sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Cranes In The Sky- entirely calibrated to evoke soulfulness, but completely devoid of it. Eerily so.

Is that right Luke?
 

jorge

Well-known member
Soul is about sincerity, it's not about being clever, or having secret knowledge. Heart not head. The world had become very head, the internet is all about head, carefully synthesised personas, responses that are hyper-versions of what you might say in real life if you had the time to think of something that clever.

Music has become the same, laptop music carefully thought out and consciously arranged to transmit the desired message. The soulful is transmitted as it happens without judgement or cynicism.
 

version

Well-known member
Is "soul" as emotional authenticity ever a negative? I'm thinking specifically of a comment Corpsey made the other day about struggling with the earnestness of metal vocals.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
soul isn't about bluesy or microtonal singing or a certain sense of cord progression you have in 70s jazz. that will always exist. soul is about spiritual uplift and hope. what we are saying we have to flagellate ourselves even more. utopia is out of reach at the moment.. capital has rendered even the gods impotent. that's because it has no centre. maybe we are experiencing a historical first.

#

We are not saying that one has to abandon the soulful music. Even I can't listen to moody dystopian stuff all the time. that would be hitting a certain zone of fruitless deadening. there is nothing to intensify there. but yet if you want to talk the language you have to engage in the mechanisms it is kicking back against.
 
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jorge

Well-known member
Having just read blissbloggers post it dispels my rose tinted view of the prelaptop world.

But does the fact that these techniques have become clichéd call for them to be reinvented in order to still be soulful ?

Is crying clichéd and therefore needs to be reinvented in order to truly express unrehearsed sadness.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Is "soul" as emotional authenticity ever a negative? I'm thinking specifically of a comment Corpsey made the other day about struggling with the earnestness of metal vocals.

definitely seen as a negative in some places - in gabba, hard techno etc. Going back to what blissblogger said, that's probably partly a reaction to the performativeness of soul, wanting to destroy a mode of expression that has seemed to want to create an equation between a particular kind of externalised sadness and longing and the very core of human emotion, whereas anger and coldness holds just an important seat at that table (which is why I never really understood the 'post-human' thing - there's so much to explore within humans that's sidelined/made taboo, before we can even think of designating anything as post-human).
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
so what you saying about hard techno then back it up a bit more.

also problem with metal is precisely that it is one of the most rehearsed genres on the planet ever ever. it's not an anti-soul with nowhere to go. it's anything but angry. half of it is indebted heavily to baroque and romantic music. righteous anger is not really anger. righteous anger is an emotional breakdown. it's not real evil. righteous anger is a comforting illusion for middle class leftists so they can believe in redistributive justice, to which ever extent. hey don't want to face the fact that the proletariat wants it all, not some breadcrumbs to live a good life. they want the materialism.

Only good thing that came out of metal was the hardcore punk descended lineages.
 
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blissblogger

Well-known member
Bowie's career is a case study in a lot of these unresolved / unresolvable tensions (which i think are vital and intrinsic and help to propel pop music along its forward path - the reinvention of soul, the reinvention of realness etc - rooted in a deep seated craving for the authenticity, for truth, for the not-hollow)

on the one hand Bowie is very quick to realise that rock etc are not any less staged or performative than showbiz / cabaret / musical theater

so he makes a big rhetorical thing about "i am an actor", "this isn't real", "i'm playing a role onstage", i'm an all-round entertainer

but he also (secretly - absolutely concurrently and in contradiction with his actorliness) continues to crave some kind of authentic expression (he was after all a creature of the Sixties, read Kerouac, loved bebop, existentialism, Buddhism, the whole quest for truth trip etc)

so he has the repeated dalliances with black music (Young Americans is taken straightfacedly by US critics as Bowie taking off his mask, becoming human - because you know, black music is more warm)

he has the stripping down to the raw, broken, fragile self with Low

and so on...
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
it's no coincidence that the only bowie music that isn't staggeringly shit is the stuff he did when he wasn't doing a character.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
so he has the repeated dalliances with black music (Young Americans is taken straightfacedly by US critics as Bowie taking off his mask, becoming human - because you know, black music is more warm)

there was also a great play that he had gone to plastic Philly and not Memphis to record though
 

version

Well-known member
Are soul and emotion inseparable? Can you be authentically emotionless and can that constitute "soul"?
 
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