LET'S GET IT ON! It's the ~~~ 1970s SOUL ALBUMS POLL ~~~ NOMINATIONS AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD

I have to agree with Cosmic Slop; but Johnny Fever also OTM earlier about the evolution of soul music in the latter part of the decade. So funk and disco are OK, but a country record with a soul cover buried on the second side is not OK, even it is for some reason included on the master list (not that anyone was going to vote for that record anyway...)

if you just say its a Soul/Funk/Disco poll then problem solved

I'm not advocating banning disco or funk, but at what point does this stop being a poll about soul records and start becoming a poll about "music black artists made in the 70s"?

― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever)

when we cut larry jon wilson from the list. :)

hard to exclude funk and disco from the poll - but the results won't really be "ILX's ultimate soul records" I guess

that's for a different poll/discussion maybe, most soulful records of the 70s or smth

Bill Withers - Live at Carnegie Hall
Donny Hathway - Live
Earth, Wind & Fire - Gratitude

Bootsy's Rubber Band - Stretchin' Out in
Rick James - Bustin' Out Of L Seven
Sly Stone - High On You

Bernie Worrell - All The Woo In The World
Bootsy's Rubber Band - Bootsy Player of the Year
Brass Construction - Brass Construction
Brothers Johnson - Right On Time
Meters - Fire On The Bayou
Slave - Slave
Slave - The Concept
Slave - Just a Touch of Love

^ awesome choices!!!

Hall &Oates - Abandoned Luncheonette

This sounds like my type of poll, here's my nominations:

Nina Simone - Emergency Ward!
Nina Simone - Black Gold
Andy Bey - Experience and Judgment
A Taste of Honey - A Taste of Honey
Patti Austin - Havana Candy
The Jones Girls - The Jones Girls
Crown Heights Affair - Dream World
Leon Thomas - Full Circle
Dee Dee Bridgewater - Just Family
Kimiko Kasai - Butterfly

~~~Nominations updated~~~

I didn't include Elvis Presley's That's the Way It Is unless someone can make a good case about this album.

D.A.M: Right on Time was nominated before, so you get an extra slot.

Tuomas, three of your picks were already on the list, so you get three more.

James Brown - Revolution of the Mind

Nina Simone - Emergency Ward!
Nina Simone - Black Gold

Just got into these recently; absolutely stunning stuff.

did you realise Humble Pie were on the list?

Here is a collaborative Spotify playlist for everyone to add their nominated albums/subscribe

https://open.spotify.com/user/pfunkboy/playlist/5R8i82XYP9T7f6HnpUsDv1
or paste this in your search bar
spotify:user:pfunkboy:playlist:5R8i82XYP9T7f6HnpUsDv1
and click on subscribe/follow

I made an online spreadsheet with all the nominations (never used Zoho before, let's see how that works out).

Nominations list

Added James Brown, deleted Humble Pie.

anyone can add their nominations to the spotify playlist so get on it!

Tuomas, that Andy Bey album is gorgeous!

Okay, here's three more:

Ramp - Come into Knowledge
Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway - Roberta Flack featuring Donny Hathaway
George Duke - Don't Let Go

(xxxxpost)

Tuomas, that Andy Bey album is gorgeous!

It is indeed, it's my favourite foreplay music of all time.

lol @ Streisand being on the list

A bit too slow for actual fucking, but awesome for some sensual loving!

(xpost)

xp - Do you mean this 1972 Flack/Hathaway album? AllMusic says the 'featuring' album was released in 1980.

I meant the "Featuring" album... My copy of it says 1979, and so does Wikipedia. Don't know why Allmusic would say it's from 1980.

Allmusic is increasingly unreliable and of questionable use.

johnny fever: Shirley Bassey is on it too (she's the UK megastar of Streisand stature on the list, is she known in the US?)

Can I make a suggestion? For those worried about funk in the poll, it would be fairer if say only albums with vocals on it should be allowed? (Not Kool & The Gang style chanting of the early jazzy funk albums)

also here is Rate Your Music's funk of the 70s. I dont think the jazz-funk stuff like herbie hancock or miles davis should be allowed, but all of this is purely up to arch carrier of course!

http://tinyurl.com/RYM-Funk-70s

re: Bassey - is she known in the US?

Sure, though for most people here she's just known for Bond themes and that Propellers song from the 90s.

xp - Let's not make it too complicated. I don't want the final voting thread to be something like 1970s SOUL/FUNK/DISCO ALBUMS BY BLACK ARTISTS WITH VOCALS POLL!!!

BTW, Shirley Bassey's cover of 'Light My Fire' from that Something album is pretty good. I'm leaving it on the list. Streisand has to go, though.

Last one for tonight...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcL8SvyKtE4

I'm mostly going to sit and watch and learn I think - and try and work out how the hell to put a ballot together.

For the record that Andy Bey album is the nuts. And, tangentially, his cover of River Man is a thing to behold.

Will think about this for a bit, this is all I have so far:

Caston and Majors - Caston and Majors
Carol Douglas - Midnight Love Affair

with so many nominees already it might be fun to give everyone 10 or 20 de-nominations as well, see if we can't cull the herd a bit

If you spot another Streisand-level anomaly, just let me know and I'll delete it from the list. No need for de-nominations - I don't want to get into a fight with Cosmic Slop because one of you wanted to remove one of his beloved funk albums!

If you don't like something, just don't vote for it.

~~~Nominations updated~~~

Can we have:

Them Changes by Buddy Miles.

dunno if I'll bother voting in this but imo fwiw the term/genre descriptor "soul" is 100% derived from marketing + commercial segregation (ie that wonderful American intersection of racism and commerce), so I have no problem with accepting the "music black artists made in the 70s" definition of "70s soul". There's no aesthetic criteria that you can credibly apply to delineate genre boundaries.

Well, obv this is for another thread and another time and level of discourse, but aren't there aesthetic boundaries between soul and funk and funk and slick American black music in the '70s? Between Isaac Hayes and Allen Toussaint, and weren't musicians aware of the boundaries when they made the music to fit the expectations of their audience and their own aesthetic standards? I don't think it's all about marketing, myself, though of course that enters into it. Chic isn't even "black music" in some ways, actually, though the rhythm section attack and the vocal blend derives from certain black models. I'm just advocating keeping musicians' intentions in mind when you're talking about slippery genre classifications/taxonomies.

aren't there aesthetic boundaries between soul and funk and funk and slick American black music in the '70s

they're pretty porous, is the problem - especially when we're talking albums that in many cases (Hayes and Toussaint being good examples) actually contain a range of aesthetic styles.

Which is not to say that your point about musicians' intentions and approaches is not a good one - but it would open the poll up to accepting, say, certain jazz artists' certain 70s records as being classified as soul (Eugene McDaniels? Les McCann?) and then people would bitch about that because those guys are JAZZ guys, that's the circuit and milieu they came out of.

So what matters more: the way the record sounds (taken in the context of other similar-sounding records)? Or the way the record was marketed, distributed, broadcast, etc.?

Yeah, I'm really not advocating any change in the poll itself. The poll already has for example Minnie Riperton. Come to My Gardenisn't a "soul" record; it's a pop jazz record. She doesn't sing in a gospel or blues style and the songs and arrangements derive from jazz and sophisticated '60s pop, like Bacharach and David. But the same producer, Charles Stepney, also made records with the Dells, which have some of the same oddball pop characteristics, but they're identifiable as "soul" because the Dells sing in a gospel-derived manner. I see this as a good example of the intention Stepney had for each project. The question of "sounds like" vs. "marketed, distributed, broadcast" is a good one. A lot of great Southern soul never got outside the South, but that doesn't mean that someone who liked Les McCann and Terry Callier might not also like Jimmy Hughes or Eddie Floyd and would take them as variants on a spectrum of sounds that would register as "soulful." I'd go with "sounds like." You're right, the boundaries are porous but only become so...in the late '60s and into '70s; in the '60s "soul" meant down-home stuff, Aretha and Otis, and only later, with the Stylistics and the Chi-Lites, and the Four Tops' later stuff and the Temptations, does it show the influence of Sly Stone and psychedelic music and the so forth. Seems that way to me, at least. But in the case of McCann or Eugene McDaniels, it's kinda like talking about Wes Montgomery on A&M--he was consciously remaking himself in the image of another kind of music so he could be marketed more profitably....

YESSSSSSS!!!! excited about this!

Glad someone nomed Caston and Majors. imo Frank Caston was one of the finest producers of the period, mostly working with Kendricks. Here's my fave from the C&M album which contains one of my favorite jamerson basslines:

https://youtu.be/6o1q1QIp110

The Blackbyrds - The Blackbyrds
The Blackbyrds - Flying Start
The Blackbyrds - City Life
Commodores - Machine Gun
Commodores - Caught in the Act
Commodores - Movin' On
Slave - The Hardness of the World
The Meters - Rejuvenation
Cameo - We All Know Who We Are
Cameo - Ugly Ego

~~~ Nominations updated ~~~

If The Stylistics and Otis Redding belong to the same genre than there's place for Sly and Chic in there too imo.

excellent nominations by turrican

*then obviously

It's hard to find albums that haven't been nominated and someone might conceivably vote for! Lou Bond, Margie Joseph, Undisputed Truth,...they're all there!