⚡️THIS SOUL IS ON FIRE🖤

Episode 10: What's Going On? How Did Music Get So Sterile?

Apr 04, 2025

TLDR: Soul didn’t die—it was sterilised & re-packaged for convenience. But here’s why it’s not gone yet. You just need to know where to look.

Picture Marvin Gaye, live, tearing open the air with Mother, mother—a plea that rewired souls. That’s the alchemy we’ve lost, and these are its rebels: artists who weaponised their imperfections against a sterile world. Some voices don’t just reach your ears—they colonise your nervous system. This is their story—and why the fire still flickers, if you know where to look.

Part I: The Six Soul Transmutations

⚡️Marvin Gaye What’s Going On?The Alchemist of Desperation🖤 Soul Transmutation Number One

A stage, a man, a prayer breaking into splinters. Mother, mother…. two words that crack and bleed from Marvin Gaye’s throat. More than a lyric—it’s a summoning. A man tearing open the air, pleading, conjuring, making the unspeakable felt.

James Jamerson, half-drunk but divinely possessed, lets his bass crawl and throttle the groove with spider-fingered genius. His Fender Precision writhes, a serpent pulsing beneath Marvin’s anguish, bending time until past, present, and future collapse into the now.

And that groove—molten, endless. The band lives inside it, stretching, making time elastic. This isn’t the tidy, radio-polished version of What’s Going On—no this is the wild twin, live-wire soul in its purest form. In ’71, the live version of What’s Going On stretched 8 whole minutes past the studio cut—a freedom playlists would choke on.

You don’t just listen.

You witness.

You are changed.

But it’s not just the personal agony he’s channeling; it’s the collective despair of American society on the brink. Gaye’s voice becomes both weapon and balm, a fragile vessel for the emotional wreckage of an entire nation. As we witness his battle with the sterility of the times, we begin to see the larger theme at play: soul music isn’t just a genre. It’s a weapon of resistance—a rejection of what’s comfortable and controlled, and a defiant return to the messy, raw humanity that makes us who we are.

Aretha Franklin⚡️A Soul-Shaking Benediction Wrapped in Thunder🖤 Soul Transmutation Number Two

If Marvin was the prophet, Aretha Franklin is the preacher—taking Gaye’s call to arms and amplifying it into something sacred & primal. Aretha Franklin summons I Say a Little Prayer then storms the gates of heaven and demands an audience.

Forget Dionne Warwick’s gentle poise—Aretha sets it ablaze.

That first I say a little prayer for you isn’t a whisper—it’s a commandment.

A plea turned battle cry.

And when she stretches forever—it quakes your bones.

In Aretha’s transformation of this piece, we see the soul alchemist at work, but in an entirely different way. Where Gaye’s soul was saturated with despair, Franklin’s is fueled by fury.

Her entire career was a refusal to be confined by the polished, marketable image that the powerful men in the music industry tried to impose on her. But this wasn’t just about rejecting pop’s polished structures—it was about reclaiming her voice from this male-dominated industry that sought to control and reduce her artistry.

Aretha understood that the power of soul music lies in its unpredictability, in the glorious imperfection of a voice fighting against the systems that sought to tame it.

When she hits that final I say—it’s a lover’s taunt. A preacher’s fire.

The Queen’s Decree.

Aretha unchains something primal.

This is her wrecking-ball self—untamed, unapologetic, and holy in her fury.

Leaving you breathless & wrecked.

Wondering: have you just been saved, slayed, or both?

⚡️Ann Peebles Somewhere Between a Sermon and A Seduction - The Alchemist of Restraint 🖤 Soul Transmutation Number Three

Where Aretha was the tempest, Ann Peebles was the quiet storm—her soul was a slow burn, a calculated descent into darkness. When she sings I Can’t Stand the Rain, it’s as though she’s summoning the storm itself.

Every note is deliberate, as though each breath carries a secret, a burden that only Ann can bear. There’s no frenzy here, no wild eruptions of fury. Instead, we find a haunting restraint that draws us in, forcing us to lean closer to listen, to feel what she’s not saying.

The storm she conjures isn’t chaotic; it’s precise, calculated. And in this measured restraint, there’s a deep, aching power that’s as potent as any explosion.

The juxtaposition between the raw, untamed ferocity of Queen Aretha & the controlled intensity of Princess Ann underscores the diversity within soul—a reminder that there’s no one way to transmute the human experience into song.

John Lennon called it the best song ever, and for good reason. This is pure soul alchemy—hypnotic, raw, swampy brilliance built on control, space, and sorcery.

Effortless Devastation

Soul

That

Smolders

⚡️Al Green – The Transformer of Loneliness🖤 Soul Transmutation Number Four

While Ann Peebles bent time with calculated restraint, Al Green stretched it with the elastic ache of desire.

When Green sings Tired of Being Alone, he doesn’t just convey loneliness—he inhabits it. His voice, that transcendent falsetto, is not just a tool to convey emotion; it’s the embodiment of longing itself.

Hunger spills from every note, and it’s in this ache that he finds the raw intersection between sex and spirituality.

Much like his predecessors, Green refused to let technology sterilise his emotional expression. There’s a rawness in his voice, a sense that he’s not performing but rather bleeding onto the microphone. And in this transmutation of pain into seduction, Green teaches us something essential: soul music is not about control; it’s about surrender—surrender to the moment, to the feeling, to the fire burning inside.

His voice is a vessel for something greater than the song itself.

It’s an offering, an invitation to join him in the depths of feeling. And for those brave enough to follow, the reward is transcendence.

⚡️Soul Uprising: Otis Redding’s Explosive Reclamation🖤 Soul Transmutation Number Five

After watching Green’s seduction, Otis Redding’s raw eruption in Monterey feels like a rebirth. If the ‘60s had been about the smooth, controlled pulse of soul’s intimacy, Redding shattered that facade, bringing soul back to its primal, animal roots.

His performance at Monterey wasn’t just a concert—it was a force of nature. The fire that had simmered through the voices of Gaye, Franklin, Peebles, and Green erupted in Otis like a volcano.

His sweat-drenched body, his howling cries—they were not just a spectacle. They were a reclamation of what had been lost.

As we move from Otis to the present day, we realise that the tension between these two poles—the sacred, intimate ache of Al Green and the primal explosion of Otis Redding—is the essence of soul itself.

It’s not about fitting into a particular mold or genre; it’s about the refusal to be contained. And as we look at today’s music, we see that same struggle—between the sterile algorithms that push us towards predictability, and the few artists brave enough to let their imperfections blaze through.

⚡️Billy Preston & Buddy Miles A Funk-Fired Hallelujah💙 Soul Transmutation Number Six

If Otis was a storm, Billy Preston was the firestorm. Where the soul revolution began with protest, Preston made it electric, unstoppable.

His Hammond organ—a weapon—hijacks My Sweet Lord with funk-infused holy fire that burns beyond Harrison’s vision.

It’s raw, unfiltered soul, not neat or sanitised. Preston, its high priest, turns gospel into a call to feel, to move, to connect. His alchemy transforms soul, forging a bridge to modern music’s rhythms and attitude.

Where Green found intimacy, Preston found freedom—an uprising, a joyful rebellion breaking every mold.

Soul isn’t convenience; it shakes us alive. This isn’t just soul. This isn’t just funk. This is salvation—with a side of sweat💙⚡

That was soul’s peak—wild and utterly untamed. But the machines had other plans…

Part II: The Sterile Takeover

Reel to Reel Tape Recorder Manufacturers - Pioneer - Museum of Magnetic Sound

1983: The Year MIDI Murdered Human Swing

As the 1980s dawned, something fundamental shifted in recording studios across America. The warm hum of analog tape machines began giving way to the clinical precision of digital recording technology.

The introduction of the Fairlight sampler in 1979 and the adoption of MIDI by 1983 marked a quiet revolution that few recognised as soul music's silent adversary. Where engineers once captured performances in their entirety—imperfections, variations, and all—producers could now isolate, quantise, and perfect every element.

The very technology designed to faithfully reproduce music was inadvertently sterilising it, fragment by fragment. What began as innovation quickly became standardisation, and the messy human magic that made Preston's Hammond scream and Aretha's voice crack began disappearing from popular music—not through censorship but through the subtle tyranny of technical perfection.

Earlier technology captured lightning in a bottle, bottling Marvin’s tremble, Aretha’s rupture, Otis’s howl. Now, the machines rule. Auto-tune turns voices into flawless mannequins, stripping the cracks that made soul alive.

Spotify-optimised tracks—clean, compressed, built to hit at 30 seconds—fit, chill or focus, demanding nothing, disturbing nothing.

It’s the stuff you skip without knowing why.

Human swing gets locked into rigid grids, happy accidents smoothed away.

They call it freedom, but it’s containment—a synthetic shell swapped for truth.

Somewhere between Play Next and Discover Weekly, we stopped discovering anything that hurts.

Soul was never background noise—it disrupts, aches, testifies, raw by design.

The machine doesn’t feel—it calculates. And if we mistake smooth for sacred, we don’t just lose a genre—we lose a language.

Conclusion: Light It Back Up

The 1970s didn’t have better music—they had braver rebels. Marvin, Aretha, Otis—saboteurs grafting truth onto tape before the machine could sterilise it.

Now, soul’s not dead, just buried under algorithm-approved vibes.

But the flame flickers. Michael Kiwanuka’s soul music radiates like a haunted bell, tolling through the static—echoes of Marvin, but definitely not mimicry.

Frank Ocean’s ghostly falsetto, an indie artist discovery swaying between heartbreak and epiphany, reminds us that emotion can’t be boxed into a neat data set. His songs don’t follow rules—they explode them.

Leon Bridges never apologises for his analog heart in a digital world. His voice—warm, ragged, real—breathes life into a genre many called retro, giving it a visceral urgency that no playlist filter could predict.

And Anderson .Paak? He’s a man on the verge of joyous collapse—his voice crackling with too much life, too much groove, too much truth. He’s not here to soothe you; he’s here to shake you.

These artists don’t serve the algorithm. They serve the altar. Their music doesn't stream—it summons.

And we—anyone still brave enough to feel—owe them our attention, our respect, and our deepest devotion.

Because, let’s be clear: while algorithms curate convenience, soul shatters it. True soul is wild. It is dangerous. It is holy. It does not ask permission, and it cannot be reproduced.

It lives in the imperfections. In the growl, the gasp, the cracked note that tears the veil wide open. Soul is the fire. And if you're still looking for that flame, it's out there—burning in the unlikeliest corners, waiting for you to feel something real enough to hurt.

So light the candle. Crack the vinyl. Turn the speakers up. Let the machines tremble. Because the real ones?

We're still on fire. Still asking: What's going on? And still refusing to be silenced.

But now the question is: Can you still hear the fire? Or have we become numb to its crackle? Share your flame-keepers in the comments—those artists who still make you feel something real. Who's carrying Marvin's torch? Who's channeling Aretha's holy fury?⚡🖤

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