The New Mythology of AFRO-FUTURISM 

Hayes may just be the perfect case study in tracing how the so-called neo-soul genre — or post-soul culture — came to be. His storied career externalizes the private journeys of his black followers who came of age in the era of desegregation and the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Hayes moved in a complex trajectory from Stax Records poobah (in the golden age of Love Generation martyr Otis Redding and biracial-band pioneers Booker T. & the MGs) to Black Moses boudoir pin-up (in his early-70s "Shaft" period) to 80s radio personality to 90s South Park icon and celebrity Scientologist.

To be a post-soul creature is to recall the halcyon days of youth spent in black-community living rooms full of plastic-covered, faux-Versailles furniture, digging Stax LPs beneath a triptych of Dr. King, Jesus and JFK. It means recognizing Hayes' "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic" as the key sample in Public Enemy's incendiary "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos." It means remembering the satirical blaxploitation hero in I'm Gon' Git You Sucka who strutted the streets of Anyghetto, USA, with the "Theme From Shaft" as a personal soundtrack played by members of Fishbone. If, in the course of your day, you helplessly quip, "He's a bad mutha...(Shut yo' mouf!)," then you probably make up the audience for consciousness-raising headwrap music.

Da Queen City gets loose for a veritable onslaught of post-soul acts this week, with the arrival of contemporary R&B dreamgirls Destiny's Child, who sublimate the strong black woman archetype beneath layers of crossover-pop gloss and Buppie (Blingie?) striving. These three children are the apotheosis of the headwrap aesthetic, whereas the sistas coming to town with the Sugar Water Festival — Dallas hood-presario Erykah Badu, Re-Re Jr. sistagurl Jilly From Philly, UK duo Floetry and pioneering feminist rapper-turned-Hollywood playa Queen Latifah — epitomize it. Whatever the artists' strengths or failings, they collectively represent the heiresses of such Harlem Renaissance Niggerati as Florida-born scribe Zora Neale Hurston, Beat-era folkie Odetta, NC-born activist-chanteuse Nina Simone and forgotten Capricorn Records black rockette Maxayn Lewis. With their full figures and sassy straight talk, both pre-thespian Latifah and Jill Scott have channeled the voices of Bessie Smith and other founding blues mamas. For now, Scott and company are doing better than 60s soul queen Mavis Staples, who documented her struggles on her late-2004 Alligator Records return, Have a Little Faith.

As folk of color like to bear witness to and signify on the ways African Diaspora culture has always been a modernist bricolage mapped on black bodies, one can never truly separate the litany of forebears from the black aesthetic du jour, and the work of the dreamgirls and Sugar Water women is no exception. (By the way, even twang-tastic homeboy Anthony Hamilton is currently cloistered at Charlotte's Reflections Studio this week, working on the follow-up to his post-soul Coming From Where I'm From.) Indeed, some observers label neo-soul as merely the music of contemporary black singers obsessed with aping the Holy Trinity: Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway and Marvin Gaye. (I reckon the chick counterpart is Aretha, Chaka and Gladys). However, ours is a generation that digs the Ohio Players and Led Zeppelin equally.

To codify the post-soul culture/intelligentsia these artists belong to is difficult, because the extra-musical concerns (shared political, social and cultural experiences of a generation of black youth born between the 1963 March On Washington and the 1979 release of "Rapper's Delight") weigh even heavier than the sonic ones. Yes, several of the acts in Charlotte this week are as true a continuation of the country-soul tradition that emerged from Muscle Shoals, Alabama (and elsewhere in the Deep South) as country stars Montgomery Gentry et al. are of classic Southern rock. Yet cultural critics rarely probe this fact. Even more crucial is that so-called neo-soul is music of negation, a black hand-side response to centuries of cross-racial desire animating the American scene. Even as it affirms black positivity, uplift and the survival of body and cultural soul, the sound has to defend against exogamous poachers/poseurs, black apathy and the mentality that prefers to enshrine the "purist" blues or soul master who is past his/her prime rather than reckon with contemporary R&B.

I date the foundational moment of neo-soul/post-soul to the mid-1980s, when the premier black pop outfit of the post-civil rights era, Earth Wind & Fire, began to fade from the charts. That was when self-consciously retro-nuevo "cultural mulatto" artists like Prince and Terence Trent D'Arby garnered both critical and commercial acclaim. It was when rap crossed over via Run-DMC's historic cover of Aerosmith's "Walk This Way," and when former Hathaway collaborator James Mtume's innovation of a compressed, synth-heavy production style (think Evelyn "Champagne" King) forever altered the sound of the black-radio mainstream (and killing off the funk big bands). But to me, it's less interesting to offer an encyclopedia of artists who have fallen under the post-soul banner — from D'Arby "rival" Chocolate Genius to ATL singer/songwriter Van Hunt — than it is to investigate why the neo-soul movement ultimately has never succeeded. For all the critical acclaim artists like Hamilton (deservedly) get, and despite songs like India.Arie's "Video" having an impact beyond the charts, this generation's musical output is a failure in commercial terms. But why? A lot of this music is as complex and piloted by hybridity as the Allman Brothers Band's back catalog. Is it because there's a dearth of multiracial bands that exogamous audiences can identify with? What about the last 30 years of post-soul culture being read as more compelling when processed through a white media lens, whether it's self-styled Generation X native scout Doug Coupland or a Ben Stiller buddy flick?

Throughout Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock & Roll, the anthology I compiled and edited for Palgrave Macmillan, there was consensus that major labels, radio and the Western rock/pop audience have a difficult time assessing and supporting progressive black music. Whether an aspiring black artist is as "far out" as Rastafarian punks Bad Brains, as dulcet as Shirley Caesar-inspired Leela James (whom Joss Stone wishes she could be when she grows up) or as possessed of arresting avant-garde compositional and playing chops as the embattled visionary Meshell Ndegeocello, said black artist will ultimately find cold comfort in the marketplace. Once and future Fugee Lauryn Hill was one of the few to ride her urban multi-kulti, womanist sensibilities to superstardom, but she blew it. For now, innovative Dixie rockist favorites OutKast and N.E.R.D. are hanging tough.

On a purely business level, progressive black music may be lagging behind its more popular sibling hip-hop because there's no millennial Motown to gather, harness and groom all of this far-flung urban/roots talent. Black exec Kedar Massenburg tried for a hot moment in the mid-90s, when Motown was signing D'Angelo, Badu, and others; James Poyser's Axis Music clique in Philly has also been quite fruitful. Still, with the exception of some out-of-the-box thinking by ATL execs at LaFace (OutKast) and So So Def (Hamilton), Massenburg's multimillionaire peers — Dr. Dre, P. Diddy, Master P — mostly followed the Russell Simmons model to overwhelming success in the increasingly corrupt hip-hop nation, making only token gestures to signing artists less informed by Thug Life than by the late Curtis Mayfield's lingering template of radio-ready polemics.

Artistically, even in the 90s, when it became cool to be black and the suburban "wigga" abounded (actually, you can date that back to Norman Mailer's infamous 50s "White Negro" or the 1920s Jazz Age), the radical expression of the Cosmic Negro — Betty Davis-idolater Joi (Gilliam-Gipp); Skin of feminist metal band Skunk Anansie; singer/songwriter David Ryan Harris, the godfather of ATL black rock; and Ndegeocello — was too threatening to embrace. If music is black and not ghetto-centric — if, in this particular pop moment, it don't extol the virtues of the pimptastic hip-hop economy and its chilling reenactment of antebellum master-slave relations — then it's always suspect to gate-keeping whites and a certain conservative black audience that rarely embraces any black art that hasn't been sanctioned by mainstream institutions and taste-makers. Black audiences are guilty of not championing their own until "whitefolks done took [our] blues an' gone." Ndegeocello's second masterpiece, Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape, tellingly opens with the line, "You sell your soul like you sell a piece of ass."

Any given neo-soul release fuses most American popular forms from bluegrass to hip-hop, as the African presence shaped them all. Yet black artists are perennially denied the gushing kudos their hybrid-happy peers get (think Beck, P.J. Harvey, the White Stripes, Cat Power). Love and theft, born of the Triangular Trade and its entertainment-industry equivalent minstrelsy, is supposed to flow only one way, apparently to the benefit of artists and hit men of the dominant culture. This is the world where Dead Elvis is crowned King of Rock & Roll instead of long-lived Chuck Berry. Where white-chocolate apprentice Nikka Costa's boogie-queen sexuality can be rewarded but Joi's authentic freaky-deke cannot. Where Carolina-bred alt-country sun king Ryan Adams is anointed for adopting Dylan's Village troubadour pose but black Brit bard Seal's brilliant re-imagining of Marvin Gaye's partnership with Leon Ware is deemed boring.

Progressive black music can be an art form of negation precisely because of black artists' inherited bitterness over this process. In many ways, the soul-baby contemporaries of white Gen X grunge rockers have defined their art by drawing lines around African retentions and turning the (white male) gaze back on itself by daring to fetishize Abbey Road orchestral arrangements or Neil Young's mercurial auteurism. And who is carrying the torch for this rebel music? Around-the-way black rockers and Afro-future pioneers Apollo Heights (twins Danny and Daniel Chavis), from Raleigh; piano- and guitar-playing D'Arby-doppelgänger Rudy Currence, just down the road in Rock Hill; and self-described punk-hop pioneers Deep Cotton from the ATL.

While these bruhs work it out, the eclectic siren and conscious rap lineup of the Sugar Water fest — aptly named for catering to a generation raised on the highs of red Kool-Aid and the golden age of sweet soul music — will promote the sistas still doin' it for themselves. So bruhs: if you want to get some of that ole-skool, blacklight, zodiac-poster nookie this weekend, I reckon y'all need to take your woman to the show and enjoy the parade of empowerment, respect and love.

(Rock critic Kandia Crazy Horse is the author of Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock & Roll; her favorite album is The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East; she knows Charlotte, loves grits and currently lives in the Ozarks.)

Destiny's Child performs at Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre Friday at 7pm. Admission is $32.50-$65. Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Queen Latifah and Floetry are at Verizon Saturday at 7pm. Admission is $28.50-$66. Tickets available at www.ticketmaster.com or by phone at 704-522-6500.