Somehow hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth made it infinitely more “real” than reading about it after the fact in a David Ritz book or, even, a song’s lyrics. They have struggles, demons and obstacles to overcome that they may not be aware of at the point of the creation of the art we consume and enjoy.
Listening to Musiq recount his early days and how he reflects on them, reminded me that these folks we write about are no different than you or me. When we write about music and musicians, we can sometimes forget about the fact that we are writing about a real person-it’s easy to divorce them from their humanity. Many of those leading lights have had their epochal albums revisited here at Albumism-I’ve had the pleasure to write about Badu’s debut Baduizm (1997) and D’Angelo’s mesmerizing Voodoo (2000), but there are many other artists who offered their own, unique take on the nascent genre that perhaps don’t get the love their work deserves-among those artists is Musiq Soulchild. While some of the originators of the sound (for example, Meshell Ndegeocello, Joi and Omar Lyefook) went under the radar to the broader music world, the triumvirate of D’Angelo, Erykah Badu and Maxwell hit heights that ensured the label stuck and the scene thrived.
Those concerns notwithstanding, the new era of soul that it ushered in revitalized an organic take on soul that had been threatened with obliteration in the face of New Jack Swing and the juggernaut named hip-hop. Though clearly trying to provide shorthand for music lovers to identify a fresh take on the scene at the time, he also unwittingly offered another box to confine artists to. When Kedar Massenburg dropped the epithet “neo-soul” to describe a fresh branding of soul and R&B music that emerged in the US and UK in the early 1990s, he was (perhaps) unaware of the repercussions of doing so. Happy 20th Anniversary to Musiq Soulchild’s debut album Aijuswanaseing, originally released November 14, 2000.
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