Characteristics
Despite some ambivalence from artists, the term ultimately received widespread use by music critics and writers who wrote about artists and albums associated with the musical style. African American studies professor Mark Anthony Neal has described neo soul as "everything from avant-garde R&B to organic soul... a product of trying to develop something outside of the norm in R&B". According to music writers, the genre's works are mostly album-oriented and distinguished by its musicianship and production, incorporating "organic" elements of classic soul music with the use of live instrumentation, in contrast to the more single-oriented, hip hop-based, and producer-driven sampling approach of contemporary R&B. They also infuse jazz, funk, and African musical elements into R&B. In her book Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction, music author Anne Danielson writes that neo soul toward the end of the 1990s exhibited a musical development that was part of "a remarkable increase in musicians' experimentation with and manipulation of grooves at the microrhythmic level - that is, the level in played music that is usually understood in terms of phrasing and timing."
Noting that most of the genre's artists are singer-songwriters, writers have viewed neo soul artists' lyrical content of as more "conscious-driven" and having a broader range than most other R&B artists. Allmusic calls it "roughly analogous to contemporary R&B". Dimitri Ehrlich of Vibe comments that neo soul artists "emphasize a mix of elegant, jazz-tinged R&B and subdued hip hop, with a highly idiosyncratic, deeply personal approach to love and politics". Music writers have noted that neo soul artists are predominantly female, which contrasts the marginalized presence of women in mainstream hip hop and R&B. Jason Anderson of CBC News calls neo soul a "sinuous, sly yet unabashedly earnest" alternative and "kind of haven for listeners turned off by the hedonism of mainstream hip-hop and club jams." Neo soul artists are often associated with alternative lifestyles and fashions, including organic food, incense, and knit caps.
According to music writer Peter Shapiro, the term itself refers to a musical style that obtains its influence from older R&B styles, and bohemian musicians seeking a soul revival, while setting themselves apart from the more contemporary sounds of their mainstream R&B counterparts. In a 1998 article on neo soul, Time journalist Christopher John Farley wrote that neo soul artists such as Lauryn Hill, D'Angelo, and Maxwell "share a willingness to challenge musical orthodoxy". Miles Marshall Lewis comments that 1990s neo soul "owed its raison d'être to '70s soul superstars like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder", adding that "in concert, Erykah Badu and D'Angelo regularly covered Chaka Khan, the Ohio Players, and Al Green, to make the lineage crystal clear." In citing Tony! Toni! Tone! as progenitors of the genre, Tony Green of Vibe views that the group pioneered the "digital-analog hybrid sound" of neo soul and "dramatically refreshed the digitalized wasteland that was R&B in the late '80s". Neo soul artists during the 1990s were heavily inspired by the eclectic sound and mellow instrumentation of Gil Scott-Heron's and Brian Jackson's collaborative work in the 1970s. All About Jazz has cited Jackson as "one of the early architects" of the sound and his early work with Scott-Heron as "an inspirational and musical Rosetta stone for the neo-soul movement".
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