Slang Soul (And Other Metaphors)
Something has to be a vehicle for making slang possible. In music, certain instruments make certain music possible. (The Medium is the Music). But it's usually linguistic in origin, which is the primary reason for musical slang.
Any time I pick up a bass I usually play something funky. It's almost built into the instrument, and is completely intuitive: the function of bass is closest to the drum.
White musicians can't easily get away with being funky because it has subtle tribal elements. Miles Davis supposedly made the observation that white musicians tended to sound white, even if you didn't know their race. The Swampers, the Muscle Shoals rhythm section, were all white, but the music didn't show it. Geddy Lee of Rush changed his technique in the 1980s to a more hard-edged funk sound. He felt that his previous way of playing was "like a white guy". Eno said that white musicians didn't have enough "Africa" in them.
African music is embedded into all music at this point, in all cultures. African musical slang has been expressed in various forms of jazz since the 1920s, and evolved to the next level as R&B in the 1950s by Silent Generation musicians, then again by Boomer and GenX generations, in all countries that enjoy pop music.
Anything built on drummed rhythms is going to be open to slanged language (such as wordplay through scat and rap), which then becomes the engine for music. Once instrumental music involves language, its rhythms change in fundamental ways: Adding lyrics to existing music involves using word placeholders, that get replaced later on. Very often the original scats work as the original--the reason being that words in pop songs are there for rhythmic purposes, not to be taken literally, even though a bunch of random phrases can add up to meaning through inferences.) American folk song is somewhat anomalous, in that it doesn't allow for the natural rhythms of language to shape the music itself. It is primarily poetry (symmetrical blocks of meaning fragments) with accompaniment. In African tribal ceremonies, the rhythms are not Music, and not associated with written text, but are rather a codification of tribal rites. We do that in Western culture primarily with text, and the internet is now the medium for it.
[It will be interesting to see how music and language evolve with machines and AI in the mix. The big dunce of AI will be its ignorance of the foregoing, or might make its own genre/tribe using synthetic language. (See Tara the Terrible, a creepy version of what might be possible with synthetic singing as a way of generating dummy vocals over set rhythms. The question remains: why do we need machines to sing?]
