soul, what the hell is it anyway?

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and so it goes, this generation (embodied by omar) turns its back on an "outdated" form of expressions, just as those to follow us will shun autechre (as some of us do today!)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