Flying High in the Friendly Sky - Brainy Soul
the difference between two Soul Nights or two Soul Records may...
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Stevesilktulip in Articles
Updated on 24 Jul 2016 ·
Published 27 Mar 2013
Flying High in the Friendly Sky - Brainy Soul.
If a bunch of nerds can pseudo-intellectualise about the relative artistic merits of formula rock and the BBC construct of the history of pop, centred on the Sixties and the Beatles; Soul Music and the Soul Scene can easily withstand a little intellectual discourse. And not just at the level of vinylism, remembering names and dates, pitting differing opinions against each other, and people bluffing about where they’ve been, what they’ve heard and who they’ve seen.
One of my pop/ Rock friends once said to me that Zeppelin, John Lemon and Simple Minds are a different thing to Simply Red — pop nerds always think we go mad for Red Micks voice — and I replied that I think Led Zeppelin are different to Lemon, SM and SR. He always thought he was ‘ different ‘ from other people because he liked the Beatles ( the most successful act ever ), Elvis ( third ), Zeppelin ( fourth ) and Pink Floyd ( top ten ).
Somebody into Classical Music would no doubt say these are all the same, but French post- structuralist philosopher Derrida would agree but would include Handel and Vivaldi as well. Derridas theory of differance amalgamates difference with deference and illustrates how the difference between two Soul Nights or two Soul Records may be arbitrary and provisional and therefore subject to change over time.
A simple example would be how Golden Age discoveries are now derided by critics as the same 200 records, but at some point, current in demanders may one day join that illustrious list.
Another example might be Levine saying Curtis went too far playing P.Funk at Northern Soul Nights, while I suspect by then Curtis was no longer thinking in terms of NS, even though in 76 I was certainly thinking of specific records by Crown Heights Affair, Cameo and Jimmy Castor as NS, and I imagine Levine and Curtis were too.
An example drawn from pop music, whereby in the sixties the Beatles and Stones were perceived as very different: the Beatles as a teeny group and the Stones as much tougher, while now they are largely considered together, and are thought of as the greatest music ever, outside of classical.
Travelling up from London after seeing the Ojays in the mid- eighties, I was kindly joined by someone who’d been to Knebworth and, no disrespect to Cliff and his fans, he thought he was out of place amongst gods of rock: Paul McCartney, Phil Collins and Eric Clapton. He too thought he was ‘ different ‘ but hadn’t heard of the Ojays. Phil Collins sang some soul he said no he didn’t I said, to myself.
One last example from Jazz: some Jazz Funk people think the term refers to Jazz and Funk and think of the Jazz element as ‘ Modern ‘ ( electric ) Jazz, as opposed to acoustic Jazz which they consider as ‘ Traditional ‘ or Trad. In the history of Jazz, Traditional refers specifically to Dixie/ New Orleans type Jazz with clarinets and banjos and stuff while Modern Jazz is Bebop onwards, generally excluding Jazz Funk, which Jazz buffs would normally consider part of Soul, pop, disco, elevator music etc.
Culture operates by a system of binary oppositions which highlights differences. In simple terms, the essence of something is determined as much by what it isn’t as what it is. Post-Structuralism questions any notion of ‘ truth ‘ in culture arguing that it is always based on power which benefits those exercising it. An apparent dichotomy is constructed and represents points on a variable rather than opposition. Bearing this in mind, the potential for debate is limitless:
High/ Low Culture. It never ceases to amaze me that Geater Davis and George Perkins are deemed Popular but Beethoven and Mozart aren’t.
Parole/ Langue. Used in linguistics to distinguish between words in common use and the full resources of the language, but here to differentiate between records played on ‘ the scene ‘ and the whole of Black Music, History and Culture.
Musicology/ Cultural Reception. Appraisal of the primary text ( the music itself )/ how it’s received by an audience. Progrock/ punkrock ( Rock: the Primary Text by Allan F. Moore ).
Simple/ Complex. Blues/ P.Funk. Even Theodore Adorno of the Frankfurt School, ( Marxist intellectuals who studied American Culture ( Adornos expertise was Music )), did not preference complicated Music.
Novelty/ Innovative. Pop music/ Funk.
Authentic/ Superficial. Blues/ Pop. Post Structuralism would argue that any notion of authenticity ( or innovation ) is inevitably constructed.
Songwriting/ Composition. ( Verse/ chorus/ solo, generally in 4/4. / Extended pieces, recapitulation, conceptualisation, progression, virtuosity, embellishment, improvisation, atonality, complicated time signatures etc. ). Elements of composition creeping in from the late sixties in the music of James Brown, Ike Hayes, Curtis, Marvin, Lamont, Dan Penn, Eugene Record with the Chilites and P.Funk, following the arrival of classically trained keyboardist Bernie Worrell; with mixed results.
Modern/ modern. Rare Seventies/ recent.
Mass Culture/ Cult. Media led/ organic(ish).
Celebrity DJ/ Soul Fan(atic).
Genre/ Brand. Music with common characteristics ( rare, sixties, Motownesque, driving beat )/ Music played at a Northern Soul Night, by a Northern Soul DJ including New York Disco ( DC Larue ), Funk ( Cameo ) and Jazz Funk ( Hubert Laws )).
Pop/ Soul. The worship of the popstar and everything s/he does, including their music ( Lemon, Bowie )./ Worship of the 7” of plastic that reproduces the sound.
Blues/ Gospel. Determining the third element in Soul Music, required by the ‘ power of three ‘ which is no more than a rhetorical device, but we’ll give it a go anyway. It may be useful to switch Blues for R+B. In fact it may be useful to think of Soul as R+B with Gospel vocalising.
The more proficient pop nerds tend to go for country, illuminating underlying racism and focusing on the predominance of white musicians, particularly in the early days at Muscle Shoals, a popular myth they think they’ve discovered. Once read some liner notes claiming the third element is Jazz, which would certainly be valid for Funk, but probably comes from a metonymic misinterpretation of Jazz.My own preference would be for doowop, particularly in Detroit and Chicago vocal groups.
Naturally, Art also always plunders folk/ pop music - why waste your energies writing melodies everyone will get to know, when you can just steal some ready-made from people like Lemon or Macca, and turn it into something interesting.
Northern Soul/ Modern Soul. The records the ns people think are Modern and the Modern people think are NS: Carstairs, Montclairs, Cashing In, Am I Cold Am I Hot, Collins and Collins, Something new to do, Charles Johnson, Anderson Bros, James Bounty, Nine Times, Sidney Joe Qualls, Touching in the Dark, King Tut, James Govan, Only Way is Up etc.
Pop/ Rock. The bands the pop ( rock/ and roll ) people think are rock and the Rock people think are pop: Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Doors, Queen, Sex Pistols, Clash, U2, Smiths, Oasis etc.
Modern Soul/ Rare Groove. Margie Joseph Riding High was Rare Groove before myself and others brought it up north when it became Modern Soul. There are many more examples including records by Leroy Hutson, Willie Hutch, Jean Carn and Leon Ware.
Modern Soul/ Crossover. If two people ever agree on what crossover is. One of my sons likes Heavy Metal ( he also likes Classic Rock, Progrock, Folkrock, Blues, Reggae, Soul Funk and Modern Classical Music ) and every new band seems to have its own genre drawing on a potentially limitless combination of words including: heavy, metal, classic, industrial, thrash, death, hard, core, progressive, southern, rap, electronic, post, nu, neo, new, wave, grind, crab, black, groove, tribal, punk, pop, British, American, Norwegian.
I don’t disagree with genres just so long as they’re meaningful and useful. Anybody see Gaz Barlows face when District 3 said they were totally different to Union J, one being pop and the other more pop/ R+B.
I want a night which only plays Crossover, with a DJ who hates Modern Soul. Starting to sound silly? I also want to create two new genres: proto crossover, the bit between sixties and crossover, and I can’t decide between neo and post crossover for the bit between crossover and seventies. Getting even sillier? Since they’re quite small genres I propose a broom cupboard for each at the next weekender.
Incidentally, somebody told me there’s a crossover record from the last year or so, and the recent Darrow Fletcher album from the late seventies is referred to as Crossover, suggesting a generic definition which goes beyond something recorded at the stroke of midnight on New Years Eve1969, which is, strictly speaking absent in Northern or Modern.
It’s a bit like doctors and lawyers who use Latin, not because of any intrinsic reason why it suits either discipline, but because it gives those using it power over the rest of us.
Culture always needs a history and a story, so the media dreams up a linear narrative which generally bears little resemblance to events on the ground; like everything leads to and from the Beatles, and Gospel became Soul became Funk became hip hop.
Crossover both links in to and transgresses this particular narrative though, as good a definition as any I’ve heard is ‘ the stuff nobody wanted 10 years ago but everybody ( whoever they are ) wants now, ‘ which I thought was Progrock.
I wonder if in time Crossover will simply be used to describe rare seventies and free up Modern to reclaim its literal meaning, further illustrating the deferance of language.
Incidentally, the term crossover was in use in the seventies and was interchangeable with Jazz, Funk, Rock, Fusion, pop, disco, commercial to distinguish Jazz Funk from ‘ the real thing, ‘ Itself a construction.
The Soul Scene per se can be seen as discursive since it differentiates between ‘ rare ‘ Soul and the stuff everybody knows ( see below ).
Soul/ R+B. When I was studying Music at college, a young class member told us about this new music called R+B, to which we objected that it had already been taken.
The ns people have reclaimed the term once again but the genre to which they have applied it is quite distinct from either the one in the charts or the original direct Blues derivative which fused with country to become Rock and Roll and Gospel to become Soul.
I tend to think of R+B, of whichever guise, as not quite Soul, not quite Blues, not quite rock and roll, not quite anything. Incidentally, in America R+B has been more or less interchangeable with Soul all along.
A little more post-structuralism is in order, courtesy another Frenchman ( apologies to the xenophobes ), Michel Foucault. Such distinctions can be seen as discursive practices or bodies of knowledge which are ideological since they are based on power exercised by those who create and articulate them, but since they are constructed, they are both arbitrary and provisional. In short, they don’t actually exist outside the discourse.
Discursive practices are maintained through interpellation whereby the ‘ opinion leader ‘ ( DJ, promoter, dealer, serious/ boring soul fan ) invites participants to share in their advanced knowledge/ appreciation of particular records/ labels/ artists/ areas/ format.
Just Soul/ Modern Soul. Since Modern Soul does not have a rigid generic definition, does a Just Soul record become a Modern Soul record on its second play?
Just Soul/ just Soul. We tend to take language for granted and assume it reflects our experience of the world accurately, but it is not always easy to appreciate how language constructs the world we think we know. The example which is always used is that eskimos have dozens of different words for different grades of snow.
It is not possible for someone to control the signified of language in every given situation so it does not always reflect what it’s intended to. For instance, Deep Soul did not settle on the Music Dave Godin intended it for.
The Just Soul Nights are another case in point and the more negative connotations of the term ( only soul/ only just soul ) come to the fore, reflecting the music played more than what the DJs think they are playing.
Similarly, when my partner in crime at the Manor was guesting on a local BBC Radio Soul Show, he called his slot Beneath the Radar and the music he played reflected what he said rather than what he intended it to mean, while I would have called it Above the Radar.
Ephemeral/ Timeless. Pop Music/ Classical, Jazz, Rock, Reggae. Soul if we ‘ Save the Children.
Plaissure/ Jouissance/. Enjoyment of music/ physical response ( dictionary definition - orgasmic ).
Deep Soul/ Northern or Modern Soul. May be something of an oversimplification since the sheer Soulfulness of the voice can invoke a physical response.
A better example may be between enjoying listening to Jazz and Blues from the twenties and thirties for its historical significance, and the way faces light up when Dancing Queen comes on at a wedding, or the first time you hear Whams XMas record each December ( November, October ), which
I like to play for my elderly relatives. But enough of my guilty pleasures.
Soul Boy ( Golden Age )/ Neo ( new ) Soul Boy ( Late 70s )/ Post ( after ) Soul Boy ( 80s )/ Neo Post Soul Boy/ Post Neo Soul Boy ( Revival ).
Vinyl/ CD. The relative aesthetic value of the vinyl album sleeve/ the utility of CD liner notes.
Music/ Social History. See Haralambos. Reading it now, it’s interesting to note how perceptions about Blues and Soul have shifted since it was written.
The grain of the voice/ Pain in the voice: Otis Redding/ James Carr. . Wilson Pickett/ Bobby Womack. . Sam Cooke/ Johnnie Taylor. These and the following may also be instances of:
Soul Music for pop fans/ Soul Music for Soul Fans: Stevie Wonder/ Willie Hutch. Sam and Dave/ Soul Children. Solomon Burke/ ZZ Hill. See Guralnick.
Did Aretha become a popstar in the seventies? Did she become a popstar when she stopped singing gospel?
Motown/ Stax, Atlantic. A popular myth, particularly with the BBC, that Motown is pure commercial and if you want the ‘ real thing ‘ you have to go ‘ down south.‘ Actually you can stay in Detroit, or bob over to Chicago, New York or Philly. Lots of big soulies prefer Motown to O, Wicked, Lady Soul etc and HDH writing for the Tops is a defining moment in the emergence of Soul Music as an art form, quite distinct from the black pop of the preceding years, alongside Change is Gonna Come, Curtis getting serious, James Carr getting seriously Soulful, James Brown getting Funky and Aretha defying everybody by making not just 1, but 2 classic albums. I’m conscious too that Southern Soul isn’t all quality as previously thought and much of it hasn’t aged well, which suits the pop nerds who think it’s period music - all roots and rustic.
Taste/ Opinion. Bourgeois Myth and proletariat excuse/ better but almost half a century into the age of post-structuralism, Soul Fans especially, with our instinctive loathing of all things populist, should be thinking in terms of Ideology, Discourse and Power.
Don’t forget, these are all compare and contrast issues with no correct answers, designed to make people think and encourage debate ( and not just who can hate me the most ) and hopefully get some better music out there.
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Save the Children — Who really cares?
The purpose of this article is not to offend a large part of the constituency, who are what the Pentagon would call collateral damage. Vinyl worshippers have an investment in plastic entirely disproportionate to their interest in music, which they will take to the grave. My hope is to help deconstruct the prevailing ideology and plant the seed of an idea for younger folk and future generations that it isn’t about politics and religion, never was and never will be.
In hindsight, because of their proximity to the Golden Age, the neos and posts were always likely to want something of their own. Sixties Newies went some way to fulfilling that need but was largely dire, so it became ( original ) vinyl we could never have afforded even if we gave a damn. And then the dinosaurs joined in.
It’s easier to accept missing something 30 years ago than 5 years ago. The pop nerds make a similar charge against my generation for not liking the Beatles, but there’s a difference between thinking something you listened to as a 5, 6, 7, 8 year old is juvenile, and not knowing something exists because it’s slightly beneath the surface.
Whether Soul becomes the province of the proverbial dinosaur — like a next generation of teddy boys — or a valid C20th Art form in the realm of Modern ( early C20th ) Classical Music, Jazz, Rock and Reggae, will be determined in the coming years.
If there isn’t a sensible Soul Night you can’t go, but if there is and you don’t go, you get the Soul Nights you deserve. If Soul Acts don’t perform in your region you can’t go, but if they do and you don’t go, you will get the live acts you deserve.
There aren’t enough sensible people in the NE to maintain a night which is there as a resource if you fancy it; you have to go. There may come a time when more people want a bigger picture than in-demand records on vinyl and the various versions of ns, but there may be nothing worthwhile left for them.
I’m edging towards a view that major Soul Fans almost have a responsibility to go to a good night, and the scope of this article illustrates that any night I’m involved in is not just another soul night. Those who have already come across me should have known that, and anybody who hadn’t come across me should have come across me, and has now.
Certainly I would have gone to a night featuring Paul Mooney or Mike Hoskins, probably John Powney and maybe a couple of others even though, in general, people in the NE are between 20 years and twice that behind me.
I’m dumbfounded that people who live a short distance away from a Soul Night with the potential to be as good as any in the world, didn’t go in almost 2 years, but still tell their friends and come on here and claim to be top soul boys and girls. I wonder if and when I will ever be able to take the NE seriously again.
Many people are content with the Good Old Days mentality ( even though most weren’t actually there ) and I have some sympathy with this; like my Rocker friend acknowledging the music of Status Quo bears a certain honesty; but it needs to be done tastefully, intelligently and progressively.
In many respects, this is preferable to the relentless excavation of 60s Soul which has been trodden continuously for decades in the endless search for that elusive B side missed by Levine, Searling, Soul Sam and a constant procession since.
As the great years of Modern Soul came to a close, I came to believe the DJs bringing back stuff like Run for Cover and Dearly Beloved had grasped the future.
Treading the various nights on offer today I was often struck, not only by the Music played, but also by the stuff excluded. I felt a modern day Soul Night should be able to play Northern, Modern, Funk, Jazz Funk and — crucially — Just Soul, the bit I thought everybody knew but seems to cause the most difficulty.
As I promoted the Manor House I was dumbfounded by ns people protesting that I play Funk, and Jazz Funk people advising me to drop the Northern, presumably because they assumed I was just going to play the tired and should be rested stuff played everywhere else.
Somebody involved in another night, told me s/he liked everything and went on to say s/he hates Funk. OK so s/he doesn’t like the Ohio Players, War and P.Funk. Does s/he not like James Brown, the Isleys and Maze? What about Soul Music with a syncopated rhythm by the likes of Marvin, Curtis, Womack, Willie Hutch and the Temptations? Or bona fide NS records by the Commodores, Crown Heights Affair and Cameo.
Classic Soul is amongst the great Music of the world which generally attracts the followers it deserves, who then fail to behave in the way it deserves.
Next time you call someone a dinosaur, check you don’t whistle when you boil, and the next time you bemoan the state of the Soul Scene in the NE or elsewhere, ensure you’re part of the solution and not part of the problem.
I hope Soul Music will have the resilience to survive those intent on interpolating the politics, sport, economics and religion at the expense of the Music and, if it does survive, I have no doubt that playing everything is the way forward, which depends on genuine enthusiasts coming out of the woodwork. I regret the NE, instead of leading the way, will be in the wilderness for a generation.
Part 3 to follow shortly....
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