Neo Soul Music Essay

Black music is always revolving and changing, creative musicians are always trying to add new elements to existing contents. In this research paper, we are going to look into the development of modern days neo-soul music in America, what makes this style of music fascinating to a lot of music lovers, artists that excels in this style of music and how it influenced musicians around the world. It is extremely difficult to separate R&B, hip-hop, jazz and neo-soul as these genres of music are closely tied together in history. In this research, focus will be heavily put on artist such as D’ Angelo, Questlove, Robert Glasper, Hiatus Kaiyote, etc. Music itself has no limit or boundaries, names were given to categorize different sounds, to target audiences of different race/social status and to help fostering music business along the years. According to Mark Nero, a professional journalist and music critic, the category “neo-soul” has been around in the late-1990s, essentially describing soul music with hip-hop elements. Artists that represents the genre are Raphael Saadiq and D’ Angelo. …show more content…
Questlove (mostly known as the drummer of The Roots) talked about how he recorded drums for D’ Angelo’s “Voodoo” album during an interview at Red Bull Music Academy. In the recording session, he was told to emulate D’ Angelo programming the drum without quantizing it, which then accidentally created a raw, dragging and uneven drumming style that fits D’ Angelo’s music perfectly. It is very impressive to see Questlove in the interview deliberately play every drum beat behind but still being able to keep the