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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