Soul Music
The early and middle 60s are remembered by many as the time when The
Beatles, Stones and big British beat took
the world by storm. The charts were suddenly alight with strange, raw,
uncompromising sounds; and for the first time in its long history,
Britannia ruled the airwaves. But the same period also witnessed the
flowering of black R&B into the distinctive soul style, and the
emergence of a number of primarily black singers, groups and music
business aficionados who changed the sound of contemporary music as
much as the white beat group and protesting folkies.
It had been primarily black groups who had initially provided a model
for most of the successful white beat groups, but it took some years
for the largely white pop audience to turn its ears in the direction
of Memphis and Detroit. Fortunately, groups like The
Beatles and The Rolling Stones made no
secret of their influences, and it was partly their praise that helped
establish soul. Few Beatles' fans had heard of Smokey
Robinson and the Miracles before the Fab Four started drooling
over them, while the Stones based their early repertoire on a large
variety of black artists - among them Marvin
Gaye, Otis Redding and Chuck
Berry.
In Britain, interest in soul was initially largely confined to the
Mods, who found in the music the sharp, cool defiance that they
themselves had assumed. While in the unrelenting 4/4 rhythms they
discovered the ideal vehicle for their footloose dancing style. They
could also point righteously to the emotion and feeling of soul music,
a complete contrast to the synthesised productions of most of the pop
market.
The situation in America was hardly better. Although black music
was more readily accessible there, and always made more of an
impression on the charts, white groups stole most of its fire, while
the folk boom became another factor limiting its success. Moreover,
racial tension ran high there. Gradually things changed. In Britain
the discotheque crowd edged a few singles into the lower reaches of
the charts, the record companies woke up to the potential of another
market, and the BBC could no longer afford to ignore the existence of
music that the pirate radio stations were all too willing to
play.
1965 and 1966 finally saw soul records making the hallowed Top 20. The
Supremes at the most commercial end of Tamla
Motown's spectrum, had already had some success; but it was the
appearance of Wilson Pickett's In
The Midnight Hour in autumn 1965 that marked the start of a new
era. The first Motown package tour had already flopped fairly
disastrous in the UK (everywhere outside London, at least) and 1966
saw Britain's first - and virtually only - Number 1 - Reach
Out I'll Be There by The Four Tops.
From 1966 through to 1968 soul music was in fashion on both sides
of the Atlantic and finally most performers in the field achieved some
degree of (albeit belated) recognition. Of the artists who established
a definitive soul style that others imitated, the most influential
were James Brown, Otis
Redding and Wilson Pickett, though
the part played by studios, labels and producers was equally as
important. In the case of Tamla Motown and Stax it was crucial. But as
the familiar commercialisation process kicked in, so the music tended
not to improve, but to fall back on a formulaic sound and style,
increasingly trapped in its own clichés, and increasingly diluted in
its potency for the mass pop market.
Most soul groups and artists achieved amazing longevity, and since
soul is to some extent a separate and self-perpetuating musical
culture, it seems wrong to talk of soul 'dying' in the late 60s. The
white audiences might have tired of it and moved on in search of
psychedelia, but soul continued anyway. But far from "telling the
truth", soul was becoming more and more contrived and divorced
from the emotion that was meant to be its foundation.
|
|
