Foreword: Preliminary Postings from a Neo-Soul

Abstract

What are we to make of palpable fact that this special issue of African American Review given over to considerations of phenomena (and having once ensconced this term in scare quotes, will dispense with all such typographical indicia of skepticism for duration) appears at a sort of high tide mark of soul? Soul is everywhere we look these days. Sharon Jones and Dap Kings continue their triumphant concertizing trek through America's music halls. Bettye LaVette, following decades of critical neglect, is out there winning awards, selling CDs and bringing her brand of soul to enthusiastic audiences everywhere. Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, D'Angelo; no matter how neo we name them, no matter how much any of them may quibble with moniker, that's soul. Alicia Keys brought so much soul to scene (borrowed James Brown chords and all) that Bob Dylan felt compelled to do a name drop on his Modern Times collection. Mary J. Blige may come out of hip hop, but dialing her 411 brings listeners to most soulful of dramas (it matters which soap you quote, and that's Elton John's Benny and Jets theme, one of those white-guy songs that finds a huge audience among black Americans, introducing one of Mary's biggest numbers). The Dap Kings are such adept purveyors of soul that Brits, those self-appointed conservators of American music that Americans tend to slight, have taken them up. The Dap Kings backed Amy Winehouse, and she got almost as many Grammy nominations as Kanye West. Angie Stone, having emerged from what New York Times describes as the first-wave hip-hop trio Sequence to take a leading role in soul revival announced provocatively from stage during a recent concert: I ain't hating on hip-hop ... But we grow up (Sanneh B5). Stax Records, formerly home to Sam and Dave, Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, Wilson Picket, and indomitable team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter, has been resuscitated for purpose of providing a new home to younger practitioners of soul. Whether we are looking at Blaxploitation redux (as bad a movie as it was, Talk to Me at least gave its audience a sense that this music had mattered in daily lives of people) or listening to a new generation (Joss Stone?) of white vocalists who grew listening to their mothers' collections of Miami-produced soul music, or watching Jill Scott in front of The Roots on Dave Chappelle's Block Party, or wondering if we hallucinated that fleeting image of a Mohawked Sly Stone we thought we saw on stage for 12 bars of I Want to Take You Higher, it would be hard to deny that there has been a remarkable resurgence of soul. grew among Baptists; we always believed that's what souls do. But this would only be seen as a refutation of impetus to describe a post-soul moment to kind of people who look for distinct boundaries of demarcation between their cultural phenomena; sort of folk who still deny there was ever any such thing as because it looked too much like modern. (Those of us who attended graduate schools in years immediately following Black Arts era will recall endless papers and books establishing that modernism itself replicated far more romanticism than it was generally willing to concede.) At one point in group discussion reproduced in this issue, one of participants remarks existence of a postmodern blackness and goes on to observe that of old school African Americanists, they hate that term. Now, I'm of a certain age, but don't take this remark personally. In fact, I'd argue that it is precisely because am so old school that don't hate term, that don't think eternal recurrence of soul means there can be no such thing as post-soul. There were some who mistakenly thought that term postcolonial was meant to mark an absolute end of colonial, but it was just that, a mistake. I've been here before; to me it's a mode of transmigration. …