Im not to sure what makes me fall in love all over again with soul music during the winter time. Maybe the bitter temperature makes me hark back to simpler times. Where to be a successful man you needed to be hard-working, loving and an emotional rock. No belief that you need to learn how to make a quiche or being a good listener. As I have breached the working world it is funny to see me slowly creeping back to these beliefs. All I want to be at the moment is bedrock, a real man’s man. Dependable, unflappable and doesn’t care what others think. A man which I am the complete opposite of. I am quite comfortable being a bag of nerves and quibbles. My life has been described as one big embarrassment and to be honest it has. I have come to the conclusion that since my life has been built on wheels it is easy to tip me over. However unlike other who may have built theirs up I am just a plain. Full of different experiences that hopefully have moulded me into someone good. I am not too fussed if I don’t be a hero just someone that someone can trust and eventually love. Please note that I am not worried about being alone just whether or not I can be a good man. A concept that has never crossed my infantile brain.
Love is a theme that is constantly coming up in the soul songs that I listen to. One that struck a chord with me today is Show Me by Joe Tex. In the song he talks about the concept being every strong person is a strong partner. He is fair to both sexes in the song which is unusual in that time. The belief that two people working hard to make sure that each other have minimal worry works in two ways. The first is a cold hard look at the work/play balance and the other is the simple fact that couples share each others pain and joy. Thus multiplying and dividing the emotional burden.
Before James Brown passed away he rambled something at an awards ceremony where he said that music should stop being so filthy. Mel & Tim’s Backfield in Motion is a classic example where cheating is brought up but in the most innocuous form. The emotion of being cheated on is not distilled just adapted in another form. These days you get Eamon’s Fuck You right Back. Yeah get that emotion out by cursing at the woman whom you just stated you loved. There is a scene in the television show The Wire where the mian cop is going through a divorce with his wife. He is angry and agitated after getting a phone call from her about her lawyer. He turns to his partner, a female cop.
“A Lesser man, a man with no class would just maybe, maybe call her a cunt”
“Did you just call the mother of your children a cunt?”
I really like that scene since the show is laden with swearing that a key moment like that is not thrown under the carpet.
Finally I just wanted to tie in a little Rest in Peace to Ike Turner. Not a great man, someone who probably lived in excess too much. A man whom my friend Ibrahim is jealous of since he got to have sex with Tina Turner. Ibrahim still would apparently. He was a bad man but someone that wrote some of the best soul songs of all time. Proud mary is such a classic. I remember watching a performance of it on one of those old clips shows and it really just the song justice.
Soul music will always be a key part in my life. A genre which never gets the credit it deserves but has influenced so many after it. Elements of disco, rock and hip hop all have their roots in Soul. Whether it be the bittersweet love songs of the supremes or the macho, chest beating stuff of James Brown. Soul music will always do what it intended to do affect your soul.