A selection byThe Waxonia Desk
Neo-Soul
Five records from the two years around Voodoo, when a group of musicians in one New York studio argued a genre into existence — plus the sampled bar that the drumming on all of them is answering.
- Picks
- 5
- Genre
- Neo-Soul
- Years
- 1970–2000
- Curator
- The Waxonia Desk
- Updated
- 2026-08-29
Listen to the whole list
Play it through here →One record after another, with the verdicts
Take 4 of 5 to YouTube → (opens in a new tab)
Opens the list on YouTube as a playlist you can save to your own account. We never see your account, and nothing is stored here. 1 of these records have no verified YouTube link yet, so they are left out rather than guessed at.
The picks — selected, not ranked
D'Angelo / Untitled (How Does It Feel)
2000 · Virgin
The band play so far behind the beat that it feels like a dare. Most of that feel is four people refusing to hurry each other rather than anything that was ever written down.
Also on Neo-Soul, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Slum Village / Guess Who
2000 · Barak
Dilla's drums audibly and deliberately out of time: the single most imitated piece of programming of the last thirty years, released before anyone had a name for what it was doing.
Also on Neo-Soul, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Common / The Light
2000 · MCA
The same producer, the same year, aimed at a completely different target. Proof that the collective was a sound rather than just a building on Eighth Street with good equipment in it.
Also on Neo-Soul
Lauryn Hill / Ex-Factor
1998 · Ruffhouse
Made just outside the collective and unmistakably of the same moment. The competition between these records is audible on all of them, and it made every one of them better.
Also on Neo-Soul, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
James Brown / Funky Drummer
1970 · King
The bar underneath everything above it. A generation of drummers learned Clyde Stubblefield from a sampler rather than from the record, and played him differently as a result.
Also on Funk, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
About the curator
The people who write the rankings on this site. We keep the lists honest, we argue about the order, and we get asked the same question more than any other: where should someone actually start. These are our answers.