Week 2

Soul Music.

What is it all about?
Soul music has its roots in gospel music and rhythm and blues. The hard gospel vocal quartets of the 1940s and 1950s were big influences on major soul singers of the 1960s. The term "soul music" itself, to describe gospel-style music with secular lyrics, is first attested in 1961.
Ray Charles is often cited as inventing the soul genre with his string of hits starting with 1954's "I Got a Woman".




This type of soul is the first of its kind. Since then soul has been reformed and grouped with various other genre's to make completely new unique sounds.

There are many sub-genres of soul I will be focusing on Neo-soul.

The most recent soul music sounds more like this:

I realised the huge change in soul music. So I would have to decide what song I was going to do so I knew which type of soul I would be focusing on.

I choose to do more recent soul music, before choosing a song I researched soul artists.
Popular soul artists were Ledisi, India Arie, John Legend, Joss Stone, Adele, Jill Scott and Raheem DeVaughn.

I noticed that in the UK soul music wasn't very popular. In the USA they had more exposure to soul music and artists, whereas the most popular genre's in the UK are pop, jazz and classical.
If I was thinking about this as a way to get sales then I would have to either try to appeal to the UK audience or stick to the USA.
Differences in UK soul, and USA soul music videos.

UK









American










. There is an obvious difference between American neo-soul music videos and British neo-soul music videos.

The locations were not too different in America they often used locations which emphasised their nationality, e.g. in Joss Stone's videos she is seen singing in the subway and in Erykah Badu's video its clear the video is set in America around the 1920's because of the clothes and scenery. D'Angelo was located outside a Hotel Inn. The locations were bright and gave uplift to the song. From the British artists the locations were much dimmer and didn’t represent Britain, they used the same location throughout the whole video, Adele, was on that road, as Corrine Bailey Rae was in her house, they didn’t change locations once.

There costume however was very similar only one vide, dressed slightly glamorous the rest dressed casual, as to keep the video more realistic, maybe even to relate to the audience.

The American videos used a lot more editing and various camera shots, almost every 3 seconds a different camera shot was used, and if not they would circulate and follow the artist. In Erykah Badu's video for about 30 seconds the camera follows her movement, but doesn’t jump to another shot.

In general I would say that the American music videos looked a lot more professional and they were more interesting to watch, because of the change in locations, the various amount of people in the videos and the change in camera shots.

But this is what I thought was interesting in order to find out what was most appealing to a neo-soul audience