“More than Billie and I sound alike, I think we feel alike,” Badu said in 1997.Īs a child of the ’70s, Badu grew up on Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Chaka Khan. Like Billie, Badu performed emotions that hit all corners of a room, her freeform scatting a product of jazz and blues. The album builds its ecosystem around her hoarse, cackling tone, which drew so many early comparisons to Billie Holiday that Badu’s publicist began asking interviewers to avoid the subject. Badu was always shape-shifting her way out of categorization, and Baduizm was the beginning of her decades-long ritual of reinvention. Neo-soul was helpful as a concept for the moment yet fleeting because Black music perpetually finds ways to escape time. You either have soul or you don’t.”įor Massenburg, the endgame was preservation. “But people who really love music can’t respect that because it’s not new soul. “I understand it for marketing reasons, I get that,” Saadiq told Billboard in 2002. Raphael Saadiq, one-third of Tony! Toni! Toné!, went so far as to call neo-soul “disrespectful,” though he recognized its intent. A 2002 Vibe essay described neo-soul as a “sublime paradox,” reflecting a common gripe at the time-“new soul” implied that soul had somehow died.
Though he didn’t see neo-soul as a “marketing strategy,” it was just that: a way to repackage ’70s soul for the masses and train listeners to value live instrumentation and vocals over the computerized pop-R&B of that era.
“Because, when you classify music, it becomes a fad, which tends to go away,” Massenburg told Billboard in 2002. Black musicians can be hyper-vigilant of the relative impermanence of their culture and wary of being boxed in. In many ways, the backlash was grounded in fear. Still, the man who coined the neo-soul term, Universal executive Kedar Massenburg, knew even the acts he’d signed, including Badu, had rejected the label. It was prestige R&B, with D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar (1995) and Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite (1996) as prototypes. The ensuing neo-soul era was illustrious, merging the familiar crackle of vinyl sounds with contemporary relationship angst. And while artists from Usher to Brandy to Blackstreet added new-school bounce and flavor to the pop charts, neo-soul glimpsed back to a time when Marvin Gaye was crafting timeless soul out of divorce proceedings. Blige was turning anguish into hip-hop soul. The truth is that, in 1997, R&B did not need any saving: Aaliyah’s music lived in the future. But in carving space for this retro sound, the music world presented neo-soul artists as saviors who were bringing R&B “back to basics,” which dismissed the innovation that was already driving the genre. Their musical and artistic identities affirmed the mutual bond between Black love and liberation.
Heralded as prodigies, they made lush serenades and instrumental jam sessions with a political center. They are full of control and surrender at the same time, confident in their search for answers even when there are none.īadu’s musical style had roots in the smooth harmonies of ’80s groups like Mint Condition and Tony! Toni! Toné!, along with the early songs of Meshell Ndegeocello, but it wasn’t until the late ’90s that neo-soul crystallized into a subgenre with a foundational crew of rebels: D’Angelo, Maxwell, Badu, Jill Scott. There’s a throughline to albums like Solange’s 2016 opus A Seat at the Table, which similarly harnesses the power of Black music as a salve. It stripped the act of soul-searching down to its philosophical elements, mining abstract concepts like self-love, romantic love, and spirituality. Baduizm was an instant hit of intimate existentialism. The record went double platinum by summer and that year won the Grammy for Best R&B Album under the banner of a divisive new subgenre, neo-soul. Out of those demo sessions came her February 1997 debut, Baduizm, bookended by the original recording of “Rim Shot,” split into an intro and outro. Clack: She made all her music this way, letting the groove lead her into streams of consciousness that became worldwide gospel. They made a song out of it, connecting the kick and the snare with the stimulating sensation of love: Boom. Badu called up producer-songwriter Madukwu Chinwah, asked what “that tick-tock sound” was, and had him compose an entire rim shot-based rhythm for her. It’s a fundamental drum technique: the act of striking the metal edge and the head of a snare simultaneously to produce a full, explosive hit. While recording a demo in her hometown of Dallas in 1995, Erykah Badu found love in the simplicity of a rim shot.