What’s New: NSN interviews the Neo Soul group Mothers Favorite Child. MFC was practically a household name and then they disappeared. We find out why, where they have been and where they plan to go next. We also have the exclusive story on their incredible new lead vocalist Rhian Ayanna.
 Neo Soul Network has partnered with buySOUL.com, an online music store specializing in “R&B music rooted with soul”.The buySOULstore will be featured on Neo Soul Network and will carry cd’s and other products that have been specially selected by NSN.
Industry Advice: Internet Music Promotion for dummies by Don Newton In the days before the internet, when the major record labels had the music market sewn up tight, it was all but impossible to break into the music business in the traditional sense without having a recording contract with one of them. This often led to artists becoming broke before their album ever actually hit the music store shelves. The long established “standard recording contract” that was used by the industry, heavily favored the company, at the expense of the star. Advances had to be recouped, recording and manufacturing and distribution costs repaid before the artist saw nickel number one. Now all that has changed, and for the independent recording artist or band these days, it is definitely a blessing in disguise, although some may not see it that way. The “lure” of the big label contract is still a desirable thing for most young artists, just because they have never been exposed to the potential of the internet as a sales and marketing medium. |
Available Now! Alicia Keys As I Am. By the time this long-awaited album saw its release date, most fans had probably read at least a couple of interviews with Alicia Keys in which she explained that first single, “No One”–a firestorm of a song clearly born of a sore heart and steeped in serious soul-searching, was about her decision to retreat from the obligations of stardom when she found out a loved one was in need of her care. The anecdote sticks not just because it explained the song so well–you can actually hear the pain, commitment, and determination in her sultry voice–but because it gets at what makes the woman behind the music so appealing. There’s only one way R&B artists grow to become legends, and it’s by drenching the words they sing with feeling (think Gladys Knight, Roberta Flack). The skeptical listener might have had her doubts before As I Am, but there’s no mistaking it now: Alicia Keys is well on her way to sharing a category with them. This record radiates not just old-soul maturity, the kind Alicia fans say makes her modern rarity, but real soul. Vintage-leaning hooks and horns grab hold on “Where Do We Go from Here” and an assortment of other songs, but Keys can also get by just fine without them, as she proves on more pop-flavored numbers like “Lesson Learned,” with John Mayer, and “Superwoman.” The genres may be smearing, she seems to say, but bring them on: she won’t shrink back. Her commitment is not to a single style but to what’s stirring her soul. Because of it, she’s moving R&B, or something like it, from the hips back to the heart. –Tammy La GorceMary J. Blige - Growing Pains  “I’m talkin’ ’bout things I know,” Mary J. Blige wails on “Work That,” the second single and opening track of Growing Pains. The album squeaked into 2007 too late to make best-of lists but otherwise would have stormed its way up several, for sure. She needn’t have hit us with such a pronouncement: In 16 songs that ring as remarkably, unflinchingly true as those on 2005’s landmark The Breakthrough, the queen of hip-hop soul keeps “keeping it real” a specialty. There’s no sense in trying to assign credit for the skin-tight grooves and funked-up retro vibe here; with nine producers padding Blige’s emotion-rich voice and the lyrics she so obviously lives by, what we’re left with is a melange of sounds. But it’s a measure of an artist who has mastered her own identity and left nothing to chance that this, her eighth studio album, comes off so free of wild cards and loose edges. “You ask what love feels like,” she sings on “What Love Is,” one of the disc’s less fierce tracks. “It feels like joy, and it feels like pain, and it feels like sunshine, and it feels like rain,”she continues, answering the question. The album feels the same way, a passel of complex feelings all wrapped up in love. No one knows struggle, heartache, and triumph over mediocrity like Blige. –Tammy La Gorce |
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