what is soul? (was RE: what is jazz?)

From: Jo-Jo Samuel (jojo6732@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu May 11 2000 - 00:40:48 MET DST

  • Next message: Michael Yim: "Re: Funkstoerung"

    I've said it before; I'll say it again. Soulful music is born within
    cultures that have deep traditions in just trying to survive. The further
    you get away from this, the more watered down the music becomes. Music and
    the culture are inseparable. Culture encompasses the food, the spiritual and
    religious tradition, the expression and celebration of good and bad times
    and most importantly the natural environment and the peoples ties to it.

    The true juice behind real Blues, Soul, Jazz and Gutbucket Funk cannot be
    explained away by meaningless musical terms that reduce music to math.

    The roots of the music that this list discusses lie in a culture made up of
    (Black and White people) doing everything they could to survive. Not in
    middle-class over-intellectualizers cutting and pasting away on samplers
    thinking they're the next Miles Davis (myself included).

    P.S.
    Living in the inner city and claiming that life is hard because you've only
    got one pair of Micheal Jordan shoes doesn't count for surviving, the kind
    of surviving I'm talking about is just trying to get enough food out of the
    land to feed your family. If the crop fails, the family eats pine cones and
    possums for the winter. This doesn't really happen here very much anymore
    and I'm not suggesting that we should all become farmers so we can make more
    soulful music, this is just an observation as to one of the many reasons why
    music is losing it's Soul.

    JJ
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