gettingby

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.

Janszoon

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

__________________
A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

Captain Ron

funk and disco killed soul in the mid 70s

djchameleon

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.

__________________

Fame, fortune, power, titties. People say these are the most crucial things in life, but you can have a pocket full o' gold and it doesn't mean sh*t if you don't have someone to share that gold with. Seems simple. Yet it's an important lesson to learn. Even lone wolves run in packs sometimes.

Captain Ron

it killed it financially

Necromancer

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.

OccultHawk

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.

Necromancer

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.

Howard the Duck

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

__________________


Malaise is THE dominant human predilection.

Necromancer

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.