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?
Centre-stage and sidelined … Adele and Rough Copy. Photograph: Getty/Rex
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 “fukk 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.
It wasn’t always so. While English singers from Mick Jagger to Mick Hucknall have long shown a flair for repackaging American R&B, they used to exist alongside a credible pool of black British talent. The 80s saw both Sade and Soul II Soul score global hits, followed by a 90s rush of talent that saw Omar, Carleen Anderson and Caron Wheeler take on the “mature” end of the market, while teen idols from Craig David to Ms Dynamite dominated the mainstream. But as the millennium rolled over, somewhere deep within the bowels of the pop colossus a switch was flicked. Suddenly, labels were signing the likes of
Amy Winehouse, Duffy and Joss Stone, and soon started squeezing megahits from the blue-eyed gospel of Sam Smith and Ella Henderson. Other than the occasional instances – JLS, Alexandra Burke or Leona Lewis – Brit soul has had a white face for nearly a decade.
It’s worth noting that these isolated successes have come through TV talent shows. But rather than this proving that talent shows support black artists, the comparatively low proportion of success stories suggests quite the opposite – something Kazeem Ajobe, Nigerian-born singer of X Factor runners-up Rough Copy, agrees with.
“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. ”
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fam you're over there having a debate with yourself....i'm pointing out 2 things
. Nevermind ticket sales, merchandise sales, cultural influence, global influence, YOUR influence, entrepreneurship development, and all of that huh?
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