Neo-Soul
As we've seen, African American music genres have blurred in the twenty-first century, creating new genres and subgenres. Neo-soul, one such music genre, has a paradoxical nature:
By definition, neo-soul is a paradox. Neo means new. Soul is timeless. All the neo-soul artists, in various ways, perform balancing acts, exploring classic soul idioms while injecting a living, breathing presence into time-tested formulas. They humanize R & B, which has been reduced to a factory-perfect product.
(Ehrlich 2002, 72)
Between 1997 and 2000, a dozen artists labeled "neo-soul" appeared in mainstream media. From Erykah Badu to Maxwell, Lauryn Hill or Rahsaan Patterson, all presented compositions mixing 1960s to 1970s soul with rap, rock, rhythm & blues, and poetry. Neo-soul is genre-bending in other ways. We know Lauryn Hill to be a neo-soul artist, yet, while a member of the Fugees, she becomes the first female rapper to sell ten million copies of an album. With The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, she became a pioneer in the neo-soul genre, when the album was one of the first in the genre to achieve mainstream success, and became the best-selling neo-soul album of all time. NPR ranked it second on its list of " The 150 Greatest Albums Made by Women." Rolling Stone listed it as the tenth greatest album on their "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list in 2020. In 2021, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was certified Diamond by the RIAA, making Hill the first female hip-hop artist to achieve this distinction. Another credit to this point is the rapper 50 Cent, whose "Best Friend" appears as number nine on the charts according to the Top R & B Songs of 2000. We see, in some instances, the category of hip-hop/R & B, as Beyonce is often categorized. We could find many more examples of this kind of genre bending. We can attribute it to the versatility of the artists in part. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, a chief aim of hip-hop music is to identify "Blackness" as a movement of people, and the integration of other African American popular music genres into a song is one way to achieve that aim.