Neo soul

• 1. Introduction

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  Neo soul arrived in the mid-1990s not as a genre anyone planned, but as a name slapped on something that was already happening. Kedar Massenburg, a music industry entrepreneur at Motown Records, coined the term in the late 1990s as a marketing category, giving a label to a wave of Black-American artists whose music felt strikingly different from the producer-driven, digitally assembled R&B dominating radio. The sound drew from soul, funk, jazz fusion, hip hop, and rock. The lyrics ran conscious and personal. The instrumentation was live. The artists behind it were often ambivalent, even hostile, toward being named and filed. How did a marketing term become one of the most debated categories in modern popular music? And who were the musicians who built the genre before anyone knew what to call it?

• 2. A Term Nobody Wanted

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  Kedar Massenburg gave his reasoning plainly. In a 2002 interview for Billboard, he acknowledged that genre classifications can feel like they are branding a short-lived trend. He believed one was still necessary: listeners needed a way to understand what they were hearing. His label, Kedar Entertainment Inc., which he established in 1995 after leaving a career in corporate marketing, had already released breakthrough recordings by D'Angelo and Erykah Badu. The success of D'Angelo's 1995 debut album Brown Sugar is widely credited as the spark that inspired Massenburg to reach for the term.

  But the artists themselves bristled. Music writer Tyler Lewis, writing in a 2010 article for PopMatters, observed that the reaction among artists who fit the category represented what he called "a wonderful example of black self-determination in an industry that is still defiantly wedded to narrow definitions and images of black folks." Badu put her discomfort with the label more personally. When writers began calling her "the queen of neo-soul," she rejected the title: "I hated that because what if I don't do that anymore? What if I change? Then that puts me in a penitentiary."

  Jason Anderson of CBC News defended the term from a different angle, comparing it to "new wave" and arguing it remained an effective tag for describing a mix of modernity and tradition. The genre's artists, Anderson wrote, "tried to look both backward and forward, acting in the belief that a continuum might exist."

• 3. Roots and Forebears

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  Tony! Toni! Toné! did not set out to launch a movement, but their 1993 album Sons of Soul planted the seed. Music journalist Cheo Hodari Coker wrote in 1997 that it "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." Vibe writer Tony Green credited the group with pioneering a "digital-analog hybrid sound" that, in his words, "dramatically refreshed the digitalized wasteland that was R&B in the late '80s."

  Me'Shell NdegéOcello's 1993 debut album Plantation Lullabies is cited even more directly. Renee Graham of The Boston Globe called it "arguably the first shot in the so-called 'neo-soul' movement." Other early artists who shaped the sound included Terence Trent D'Arby, Mint Condition, Zhané, Groove Theory, Joi, and Tony Rich.

  The hip hop world fed into the formation as well. Kierna Mayo, former editor-in-chief of Ebony, pointed to alternative hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest's early 1990s albums The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders as the work that "gave birth to neo-everything... That entire class of D'Angelo, Erykah Badu, Maxwell, and Lauryn Hill." Malcolm Venable of Vibe similarly highlighted The Roots' use of live instrumentation as an early precursor.

  Deeper in the lineage stood Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson. All About Jazz named Jackson "one of the early architects" of the sound and his 1970s collaborative work with Scott-Heron "an inspirational and musical Rosetta stone for the neo-soul movement." Miles Marshall Lewis put it plainly: 1990s neo soul "owed its raison d'etre to '70s soul superstars like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder." Tony! Toni! Toné! member Raphael Saadiq went on to produce works by other neo soul artists, carrying the lineage forward.

• 4. The Breakthrough Albums

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  D'Angelo's Brown Sugar arrived in 1995 with golden humming keyboards, sensual vocals, and what Time journalist Christopher John Farley described as songs that were "polished without being slick and smart without being pretentious." Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite followed in 1996, and then Erykah Badu's Baduizm in 1997. Farley wrote that Badu "brought an iconoclastic spirit to soul music, with her towering Afrocentric headwraps, incense candles, and quirky lyrics." Baduizm sold nearly three million copies and earned Badu two Grammy Awards.

  The 1997 film Love Jones, timed to ride neo soul's momentum, released a soundtrack that reached the Billboard charts and featured Hill, Maxwell, The Brand New Heavies, NdegéOcello, Groove Theory, and Dionne Farris.

  Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill came in 1998. The album combined singing and rapping with deeply personal lyrics and became one of neo soul's primary successes, achieving massive sales and five Grammy Awards. After a brief marketing downturn, 1999 brought renewed commercial success from Hill, Maxwell, Eric Benet, Saadiq, and Les Nubians. R&B acts including R. Kelly and Aaliyah incorporated some of neo soul's textures. Kelly's 1998 song "When a Woman's Fed Up" drew directly from the aesthetic and referenced Badu's 1997 song "Tyrone" in its lyrics.

  Jill Scott had not yet released her debut when The Roots featured her on their 1999 hit single "You Got Me." Music writer Joel McIver credited that exposure with making Scott "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."

• 5. The Soulquarians

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  The musical collective that formed around the turn of the millennium carried neo soul's most experimental impulses. The Soulquarians gathered D'Angelo, The Roots, Erykah Badu, Bilal, Mos Def, Common, James Poyser, J Dilla, and Q-Tip. Music critic Greg Kot described their output as "organic soul, natural R&B, boho-rap." The collective developed through the production work of Questlove, the drummer and producer of The Roots.

  D'Angelo's second album Voodoo, released in 2000, stood as the Soulquarians' most celebrated achievement. Ben Ratliff, writing in The New York Times, called it "the succes d'estime that proves the force of this new music: it is a largely unslick, stubbornly idiosyncratic and genuinely great album that has already produced two hit singles." Spin magazine, in a 2010 retrospective on critical moments in popular music, placed Voodoo at the top: "D'Angelo's pastiche of funk, carnal ache, and high-minded, Afrocentric rhetoric stands as neo-soul's crowning achievement."

  The collective's influence extended into hip hop. The Roots released Phrenology in 2002 and Common released Electric Circus in 2003, both incorporating neo soul elements. African American studies professor Mark Anthony Neal argued that "neo-soul and its various incarnations has helped to redefine the boundaries and contours of black pop."

• 6. Sound and Identity

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  African American studies professor Mark Anthony Neal described neo soul as "everything from avant-garde R&B to organic soul... a product of trying to develop something outside of the norm in R&B." That "outside" quality expressed itself most clearly in the production choices: live instrumentation over sampling, album-oriented craft over single-driven hits, and a microrhythmic sensibility that music author Anne Danielsen, writing in Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction, described as "a remarkable increase in musicians' experimentation with and manipulation of grooves at the microrhythmic level."

  Dimitri Ehrlich of Vibe summarized the sound as an emphasis on "elegant, jazz-tinged R&B and subdued hip hop, with a highly idiosyncratic, deeply personal approach to love and politics." The genre incorporated elements of electronic music, gospel, reggae, and African music alongside its more publicized jazz and funk roots. Lyrically, writers noted the artists skewed toward singer-songwriters with conscious, personal content wider in range than most R&B.

  Writers also observed that neo soul artists were predominantly female, a contrast to the marginalized presence of women in mainstream hip hop and R&B. Jason Anderson of CBC News described the genre as "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." Neo soul artists were frequently associated with alternative lifestyles: organic food, incense, and knit caps appeared in multiple critical profiles as signifiers of the scene.

• 7. Decline and Diversification

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  The 2000s brought a retreat from mainstream visibility. Music journalist and culture critic Chris Campbell, writing in his 2010 book The Essential Neo Soul, acknowledged that the genre had been "woefully misunderstood," while arguing it retained "a historical and social relevance that validates its designation as the current face of alternative progressive soul music (in both underground and overground circles), complete with a distinct origin and developmental evolution." Newer artists reached audiences through more independent means of marketing.

  The 2010s saw a late creative resurgence. Evan Rytlewski of The A.V. Club identified what he called "a line of revelatory, late-period neo-soul albums" that included Maxwell's BLACKsummers'night (2009), Badu's New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh) (2010), Bilal's Airtight's Revenge (2010), Aloe Blacc's Good Things (2010), and Frank Ocean's Channel Orange (2012). International artists joined American ones in expanding the genre. Names including Amy Winehouse, Justin Timberlake, John Legend, and Tyler, The Creator were grouped with neo soul's later period.

  In August 2019, Okayplayer journalist Keith Nelson Jr. published a piece naming eleven artists on the leading edge of the genre's third decade. Among them: Steve Lacy, described as "cut from the abstract neo-soul cloth of Frank Ocean"; Ari Lennox, compared to Erykah Badu; and Lucky Daye, whose love songs were noted for a "Raphael Saadiq-esque adventurousness." Saadiq, who had been part of the earliest formations of the genre through Tony! Toni! Toné!, remained a point of reference more than two decades after neo soul first found an audience.