In a Billboard magazine article from 2002, when neo-soul is very much still happening, Kedar Massenburg is still bragging about inventing it. Is that emphasis on languorous atmosphere over immediate pop hooks the neo part of neo-soul? How are we all feeling about the term neo-soul so far? Not everyone’s crazy about it.

It’s great music for zoning out, whether that’s an amorous activity for you or not amorous in the slightest. This is music that still sounds fantastic when it’s faintly audible over the roar of a bathtub faucet, whether you’re making a baby in that bathtub or it’s two years later and now you’re giving the baby you made a bath in the bathtub. It’s not “background music” in the sense that it’s extraneous or ignorable, but there’s an immersive quality, a whole so overwhelming that you forget all the individual parts, and you also forget how to add all the parts together to confirm that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. With both these records, the debut albums from D’Angelo and Maxwell, it’s not that they don’t have great melodies or hooks or whole pop songs, but I do think that primarily they’re both triumphant creators of atmosphere, of mood, of vibe, whatever the word vibe means to you. This is my favorite song on Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, and I am only slightly embarrassed to inform you that it’s called “.Til the Cops Come Knockin’.” The filthier his lyrics get, the smoother he sounds. Sure! If it’s 1995 and you’re trying to build a whole new genre of music around one person, D’Angelo’s an excellent choice. Kedar owns the trademark “‘Neo-Soul’ Genre Creator” is the first line of Kedar’s Instagram bio.

And so Kedar decides to promote his new artist by making D’Angelo the face of a whole new genre: neo-soul. But here in ’95, D’Angelo is a new artist with an old soul, and he’s got a manager named Kedar Massenburg, who’s naturally thinking about promotion, about marketing schemes. Questlove’s gonna work on the next D’Angelo record, which is called Voodoo and comes out in January 2000, and that’s a whole thing. But it’s a tough balance for other new R&B singers to strike.

It is steeped in the ’70s but spiritually feels like the ’90s it is conversant with hip-hop but does not spiritually submit to hip-hop.

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