It was better before bla bla bla… It’s not what it used to be bla bla bla Vintage groove fans can wail, whine and resent. But for the last ten years or so, the soul of the sixties and seventies has made a resounding comeback. Each week sees the birth of more or less direct heirs to Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, Willie Hutch and Marvin Gaye. But besides just the voices, it is above all the sound that is true to these decades of the past century which symbolizes this revival. Sometimes close to taxidermy, this sound can also be very contemporary. In all cases, it revives a tradition that the 80s and 90s had consigned to oblivion...
It's difficult to date this comeback to a precise moment in time. While the high-sucrose-content R&B reigned during the 80s, Neo Soul (more conscious and sophisticated in its productions) prepared the ground for the following decade. Amy Winehouse, even if she was not the only voice of her generation to praise the elders, remains the first great star to revive a vintage sound. When the “Amy phenomenon” truly exploded with her second album, the sublime Back To Black in October 2006 (far superior to her first album Frank), soul music offered mostly hollow, interchangeable and syrupy R&B goddesses on totally sanitized productions. Few of them tried to really change the sound sculpted by Aretha Franklin, Ann Peebles, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Dinah Washington and Marlena Shaw. Then Amy Winehouse offered the world a panther-like voice, real songs (which she wrote herself, unlike 90% of her colleagues), a production with vintage accents (but never backward-looking) and brass instruments galore. To top it all off, even the image is unique: the beehive hairdo, biker tattoos and punk guile! Back To Black topped the charts all around the world for months, and it remains today a true masterpiece of soul and rhythm'n'blues. When the critical opinion meets the popular opinion - a phenomenon rare enough to be worth underlining - the pleasure is tenfold... Despite being more diluted in the pop format, the albums of other British soul sisters such as Adele or Duffy also contain their dose of retro soul, a few winks at Motown and a certain sixties imagery...
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