In the past music discovery happened on searches at record stores, new music drops on the radio or music videos on various cable channels. At one point in the 90s the discovery was found in Music Choice and as phones became the delivery system Pandora, iTunes and music subscriptions allowed musical taste to expand in an unlimited fashion. I discovered nezsa while traveling down a wormhole of Louis Baker. She is another talented international singer who sounds like what the Soulquarians/Neo Soul era of music gave. American was once the bar, but as autotune gave mediocre singers the ability to land hits at the same rate as a vocalist like Jill Scott or Erykha Badu, R&B, Neo-Soul, faded.
nezsa feels like when I discovered Goapele. A breakup song shouldn’t be this beautiful. There isn’t much out there about her and her YouTube only has 4 songs. There isn’t a bad one in the limited batch. I guess it doesn’t matter that her story isn’t known. When I heard a song on Music Choice in the 90s or in the mix on Pandora in 2000s, I didn’t know much about the artist. Maybe that’s how it should be. A window into where songs like Should Have Cared were born could prevent listening. This is haunting, beautifully haunting.
