So I just got done watching Mary J. Blige perform on the VH1 series, “Storytellers,” and I was blown away. It wasn’t just that she could sing (trust me, she can), but it was the amount of emotion, the soul, that she was transmitting on that stage. What made the performance even more enthralling was that she talked with the audience about each song before she sang them. She became really emotional at times and I could hear where all that pathos comes from – she hasn’t had an easy life and she has been able to translate that, even more so, transmute that through her singing.
I’ve always had a thing for soul music – that raw emotion that comes from hardship, experience. One of my favorite albums is Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly.” What I love about this record is not only is the music fantastic – orchestrated funk – but that he’s telling a story about a socially relevant topic: drugs in the ghetto. But the album has so much soul because you can feel Mayfield’s own anguish throughout, as well as his hope for things to get better.
Music is so fascinating because on one level it’s just a series of frequencies put into a particular order, which doesn’t seem really all that interesting, but then you hear it and it triggers something in the brain – emotions, thoughts, passions, anger, heartbreak. We’re wired for sound and soul music targets that in a way many other forms of artistic expression just can’t. It goes straight for the heart.
But what exactly is soul music, especially when you think about electronic music? It’s music made by machines. Growing up in the Midwest, if it didn’t have a guitar in it most people don’t think it’s music. I’d always be debating about how an instrument doesn’t have to be “played” to be considered music. In fact, when I first heard proper techno, I was caught by how much soul was being conveyed in this music that strove to be as inorganic, compositionally, as possible. It was music that seemed to be searching for the soul in the machine.
I’ve always been attracted to the fact that despite the evolution of technology, we still grasp at the humanity within cold wires and hardened steel. Techno, in some ways, epitomizes that by saying, “we’ll take these machines you’re trying to inject us with and make something beautiful with them.” The machine has simply become a new medium for human expression.
Music isn’t about the format, the instruments, or even to some degree, the ability – it’s about the soul. When a song can touch or move someone, when it can create an empathic bond between two people, it becomes something more than just sounds and sequences, it transcends its parts. Soul music is about the expression of the human experience and it doesn’t matter how you do it, it just needs to be done.
