By Sylvia W. Chan

AT SOME POINT you realize you've become the person you've been rebelling against for as long as you can remember. You bleach your countertops. You make the bed. On weekends you buy melons at farmers' markets, seek out Swiffer refills at Long's, and then rush home so you can take a nap. You make casseroles, eat vegetables, and show up for appointments on time. Midnight feels late. You like ironing. And then, suddenly, one day, you know. You have officially become your mother.

But different. Because moms sings Cantonese karaoke for kicks, balances her checkbook, and is still way more together than you'll ever be. And so you start riffling through your CDs and records like you always do when you're not quite sure who you are anymore and try to figure out where exactly this life of yours is at right now. Why all of that angst and dissent you've been clutching like fists for years have unclenched into loose tai chi palms. Why newspaper headlines and the evening news no longer send you reeling into conspiracy theorizing and against-the-machine raging, but get folded away and clicked off with a roll of the eyes and a soft cluck of the tongue. You look at the albums from artists that have guided you through the years – Marvin Gaye, 'Trane, Stevie Wonder, Operation Ivy, A Tribe Called Quest, the Violent Femmes, Mary J. Blige, Public Enemy, the Cure, Aretha, James Brown, Chaka, Miles, and Nina Simone, just to name a few – and realize things aren't going to be like that anymore. And it's not even because everything sucks (even though that's what you say every time someone asks you what new stuff you're listening to these days), but that you've simply stopped expecting any guidance from it. Because as much as you'd like that one artist to come along and shake things up, you've stopped holding your breath.

Soul searcher

Don't get me wrong – this isn't some jaded, defeatist, I'm-too-cynical-for-my-own-damn-good sort of thing. It's just that I've figured out that in order to enjoy any of the new stuff coming out, I've got to stop hoping it all means something. Leave it to the talking heads that fill up VH1 24-7 these days, contextualizing Michael Jackson and canonizing Eminen. Let 'em go on pretending that people give a fuck about Madonna and the '80s and how seminal Wham! was. I can't do it anymore. I write about pop music, and I've already taken what I do way too seriously for too long. All art may be political, but deliberating the politics of apathy, apoliticism, booty, and blingin' is just plain wearing me out. Admit it. You're tired too.

Sometimes music is just music, and though I seriously doubt I would have said anything of the sort even a year ago, that's what struck me more than anything when I made a turkey noodle casserole and sat down to evaluate the slate of new R&B and soul releases piling up around me. After rallying around a "neo-soul sucks" banner for the past eight months or so and trying to listen to the White Stripes, Coldplay, and Fischerspooner before realizing I could actually stand fake neo-soul hipsters way more than pasty, pretentious indie rockers and greasy electroclashers, I approached the endeavor with a sheepish grin and a bag of mea culpas. Admitting that yeah, the new Floetry jam, "Say Yes," sort of gets me off was the first step. Conceding that maybe, just maybe, Musiq Soulchild's last record had nothing to do with the virulent spread of American empire was the second.

The third, I suppose, is acknowledging that there are some standout soul artists making music right now, and whether you want to call it R&B, soul, neo-soul, or "neo-neo-soul" (as I heard somebody term it the other day), it's worth checking out. Sure, the world's going to hell in a handbasket, but Vivian Green, Dwele, and Spacek have made my life transition into nonangry armchair critic a whole lot easier. And though Green's A Love Story (Columbia, 2002), Dwele's recent Subject (Virgin), and Spacek's new Vintage Hi-Tech (K7) couldn't be more different, all three albums are works that acknowledge certain timbres of the times, from Green's superslick yet wide-eyed optimism, to Dwele's flossy, lover-man grassrootedness, to Spacek's gorgeous electric weirdness.

Solid players

While all three are clearly descendants of what has only recently preceded them – Green of Jill Scott (for whom she worked as backup singer), Dwele of D'Angelo, and Spacek of the London garage and trip-hop scenes – their disparities also seem indicative of the fact that new soul artists know they're not the purveyors of some new sort of groove movement that's going to get people head-bobbing in some grand cosmic fashion. Nah, these folks are doing it for themselves, and though I'm sure they've all got their fingers crossed that these albums are gonna blow up, I'd put a month's rent down that although the albums will establish them as solid players, none are really going to reach that far beyond the scenes they're rooted in.

Besides the fact that it's not fair – yeah, their work's more interesting and definitely more innovative than Ginuwine's, Ashanti's, or B2K's – this also speaks volumes about the extreme right-place-right-time-ness of the nature of success these days. By mere dint of being direct descendants of music that came out right before them, these artists have already missed the supposed "movements" they were supposed to be a part of. Which also means, sadly, those movements were never real movements in the first place.

This is most bittersweet for an artist like Dwele, the Detroit native who sang the hook on Slum Village's "Tainted" and probably would've had a moment in the sun if his album had come out a couple of years ago. As it stands, Subject is a strong but scattered record that stumbles by trying to cover way too many bases at once. As a Detroiter, Dwele's got to pay homage to the city's classic soul roots, which he does, but with too much of a lean into the head-wrapped, spoken word world that has become such a cliché in so much of black music today. He might have done better to play off the town's more recent incarnation as techno central (even Diddy's doing electronica these days!), since cuts like "Hold On" and the title track – which borrow from house not in sound but in their multilayered production aesthetic – fare best. (My major gripe: "Possible" – the best track off the album promo and the sweetest thing I'd heard in days, the kind of love song that gets girls all gooey inside and makes guys want to buy you dinner first – didn't make Subject's final cut. Don't ask why; just download it on Kazaa.)

On the other hand, Spacek are firmly grounded in the electronic music scene, and as much as progressive soul heads might bitch that the group's inability to break out beyond it says something about how crappy and unadventurous R&B is today, they're griping up the wrong tree. Mainstream soul music has been crappy and unadventurous for years. Nothing's changed. Only those firmly steeped in Jazzanova and P'taah albums will claim to get singer Steve Spacek and company's tricked-out, strangely addictive grooves (I don't get it at all; I just know the music makes me feel sort of crazy and good), and that should work out fine for Spacek, since they should just keep doing what they're doing and hope folks 20 years from now figure out how cool they were. Commercial success isn't something a group of tripped-out British dudes doing smooth, spacey funk should even be working toward.