoots, some of which (funk, perhaps) shouldn't be included.

ii. music derivative of that moment, the stylistic conventions arising from that moment. still trace elements in most musical styles today.

iii. that moment reconfigured as something attitudinal rather than musical. So ideas of struggle, authenticity, freedom, emotion, rawness, organicness, liveness, pain...a lot of this stuff is very very bound up with interpretations of blackness. The 80s interpretation of soul as in jeans ads, literally adding colour to the yuppie lifestyle, comes into play here.

iv. 'soul' as a totally abstract concept - the rowland/t&f stuff quoted above. Basically a way of saying "this is good" possibly - but not neccessarily - with some ideas from i., ii. and iii. above mixed in. This version of 'soul' is a discussion-killer, and is also quite close to how I use 'pop', as some abstracted force driving most good music. The choice of 'it has soul'/'it rocks'/'it is pop' can be a way of allying yourself with other discource currents or it can be just personal preference.

(Interesting perhaps to analyse the sentences above - soul is something external, rock is a doing word, pop is something music is or isnt.....)

This is soul --
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxyLU5jHJf0

it's a hamhock in your cornflakes