Word: neos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Musical genres, like city streets, need names to make things navigable. Artists rage against categorization, but it's a useful tool to define the boundaries of a given phenomenon. Neo-soul is the best name to call the latest emerging genre. Simply defined, neo-soul describes artists--like song-stylist Erykah Badu--who combine a palpable respect for and understanding of the classic soul of the '60s and '70s with a healthy appetite for '90s sonic experimentation and boundary crossing. Neo-soul artists tend to create music that's a good deal more real, a good deal more edgy than...
...Neo-Soul is not an entirely new musical category. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, for example, has been creating experimental R. and B. for two decades. And remember Terence Trent D'Arby? No? Well, he was that guy...never mind. The point is, in the '90s, the face of cool in R. and B. has been the face of a gangsta. Puff Daddy, Dr. Dre, Master P and the like dominate the aesthetic space in black music. Boyz II Men may sell more albums, but when you think of what's hot, what's hip, what's real, what...
...cool. Last year Badu, with her Afrocentric head wraps, sensuous grooves and searingly beautiful voice, captured the attention and imagination of record buyers, selling more than 3 million copies of her debut album Baduizm; this summer she's a headliner on the Lilith Fair tour. Other new neo-soul artists such as Maxwell, with his enlightened ladies'-man charm, and laid-back auteur D'Angelo have also managed to garner critical and commercial success...
WYNTON MARSALIS (1961- ) A master soloist and bandleader and a Pulitzer prizewinning composer, Marsalis has championed Neo-Traditionalism. Committed to the belief that the style created in the years between Armstrong and Davis is America's true classical music, he cofounded Jazz at Lincoln Center. His seminal album, Standard Time, Vol. 1 (1987), treats works by Ellington and Parker with passionate devotion...
...hand, my colleague's view of Sinatra as scourge of baby boomers--the anti-Judy Collins, if you will--is a crude caricature of a complex artist, as reductive as any neo-swinger's fetishistic prattling about the man's way with a pocket handkerchief. On the other hand, it is a caricature I too used to believe...