Neo soul
As a term, neo soul was coined by Kedar Massenburg of Motown Records in the late 1990s as a marketing category following the commercial breakthroughs of artists such as D'Angelo, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, and Maxwell.
"[8] Jason Anderson of CBC News compares the etymology of neo soul to that of "new wave" and comments: "As imperfect as the term may be, neo-soul is still an effective tag to describe the mix of chic modernity and time-honoured tradition that distinguished the genre's best examples.
"[17] Dimitri Ehrlich of Vibe said that they "emphasize a mix of elegant, jazz-tinged R&B and subdued hip hop, with a highly idiosyncratic, deeply personal approach to love and politics".
[18] Jason Anderson of CBC News called neo soul a "sinuous, sly yet unabashedly earnest" alternative and "kind of haven for listeners turned off by the hedonism of mainstream hip-hop and club jams.
[5] In a 1998 article on neo soul, Time journalist Christopher John Farley wrote that singers such as Hill, D'Angelo, and Maxwell "share a willingness to challenge musical orthodoxy".
as progenitors of the genre, Tony Green of Vibe viewed that the group pioneered the "digital-analog hybrid sound" of neo soul and "dramatically refreshed the digitalized wasteland that was R&B in the late '80s".
[25] Influential to neo soul, UK act Sade achieved success in the 1980s with music that featured a smooth jazzy style of pop rock called sophisti-pop.
[30] According to Christopher John Farley, Prince had been "carrying a torch for neo soul for decades, refusing to make R&B that played by the rules or fit into comfortable formats.
[1][32][33][34] NdegéOcello's 1993 debut album Plantation Lullabies was later credited as the beginning of neo soul;[35] according to Renee Graham of The Boston Globe, it was "arguably the first shot in the so-called 'neo-soul' movement".
[37][38] Cheo Hodari Coker said in 1997 that the album "largely sparked the soul music revival that has opened the door for a new generation of singers who build on the tradition of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder".
Malcolm Venable of Vibe highlights the early work of hip hop band The Roots, who used live instrumentation, as a precursor to neo soul's commercial breakthrough in the mid-1990s.
[39] Kierna Mayo, former editor-in-chief of Ebony, said that alternative hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest's early 1990s albums The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders "gave birth to neo-everything ... That entire class of D'Angelo, Erykah Badu, Maxwell, and Lauryn Hill".
[5][1][17][42][43][44] According to Farley, D'Angelo's album "gives a nod to the past, ... mints his own sound, with golden humming keyboards and sensual vocals and unhurried melodies ... His songs were polished without being slick and smart without being pretentious", while Badu "brought an iconoclastic spirit to soul music, with her towering Afrocentric headwraps, incense candles, and quirky lyrics".
[45] Hill's Miseducation album featured her singing and rapping, with deeply personal lyrics,[31] and was one of neo soul's primary successes,[1] achieving massive sales, critical acclaim, and five Grammy Awards.
[46] The 1997 film Love Jones capitalized on neo soul's success at the time with its soundtrack album, which impacted the Billboard charts and featured artists such as Hill, Maxwell, The Brand New Heavies, Me'Shell NdegéOcello, Groove Theory, and Dionne Farris.
[47][48] After a brief marketing downturn, neo soul gained more mainstream popularity in 1999 with commercial successes by Hill, Maxwell, Eric Benét, Saadiq, and Les Nubians.
"Thanks to her stint on 'You Got Me' and subsequent live shows", Joel McIver wrote, "Scott can be credited as the first female artist to emerge in Erykah Badu's wake who could seriously claim to have challenged her superiority at the top of the neo-soul tree".
[56] Other successful performers marketed as neo soul at this time included Bilal, Musiq Soulchild, India.Arie, and Alicia Keys, who broke through to broader popularity with her debut album Songs in A Minor (2001).
[4][17][57] According to AllMusic biographer Andy Kellman, although Bilal may have been the "one R&B artist for whom the neo-soul categorization seemed limiting", his 2001 debut album 1st Born Second was an "exemplary" release for the genre and a top-10 R&B chart success.
[9] Melena Ryzik of The New York Times wrote in a retrospective piece on that "era of left-of-center black singer-songwriters", stating "many of them struggled to keep their creative momentum, conflicted about their early mainstream success.
[61] After D'Angelo and Hill's withdrawal from the mainstream, Bilal appeared to be another artist from "the soul music vanguard" of the late 1990s and early 2000s to succumb to professional setbacks and fade from the public view, after his heavily bootlegged album Love for Sale was shelved in 2006, although it developed an underground following in subsequent years.
[63] In the latter part of the decade, emerging artists such as Heather Headley, Anthony David, J Davey, Eric Roberson, and Ledisi signed to independent soul labels and received exposure through independent retailers, neo soul-oriented web sites, college and public radio stations, city club venues, cable networks such as Music Choice and BET J, and publishing deals as writers and producers for major label-recording artists.
[11] The more popular neo soul artists of the 2010s included Scott, Maxwell, John Legend, Anthony Hamilton, Amy Winehouse, Chrisette Michele, Leela James, and Raheem DeVaughn.
Club discerns "a line of revelatory, late-period neo-soul albums" with the releases of Maxwell's BLACKsummers'night (2009), Badu's New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh) (2010), Bilal's Airtight's Revenge (2010), and Frank Ocean's Channel Orange (2012).
[71] In the 2010s and 2020s, other neo soul acts included Tyler, The Creator,[72] Fitz and the Tantrums,[73] Mayer Hawthorne,[74] Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats,[75] Sol Chyld and Amos Lee.
[76] In August 2019, Okayplayer journalist Keith Nelson Jr. published a piece highlighting 11 recording artists who are "on the precipice of pushing neo-soul forward" into its third decade of existence: Steve Lacy ("cut from the abstract neo-soul cloth of Frank Ocean where you’re just as likely to have a jam session as you are to hear philosophical quips"), Mahalia ("singer-songwriter, with honeyed vocals … songs of love and anguish typically exist in narratives, similar to Jill Scott, who paved her path"), Adrian Daniel ("experimentation and vulnerability that is reminiscent of fellow Brooklynite Maxwell"), VanJess ("sister duo float between the soulful chemistry of Floetry and the unapologetically assertive of City Girls … artful sexual empowerment"), Donovan ("avant-garde singer and instrumentalist … bedroom intimate vocals and [emotive] production"), Ari Lennox ("can make Tinder plights sound rich with soul … akin to Erykah Badu"), Marco McKinnis ("Anthony Hamilton meets D'Angelo … hazy ambient sounds"), Baby Rose ("exquisitely guttural voice makes [love] palpable"), Kyle Dion ("a register so high it sounded like tearful begging"), Lucky Daye ("his love odes are imbued with a Raphael Saadiq-esque adventurousness"), and Iman Omari ("a faint Bilal tinge … music that leans heavy on a jazz/hip-hop").
