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Brit soul lost touch with its black heritage (The Guardian)
Turning tables: how Brit soul lost touch with its black heritage
While Sam Smith, Adele and co fly the flag for British soul in the charts, the only black artists in on the boom are talent-show stragglers. Why does the music industry refuse to market them properly?
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If you ask the accountants at some major labels, British soul is basking in a golden age. While record sales have flatlined, Sam Smith and Adele have been shifting albums by the pound. They’ve racked up awards both here and in the States, and provided a smooth soundtrack for a million coffee franchises. Meanwhile, Ed Sheeran is strumming with Pharrell, James Blake is collaborating with the RZA, and Jessie J has been belting out lung-busters under the watchful eye of R&B hit factory Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins. No doubt Brit soul, a genre taken seriously enough to warrant its own extensive Wikipedia page, is booming. There’s only one thing that seems to be missing: black artists.
As many have pointed out, all this Grammy-grabbing and Mobo-snatching has been a pretty pale affair. It’s almost impossible to name a black British soul or R&B act who has had any major success in the last couple of years. There may have been some attempts to classify FKA Twigs as an “alternative R&B” act, but she has rightfully kyboshed the notion, memorably stating “**** alternative R&B” when asked about her place in the genre. The irony here is that the previously anonymous artist – her music closer to Björk’s than Aaliyah’s – only picked up the alt-R&B label when photos revealed her mixed-race heritage. Realistically, in the current UK soul scene, that heritage would have made her an exception rather than a rule.
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“The simple truth is this,” he explains over the phone. “When a white person sings like a black person, it’s a phenomenon; it’s headline news. When a black singer sounds black there is no news angle, it’s just normal. So labels think it’s easier to package and sell a white R&B artist than a black one. ”
Ajobe has some firsthand experience to lend credence to his claim. Having breezed through the 2013 competition with a line in slick R&B jams, the Rough Copy trio bowed out in the semi-finals before landing a deal with Epic Records. 2014 was supposed to be the year they brought some swagger back to UK pop – but they soon felt that Epic had little interest in marketing them. While the record label was devoting its energy into carving out soul hits for Ella Henderson, a teenager from Grimsby with an earnest ambition to become Aretha Franklin-lite, Rough Copy were railroaded into the pop mish-mash of their first single, Street Love – a clunker of ill-chosen Anita Baker samples and synths nicked from Skrillex’s dustbin. Ajobe claims the band had been promised “90s R&B, like Jodeci or 112 – our music”. What they got was the sound of middle-aged executives gambling on what teenagers listened to and coming up snake eyes.
Predictably, the single failed to break the top 10, and the band were swiftly dropped, leaving Ajobe mirroring the statements voiced by Selma actor David Oyelowo – that Britain won’t see talent until it is recognised abroad.
“American R&B artists come over here and sell out arenas, when we have talent at home that hasn’t been given a chance. You get to the point where you have to run away and feed yourself back in through another route. It happened with Floetry, it happened with Estelle. They had to go to America to blow up before the UK wanted them. At the end of the day, you don’t run away because you have a choice. You run away because you have no choice.”
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