I've been on a huge neo soul kick for a while now. D'Angelo, Erykah Badu, RH Factor, Musiq (to name a few).
I just checked Wikipedia out of curiosity, for its definition of the term and this is what I found:
Neo soul (also known as nu soul) is a marketing term for a sub-genre of contemporary R&B.
I will argue that it is not a marketing term, and anyone who says it is, is completely out of touch with the reality of what the music conveys.
I see neo soul as a throwback to the original days of R&B (Stax and Motown), blending with what R&B has become. It's about the passion for the art form, not about how to package the art form. You take something you love and mix it with something else you love. Take a funky old school bass line and a horn line with jazz sensibilities, and have Common rap over it.
That's not about how to market anything. That's musicians getting together in a room and creating something they love. I can picture Roy Hargrove and Common sitting in a recording studio with Pino Palladino laying down a bass track, and being able to do nothing more than laugh at how musically gifted he is. I picture Common in the booth, freestyling, and Roy Hargrove closing his eyes and bobbing his head, taking in the words.
You can't market that. It just is. You can't describe it in a simple term. It's an emotion or a state of mind. Passion in its purest form.
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