G-Z wrote:I'm glad this has been brought up, because in my mind there seemed to be a sudden shift in gears where soul seemed virtually unimpeachable on BCB - and I'm still scratching my head over the Mojo Soul thread, where a list which would usually be met with a collective cry of "yawn" was instead characterised by universal praise of this music...
I don't think that thread was about universal praise actually, there were plenty of less enthused reactions. Granted, they were more of the 'this album should have been in rather than that one' type...
G-Z wrote:if it had been a Rock / Indie list you can just imagine the reaction.
I can only really speak for myself here, but the list interested me because I am only now exploring soul and funk in any depth. I've previously had the usual albums by the usual suspects -
What's Going On,
Innervisions etc., the stuff that every indie kid or classic rock buff gets. For me lists like this are interesting... as indeed in previous years Rock/indie lists might have been. I'm reminded of Coan's story about the 1985 NME list that he used as a guide for buying stuff.
I've kept a copy of this list - and the 100 Greatest Soul albums list Mojo did a few years ago (and with which they were careful not to overlap on this one) - for precisely the same purpose, as a guide to finding great music. But it's just one resource; BCB has also served this purpose - I've bought Terry Callier, EWF and War albums because they were raved about by a few on here.
G-Z wrote:It seems that there is a presumption here that 70s soul is underappreciated or underdiscussed, and therefore some kind of holy grail, but I generally don't see that at all, at least not compared with many other genres.
I disagree. I don't think we do discuss 70s soul very much. Certainly not compared with 70s rock. And I think we can appear to be blindly enthusiastic about it because for some of us it's off our map to one extent or another. So the stuff we've heard, and are able to talk about
at all, is stuff which really floats our boat.