By Sylvia W. Chan

I'M SO TIRED of that groove, the one I'm supposed to sit back and chill to, the one I'm really s'posed to be feeling, that beat you light incense to and kick it real hard. You know the shit I'm talking about: neo-soul, that groove I used to think was some sort of savior, that started as an alternative to other tired grooves, and that, like almost every single other fucking rhythm that rises up out the soul and somehow finds itself on KMEL-FM, got chosen, co-opted, and frozen in time so fast that all us people chilling, feeling, and kicking it were too stoned to even notice.

Who knows who came up with the term "neo-soul" (probably a couple of really down white industry guys who've got Asian wives and lots of black friends), but ever since they did, artists have been hating on it, P.R. folks have been spinning it, and writers like me have pretended it actually matters. Though, like every term coined to partition sound into tidy bins at the record store (e.g., "alternative rock," "acid jazz," "rare groove"), "neo-soul" has become a marker for mediocrity, a catch phrase for glommers and hangers-on, a big, fat marketing ploy. I mean, if you meet someone and they tell you they're "really down with neo-soul," let the sirens wail. All they're down with is hoping you'll think they're down, extraconscious, and if it's a dude in a club, so sensitive you won't even notice his hand creeping up your leg while he's telling you how much he loves Les Nubians. I'm not quite sure when and how I got so pissed off with the whole deal.

After all, Bay Guardian contributor Jeff Chang said when we were chatting the other day, I'm the neo-soul girl, the for-life Tony Toni Toné fan who freaked out when D'Angelo's Voodoo came out, who gushed a like schoolgirl over ?uestlove's backbeats, who ran around trying to convince everyone Lucy Pearl was going to save the world. I tried to figure out who Jill Scott was, cranked up Rahsaan Patterson's stereophonic love, mined Angie Stone's mahogany soul, and head-bobbed harder to it all than anyone really should. And hell, I still love those albums, still pop in Patterson when the sunroof is down, Scott's "Lyzel in E Flat" to get in the mood, Stone's "20 Dollars" when it feels like everyone's on my tip. At some point though, folks like Scott and Stone gave way to fakers like Musiq (Soulchild), Koffee Brown, and Remy Shand, and I got a little confused by the scene I was covering, baffled by how everything got so very bad so fast, and wondering how in the world I could keep on writing about music that bored me to tears.

"Neo-soul" began being thrown around in 1998 or so to describe acts like D'Angelo, Maxwell, Eric Benét, and Erykah Badu. It was a lazy phrase, something to separate Kenny Lattimore from Ginuwine, Raphael Saadiq from R. Kelly, and Macy Gray from Mary J. Blige without actually getting down to describing the music at hand, thinking about why certain rhythms signified certain vibes or considering how the music related to what was going on the world. It was, in other words, a dis on the state of soul music at the time, and there was a subtly patronizing, though not entirely undeserved, undercurrent to it all: that in a supposed economic boom, it was time for the sophisticated "urban" (read: black) audience to let go of all that sex talk and swagger, to, as one online neo-soul fan site states, "separate itself from the popularly produced Rhythm and Blues theme of 'Bump and Grind.' " The creator of the fan site (hosted on www.suite101.com), who calls her- or himself Makkah, goes on to say, "Neo-Soul music smashes the mold; is a blend of respect and sexuality, love and lust, desire and the blues; it blares operatic intonation. It is language in rhythm. It sings motion."

And though Makkah might be prone to exaggeration, she or he's just a fan, expressing her or his opinion. The crazy thing was, sentiments like those were being tossed around by the big-time mainstream press as well – by writers like Ben Ratliff, who wrote in a January 2000 New York Times article, "Black Pop: Out of a Rut and into a New Groove," on artists including D'Angelo, Saadiq, and Badu ("black pop" 's another wonderfully idiotic idiom, isn't it?), "There's a widening groundswell of R&B artists who are sounding like an antidote to the sameness problem [going on in the genre]. They make a mature music, and a family music, for living rooms, rather than for the streets. In their subject matter there is room for self-doubt, anger, beatitude, whimsy and religion – not just slick come-ons or aggressive bluster. Importantly, it marks a gradual return in black pop to the use of instruments instead of electronics." Then Ratliff muses, "Perhaps you could call it all-natural R&B, referring to the patience and wisdom in this new music as well as to the absence of glossy pop hysteria and to the Afro hair style affected by some of the performers."

OK, I'm biting my tongue like a motherfucker, but you gotta see the implicit racism buried in Ratliff's words, the idea that neo-soul (black pop, whatever) is a good thing because it's mature, it's peaceful, it keeps African Americans preaching love, strumming acoustic guitars, and pining for some mythic back-in-the-day instead of getting pissed off, taking advantage of technology, and scrutinizing the future. But one expects folks like Ratliff to say dumb shit like that, to spin something interesting going on in a community of color into condescension and depoliticization of the highest possible degree, to practice, as scholar Houston Baker writes in the intro to Music and the Racial Imagination (an anthology of essays on music and race from 2000), "tasteful, raceless listening."

The even crazier thing though (crazier than Makkah's hyberbole and Ratliff's general wackness) is the fact that so many folks, all kinds of folks – black, white, Latino, Asian, Arab, and whatever – are still buying into Ratliff's bullshit conception of neo-soul and, in effect, what blackness should be, sporting their skull caps like consciousness, brandishing head wraps like knowledge, waving incense like weapons, and still bobbing to the same fucking groove that's been knocking around my stereo for the past four years.

You got all these people putting albums out, people like Floetry, a female duo from England who said in an interview with Davey D on KPFA-FM last week that neo-soul "is a marketing device and a way for people to communicate about what kind of music they like, something to familiarize with, and it's unfortunate that that has to be." Or take the words of Conya Doss, a new artist on Nu Mecca Records who says in her press release, "If they want to label me in the Neo-Soul movement they can, but to me this soul music is nothing new. It's hard to categorize me into one genre of music because it narrows your audience and I learned from them all."

There are people who, from their words, seem to understand the need for a new groove in soul music, a groove that takes into account that this country is at war, that folks are out of work and broke as hell, and that if people don't get their heads out their asses, we're all going down. And not to single them out (because there's all sorts of neo-soul crap coming out that's not even worth mentioning), but both Floetry's and Doss's albums are staunchly mediocre, still vamping off the same Roland keyboard D'Angelo played on Voodoo, still grasping for a moment of Stevie's or P-Funk's brilliance, and finally, just not coming proper the way real soul music should.