Question from Doug: “What ever happened to the rapper Diverse? He had one album on Chocolate Industries that was great and had production from Madlib, RJD2, and Prefuse 73…and then nothing. It seems like a waste of talent. Any info would be appreciated!”
Answer: That’s a fine question indeed and honestly? I have no idea. Diverse, as you pointed out, broke out of the pre-Kanye/Lupe Chicago scene in the early 2000s and was one of the most prominent artists on Chocolate Industries. But someone at the label has been sleeping given that they clearly haven’t updated Diverse’s artist page in years despite the fact that he and CI actually put out a 7″ as recently as 2008/9: “Escape Earth.”
Around the same time, the Chicago Tribune reported that he was on the verge of releasing his next project but it’s been nearing four years since then and it looks like we’re still waiting. Personally, my favorite Diverse project might be this track he joined forces with RJD2 and Lyrics Born on:
Question from anonymous: “A few years ago, I used to frequent the myriad of music blogs that offered rare soul albums for free download and it was wonderful to discover obscure artists who otherwise would not have seen the light of day. Now it is a virtual wasteland, as all the sites have shut down due to fear of the RIAA or trolls screwing up a good thing. It was a great community that is now gone. I used to frequent Soulseek but even that has become ridiculously elitist and cliquish as you have to join snobby groups that won’t let you join unless you have something they find worthy. So my question to you is, where can I go now? Is there any underground soul community that is like the ones back in the good ol days (two years ago) that shares rare lps?”
Answer: First of all, I’d respectfully disagree that RIAA or trolls “shut down” the era of album blogs you’re talking about. RIAA, as far as I know, never prosecuted a single music blogger. There may have been a small handful of sites DMCA-ed but I never got the sense that there was some overall chilling effect. What was more effective was going after Megaupload and other large bandwidth download sites, thus shrinking the number of options available to people who wanted to put large files up for download. I still don’t think this was the death knell.
I think Facebook and/or Twitter had more to do with it. Not because they directly competed with blogs (who, if we’re being precise here, peaked in saturation about five years ago and have been on the wane since then) but because they compete for people’s attention and energies. It’s not just that these other sites lured away people who might have started blogs otherwise but perhaps more important, they drew off people who used to read blogs regularly. A blog that goes unread doesn’t offer much incentives to the people writing them. Believe me, I think about this a lot since the average number of comments on Soul Sides is a fraction of where it was back in 2005. And that kind of bums me out even though I understand why it happened. But as a writer, if you feel like you have no audience, your incentive to write can wither with it. And certainly, in the last few years, there’s no shortage of distractions that are keeping people away from blogs and more towards other places. I mean, all those animated .gifs on Tumblr don’t just create themselves.
*sigh*
Anyways, back to your original question. I think there’s actually two questions in there. 1) Where can you learn about soul music from a variety of people? 2) Where can you download albums for free? The heyday of the latter is over and frankly, I’m glad it is. Call me old school but it just seemed like that circumvented the traditional process of record discovery which meant literally getting your hands dirty by rifling through actual, physical records. Obviously, I’m being slightly hypocritical here since 1) I share songs which isn’t that far removed from sharing LPs and 2) I often benefitted from having access to full albums online whenever I need to research an artist’s discography. But ultimately, it just seemed like having a potentially infinite universe of every album ever released cheapened the inherent value of any single album.
I’m not saying this to chide you (or anyone else) but prior about 10 years ago, the main way you learned about records was to go to record stores. And you usually had to buy those records. But it was a marvelous, eclectic education. As you may have seen, I’m writing a guide to starting a collection and one thing I was going to add to that is that building a collection is inherently a long-term process. It takes years, especially since sitting with records and listening to them is time consuming. I think we – myself included – forget that because we have so much at our fingertips these days. But there’s something about the slower pace of finding records one by one, “in the field” that’s not replicable online.
And that’s the thing, if it’s about learning about music? Never been an easier time, especially since there’s an infinite jukebox of music available to listen to. Sure, Spotify and Youtube won’t let you download entire albums of CD-quality music but that was always a luxury, never a right or entitlement. If someone has to buy an album from iTunes or Amazon in order to listen/keep the entire album…well, that’s how the most of recorded music history worked. And it was never a bad bargain, especially not now since you can listen to each song before you commit to buying anything.
So that brings us back to: where can you learn about music? And in that respect, I think there are still solid resources out there. Just a few of my favorite: Soulstrut, Melting Pot, Home of the Groove, and Nerdtorious. And hell, I haven’t updated this in a minute but I figure my blogroll isn’t totally worthless (yet).
There’s also a ton of Facebook groups purely dedicated to sharing/talking about music. Check out Sweet and Deep Soul and The Executive Listener to start with.
Have a question? Ask us.
Fantastic article ! This is a topic I have seen rarely ( if ever ) covered by music blogs. I agree with the author about the natural process of collecting records, building ur music know how and going about the process the way it has been done for years. For a latecomer like myself,intitially, the only source for buying records seemed to be on ebay. So I figured I couldnt afford to buy any. And thats why the music blog was such a fantastic source.
Soundlibrary records, soul and funk rarities and 45s. These are off limits to most casual collectors and listeners because of price issues and the fact that most dont even know they exist. Thanks to the music blog this is no longer the issue.
The large music blog communities may be scarce but the blogs run by fans are sprouting everywhere and continue to post quality content.
eg. apyrexscholar, blaxploitationpride, orgyinrhtythm etc.
Hi, Oliver. I’ve been reading Soul-Sides for many years, and I still check very often, reading most posts. You’ve introduced me to a ton of music, so thank you very much. Per your comment about the number of comments going down, I can understand how that might be dispiriting, and I’m guilty of not commenting frequently, but I can say that I really enjoy your writing & the education you’ve been providing me.
And to the reader who asked the question about where to go for some quality rips and write ups, check Funk My Soul.
The more I think about it, I do think the record industry going after the upload sites may have been more influential than I initially thought. Because I could see how that’d be dispiriting to someone who had spent, say, a year or two, uploading their collection only to see all those links go dead literally overnight. While other options may have remained, that could certainly have killed my interest in *continuing* to post because you’d never know if the new upload site you used would get DMCA-ed the next day.
That said, it’s very hard to tease out these kinds of factors and assume that one was more influential than the other. We know, via metrics, that social media use has exploded during the same time that AOBs declined but as I tell my students: correlation does not equal causality. 🙂
I stopped commenting awhile ago because it seemed to become more difficult. I did not want to log in with Facebook etc…..
Still, this was pretty easy so maybe I am wrong.
Toss out an Amy Winehouse reference? That used to get people going?
Hey Oliver,
I dont think I’ve ever made a comment on your site but reading this I thought, that while you werent necessarily fishing for it, I should drop you a line and say that I’ve had Soul Sides bookmarked for a good 5 years and regularly check in and have found some great music here.
I’m a massive fan. Thanks
Gav: Thanks. But seriously, I wasn’t fishing, simply making an observation. I suspect that people have shifted the sites where the most conversations are taking place. I’m as guilty as anyone; I drop hundreds a word a day on Facebook (or so it feels) but not necessarily anywhere else.
I’m obviously late to this, so I doubt anyone will read my comment; but I think why most of the music blogs faded out was because most of the authors were a little shallow in their product offering. That’s not to say they didn’t know anything, but it seemed a lot of the blogs were posting the same content after their own stuff ran dry.
You peg yourself into a certain genre or two, and your limited to the amount of good material you can post.
Anthony: Respectfully, I disagree. I think, across the board, the kind of blogging I’m talking about – content-heavy vs. micro-blogging/Tumblr-esque sites – lost readership in droves that had nothing to do with the content. In other words, it was the mediums that changed, not the message. I don’t disagree that much of the content out there could be, as you say, “a little shallow” but that shallow-ness isn’t what weakened the music blogging format. I don’t there’s any single explanation; it’d have to be a confluence of forces and within that, I think overall content quality was a minor factor.
I’d also, fiercely, disagree that genres dry up. Believe me as someone who collects soul music – there’s more good music in that genre than I’d ever have a lifetime to write about.