While there is universal agreement that soul music originated with black Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, the nature of soul is not as simple to define: being black did not necessarily mean that an artist was a ‘soul’ artist; moreover, rock, pop and folk music originally recorded by white artists could be covered by black artists, and become soul classics in the process. In The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience since the 1960s, Emily J. Lordi – Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University – takes readers on a well-researched and fascinating journey to give her take on the subject. Lordi rethinks the conventional logic of soul discourse to offer a ‘revisionist history’ of soul music that challenges contemporary readings of soul (most notably post-soul scholarship). In doing so, she engages with soul superstars – such as Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Nina Simone and Marvin Gaye – to conduct an unconventional, aesthetic analysis, thereby offering a ‘new understanding of soul: as a capacious narrative of black overcoming that illuminates an eclectic set of musical aesthetics and signals unexpected futures’ (p. 15).

In the Introduction, Lordi positions her work in a vast body of material on soul music. She makes clear that she is not interested in an exhaustive history of soul music:

Moreover, Lordi aims to restore soul's complexity, by disentangling it from post-soul scholarship, in which ‘several scholars have reduced soul to a mere shorthand for hegemonic forms of collective black politics that seemed undesirable’ (p. 13). Here she also challenges post-soul's othering of soul as ‘racially essentialist, masculinist [and] heterosexist’ (p. 13). She defines the soul era as the late 1960s through the early 1970s, thus binding her theme of resilience to the particular political and economic realities black Americans were facing at the time. Her analysis is based on literature – both popular and academic – as well as on the music and performances of selected artists.

In Chapter 1, ‘From Soul to Post-Soul: A Literary and Musical History’, Lordi ‘presents a genealogy of soul – as cultural logic, marketing category [and] musical genre’ (p.16). Following a brief history of soul discourse and soul in the music industry, Lordi turns her attention to post-soul in a section titled ‘Post-soul Politics’. Here, she examines work by scholars such as Nelson George, Greg Tate, Lisa Jones and Trey Ellis, whose essay ‘New Black Aesthetic’ was a vigorous response to Addison Gayle's anthology The Black Aesthetic:

Lordi refers to post-soul scholars’ characterisations of soul as ‘caricature’ (p. 42) that fails to acknowledge soul's complexities by ‘repeat[ing] the neoliberal logic of treating (black) diversity as an end in itself, and black identity as defined by the range of products one buys or makes’ (p. 44). Post-soul's misunderstanding of soul logic remains a prominent theme throughout the book.

The next four chapters centre the discussion of soul on aesthetic choices made by artists and illustrates how these choices are tied to the concept of resilience central to her logic of soul. In Chapter 2, ‘We Shall Overcome, Shelter, and Veil: Soul Covers’, Lordi provides analyses of cover songs by Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway and Minnie Riperton. Lordi presents these covers (of both white and black artists) as acts of overcoming, writing that covers of songs by white artists ‘could be admiringly sincere, strategically market-oriented, and combative all at once’ (emphasis by Lordi), while covers of songs by black artists ‘opened up another set of intraracial and gender dynamics’ (p. 48). Chapter 3, ‘Prescripted Relations: Soul Ad-libs’ looks at Sly and Rose Stone, Nina Simone, Donny Hathaway and Aretha Franklin, as well as Prince and Rosie Gaines. She theorises that ‘ad-libs reflect the need for artists to revise not only preexisting musical scripts but also dominant social scripts – and thus to survive in a world whose social mandates are often designed to negate them’ (p. 75). Chapter 4, ‘Emergent Interiors: Soul Falsettos’ considers recordings by Anne Peebles, Al Green, Isaac Hayes, Minnie Riperton and Solange Knowles to show how these artists ‘used their higher vocal registers to limn the contours of expressive possibility at key moments of personal, artistic, social, and communal emergence’ (p. 101). Finally, in Chapter 5, ‘Never Catch Me: False Endings from Soul to Post-soul’, Lordi examines performances by Mahalia Jackson, James Brown, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye as well as a music video by Flying Lotus to posit that the false endings highlighted here ‘enact … soul's message of black group resilience’ (p. 126).

In the Conclusion, ‘“I'm Tired of Marvin Gaye Asking Me What's Going On”: Soul Legacies and the Work of Afropresentism’, Lordi challenges the concept of Afrofuturism by looking at the work of Beyoncé, Erykah Badu and Janelle Monáe. This challenge takes the form of a concept she labels Afropresentism:

Key here is the notion that soul lives on – albeit reimagined – because the conditions for the logic of soul are as pervasive as they were in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Meaning of Soul is an evocative book, which is virtually impossible to read without playing the music Lordi discusses and then hearing it differently. Although she features an extremely limited selection of performers and aesthetic choices to theorise her logic of soul, Lordi's work is nevertheless convincing; it is to be applauded for challenging what we think we know about soul.