![]() Some found themselves as core members of the Soulquarian collective, an expansive, interdisciplinary crew of musicians and producers who popularized neo-soul and later fought to distance themselves from it. Some are obvious predecessors who channeled aspects of bygone eras as well as their own into modern masterpieces. The source code of neo-soul is scattered across a number of genre-defiant projects that pushed, and eventually broke, boundaries in the first half of the ’90s, allowing for a subsequent generation of soulful misfits to pick up where they left off. But it seems important to note that despite the genuine innovations heard on those albums, their respective follow-ups, and the dozen or so associated with the movement, the maturation (and to a certain degree, mystification) of R&B predates the mid-’90s public relations push. The debut albums of both D’Angelo and Badu were commercially and critically adored. By any set of metrics, Massenburg’s effort was a success. Managing Erykah Badu and the rising Virginia singer in the mid-’90s, Massenburg hoped to set his clients apart from the rest of the landscape by inventing his own catchy sub-genre, effectively creating the Web 3.0 of R&B. But as hard as it is to blame them, it’s even more difficult to examine the transformation of black music in the early ’90s and not empathize with the critics and pedestrians (and, yes, major label marketing departments) struggling to describe the moment.Īccording to an interview with D’Angelo in 2014, “Neo-soul” was coined by Kedar Massenburg, a former Motown Records executive who served as president of the label between 19. This much is clear, though: artists who were stamped with it have mostly grown to distance themselves from the classification. How the umbrella term was conceived (and by whom) is still a point of contention. Hard to believe, but there was a time when everything from late-daisy age rap to jazz-anchored R&B didn’t fit so neatly under one banner. Neo-soul wasn’t always such a nebulous category of music. Photo Credit: Paul Natkin/Getty Images The source code of neo-soul is scattered across a number of genre-defiant projects that pushed, and eventually broke, boundaries in the first half of the 1990s. No discussion of the blurring of genre boundaries can go without mention of Sade. ![]()
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