On the search for soul in contemporary Black British music.
Written by Matilda Oduntan
One thing about me? I love live music. Hearing musicians have fun and flex on stage in front of a crowd of people equally as hyped is one of my favourite experiences. But, anybody who knows me knows how much I hate hearing a church keyboard in a music arrangement for a UK R&B or afrobeats artist. By church keyboard, I mean that tinny, shallow keyboard setting that any of you who grew up in a Pentecostal church can probably recognise immediately. It jars me to hear it in a non-religious setting because it doesn’t feel like it belongs anywhere else. It feels uninspired, flat, and most specifically, it lacks soul.
I find that music across all genres can be full of soul, but sometimes it gets hard to pin down what it sounds like, where to find it and why it is so integral to good music. I have spent a long time thinking about Black people in London and as new amazing artists blow each day, I’ve been trying to figure out what our quintessential sounds are. It made me wonder, what is soul, and where can we find soul in contemporary Black British music?
Understanding Soul
When we speak of soul, many think immediately about the genre and the voices of Aretha Franklin, James Brown or Marvin Gaye. Many of us then think of the African American church as an institution of soul, where many Black singers across several genres developed that “soulful” sound. But I find that soul, the genre, is just a starting point to understanding what soul, the feeling, is. The genre gets its name from the rawness of emotion captured by musicians. When they perform, it doesn’t feel like a performance. It feels as if the musician has forgotten we the audience are there. We feel we are being intrusive as we peer into an intimate moment between the musician and their instrument.
Soul is therefore honest and unfiltered emotion. It is a rawness and effortlessness that simultaneously feels fluent and perfectly hits the mark. It’s the integrity of your sound to who you are, where you are from and what you’re making music about. Soul is what makes music come to life, and makes the music feel alive for the listener. And if that is the case, there can be soul in any community authentically creating music that is honest, and reflects who they are and the places they know. So, there must be some soul in our community.
Soul & the Church
While we can pretty easily locate the soul of the African American community in their churches, soul ebbs and flows in African churches in the UK. Again, I think of the godawful church piano setting as evidence of this lack of soul. But also, despite all the love I have for my aunties, my memories of church music growing up are marred by their attempts to mimic the sounds of American pentecostal church choirs. Sometimes, they could capture some soul by relating to the emotions of the song, such as love and gratitude. But, for the most part, they missed the mark. Their harmonies were clunky, and they couldn’t blend their voices the way African American church choirs could. Instead, their Nigerian accents garbled the Southern twang they were attempting to sing with, and I was left cringing in my seat every Sunday.
All in all, it lacked soul. And I don’t blame them. It is fundamentally hard to wade in a soundscape that is not yours. You can study the soundscape, but when you aren’t moulded as a musician within a certain space, there are beats and rhythms that you just cannot catch. And in the context of a church, it’s much harder to pour out your feelings in a language that isn’t yours. Your heart hasn’t been trained to do so.
But, my aunties were their most soulful during African praise and worship. The music was at its best in my very Yoruba church when they were singing in the language they know intimately. Somehow the once discordant harmonies seemed to magically slot and stack against each other. There wasn’t necessarily an emphasis on blending voices as African American church choirs would do, but instead, my aunties voices crescendoed into a jubilant sound. Even the drummer seemed freer, and managed to catch each beat and sit snugly in every pocket. They performed from the heart, and with finesse, they connected with sounds that would transport them back home. There was soul in their rawness of emotion, honesty and authenticity.
Soul in Black Britain
But it gets pretty muddy trying to identify soul in our sound. I, and many others in my community, are not fluent in the languages our parents speak, nor were we reared in the spaces that gave our aunties this soul. There is no defined, collective mother tongue to which we all default that would let us tap into a soulful sound.
Also, we cannot just look to the church to find our soul. Not all of us grew up in religious institutions that had music as part of worship, or even grew up in religious institutions to begin with. Furthermore, most people don’t necessarily identify with Britain but with the subcultures that they are part of. And within that, there are so many sounds that Black people have accumulated over the last eight decades of migration. From dancehall to soca, from garage to funky house, the soundscape is always shifting and evolving.
But, thinking of soul as something honest, raw, unfiltered and an effortless emotion captured by song, there is one place that comes to mind - motives.
Motives
Motives these days will have five different sets with five different DJs who are responsible for making sure every genre ever played in London is represented. Motives are where you can find us butchering the lyrics to songs in languages that we don’t know, but have overheard when our friend is on the phone with their mum. What is more honest than all of us accepting we do not know the lyrics to songs sung exclusively in Yoruba, Patois or Twi, but singing along anyway?
Motives reflect how we co-exist in this country, down to the messy transitions, the different genre sections, and the different languages. Motives reflect our demography because they are a booming, shifting soundscape with a cacophony of sounds that somehow exist in perfect harmony. The soundscape is muddy and collaborative, a fusion of who we are. In this, motives exist as a musical institution for many in our community because it’s a space that is full of life and raw, unfiltered emotion that is true to who we are - it is soulful.
It’s thus no surprise then that some of the biggest UK acts do not lean into just one sound. Artists like Odeal, Bree Runway, NSG, Headie One, DBE and J Hus have all picked and mixed several genres in their music. Another great example is Wizkid who, even though he is not from the UK, has been a titan of the afrobeats space for years. But his Made in Lagos album in particular struck a huge chord in this corner of the diaspora because it was full of sounds from not only Lagos, but London and Kingston too. Wizkid and many others like him manage to create sounds that speak to several subcultures, while still feeling accessible to the culture at large.
Our soundscape isn’t perfect though. There’s an ongoing contention about how much artists are sampling American R&B classics recently. Even though their inspirations for the songs are abundantly clear through the samples chosen, sometimes it still feels uninspired. This is not to say that this music isn’t good, but it’s just not us. Again, we are caught trying to mimic a soulfulness that simply isn’t ours. I wonder what will happen when artists start to recognise motives as the musical institution that they are, and study its rawness and honesty to find inspiration.
Final Thoughts
I’m sure as time goes on, a better qualifier than “fusion” will be made to explain the sound emerging out of the UK (if it doesn’t already exist). And with that, I imagine a more consistent fluency and finesse emerging in the arrangements of live performances where we don’t default to *that* keyboard. But as of right now, we’re in a pretty good place. We have so many artists who always seem to make music that just meets the moment, whose songs slot into motives and DJ sets across the community so seamlessly. In the same way that churches are a pillar of the African American soundscape, motives are our musical institutions, because they are full of the soul of our community. Our soul is found in the muddiness, the mess, and the combination of sounds that mirror the vibrant demography of our community.
