Do you agree with New Jack Swing ruined soul music?
 

I prefer soul music from the 60's to the mid 1980's but I feel like real singing and talent in R&B after the 1980's went down and so did rap.I think New JAck Swing is the cause of this pop orientated fad in hip hop also.Is there any way this route could have been avoided so that soul music could still be mainstream?People were complaining inthe lare 1980's thatthemusic was too commercial so they mixed R&B with hip hop.

No, soul music was already horrible before new jack swing came along.

funk and disco killed soul in the mid 70s

funk and disco didn't kill anything...

funk and disco was getting the most radioplay during the 70s but it had nothing to do with soul killing itself.

it killed it financially

Soul was still a relatively young genre during the 70s with artist like Al Green on so on. Popular opinion suggest that Ray Charles was one of the first artist to introduce soul music in the early 60s.

Soul music - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Artists like James Brown led soul towards funk music, which became typified by 1970s bands like Parliament-Funkadelic and The Meters. More versatile groups like War, the Commodores and Earth, Wind and Fire became popular around this time. During the 1970s, some slick and commercial blue-eyed soul acts like Philadelphia's Hall & Oates and Oakland's Tower of Power achieved mainstream success, as did a new generation of street-corner harmony or city-soul groups like The Delfonics and Howard University's Unifics.

As disco and funk were dominating the charts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, soul went in the direction of quiet storm. With its relaxed tempos and soft melodies, quiet storm soul took influences from soft rock and adult contemporary. Many funk bands, such as Con Funk Shun, Cameo, and Lakeside would have a few quiet storm tracks on their albums. Among the most successful acts in this era include Smokey Robinson, Teddy Pendergrass, Peabo Bryson, Atlantic Starr, and Larry Graham.

After the decline of disco and funk in the early 1980s, soul music became influenced by electro music. It became less raw and more slickly produced, resulting in a style known as Contemporary R&B, which sounded very different from the original rhythm and blues style.

It is true that a large percent of American pop music was devoted to this crappy genre.

Also, it may be worth noting that I didn't even know that all these crappy bands were New Jack Swing until this thread. I've never even heard this term before but the New Jack Swing musicians listed by Wiki do suck and are famous so you may be on to something.

I didn't even recognize any of the artist listed except for Michael & Janet Jackson. I did like a few singles by the Gap Band which was listed. New Jack Swing seems very similar to the neo soul genre to me. Although these bands are so crappy as suggested, maybe it is better they have their own category. This genre is defiantly the worst by far that is a derivative to the soul genre.

i don't think so - some New Jack Swing is quite groovy, Guy for instance

the mere instant they used electronic drums and synth-basses in R n B, it had already lost it soul - this era would be the more electronic form of disco (Donna Summer's I Feel Love) rather than the earlier "funk-oriented" disco

I always read where R&B/Soul genres have so called "Lost its soul" or originality. This is called genealogy of musical genres, the pattern of musical genres that have contributed to the development of new genres like contemporary R&B, neo soul, or new jack swing. It doesn't mean that the original R&B and soul genres no longer exist, or that R&B has lost its soul. Although it also at the same time does not mean that these new genres are better than the original ones they derived from. That would be a matter of individual taste.

thank you!

I had a stupid long frustrating conversation with some old timers about music losing it's soul compared to music today.

the newer stuff sound plastic

compare Usher and Beyonce to the Detroit Spinners and the Chi-Lites

you are trying to compare apples and oranges though

they're still popular black music, just different eras

i still have hope in neo-soul, especially Maxwell

and for anyone who thinks all New Jack Swing is crap, should listen to Guy

See that's what I was going to explain!

You should be comparing Neo Soul to the artists that you picked to compare to Usher and Beyonce not just because of their popularity but because of their styles


Neo soul would be the modern version to compare to those guys that you listed.

Lyfe Jennings, Maxwell, Erykah Bahdu

Right

New Jack Swing- I always think of this:
(Classic line-"How can I be down?")
Ice T- New Jack Hustler

Ice T - New Jack Hustler (Nino's Theme) - Bing Videos

lways liked this one:

Guy- Piece of my love

Guy - Piece Of My Love - Bing Videos

you love Mr. New Jack Swing's music?

Tell me more...

which albums?

I love **** like Blood Sweat tears, they were like 60s / 70s era I think?

Well when Guy introduced us to this "New Jack Swing", it wasn't used on all of their material, just a few songs. But those songs had such mass appeal that people lumped everything they did together and called it NJS. New Jack Swing is not Soul nor R&B. To me it's more urban club or dance.

R&B has been moved over into a Hip Hop like environment along with Rap and Soul today is now called Neo-Soul and things are kinda jacked up. People tend to classify every song on an artists album according to what their hit song for that album was and this messed things up.

So if an artist did two Country songs, five love ballads and four Jazz like cuts on their album but the Country songs became hits, then people would say the whole album is Country which is not true.

Look what happened to Robin Thicke, he was not gunning for R&B or Soul but because the song went over so well to that crowd it became R&B instead of Pop.

Yes I believe it did

Is the soul we have today not good? I think it is.

Soul is dead

I'm going to post a few videos, you tell me what I'm missing. Give me ~10 mins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7ZcSu8qtNs

Feels like a solid soul track

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHDWunpDFeA

Feels like a solid soul track

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E8S7OSc_nU

Feels like a solid soul track

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkntWssHboY

Feels like a solid soul track

A quadruple post? That's a capital offense.

I'd put them all in one post but the way this forum formats **** drives me insane.

I wish I could just list 4 youtube links in one post without it bringing in the video image.

Wish granted.

You're a saint!

Almost every decades, Black Music changed name: Rhythm'n'Blues in the late 50s, Soul in the 60s, Funk in the 70s, Disco-Funk in the late 70s and early 80s, Hip Hop in the mid 80s, then New Jack Swing in the late 80s before it turns to New Soul and R'n'B in the late 90s.
The old sounds from the 50's up the early 80's are vintage and they are still very appreciated because it was played by real musicians instead of machines. Still there were artists who knew how to use the machines like Marving Gaye with Sexual Healing or Prince with When Doves Cry.
I rather consider that it is the growing popularity of Black music that drove the buisness to make more fast money with it and it is then that all the producers were using machines instead of musicians, and formated their songs. That is then and why most of Black Music lost Soul.

It was the golden age, I feel like I'm in heaven whenever I listen to rhythm and blues/soul from that period you mentioned :love: