The 70s Soul Diaspora — One Conversation, Four Continents

Lion isn't a stage name. It's the name of a Dutch musician — Peter de Leeuwe, a drummer by training — who in 1975 made a soul record so convincing that nobody believed it. Not because it sounded wrong — because it sounded too right to come from where it came from. Philips released it in Holland and almost nobody heard it.

When Michelle put it on the table, Paul asked the question everyone asks the first time they hear this track: where is this from? The answer still surprises people. Holland. 1975. A track that spent decades in near-total obscurity until funk and soul collectors rescued it. In 2017, Chicago indie band Whitney covered it — and that's how it reached the ears that still didn't know it. Two years later, Numero Group gave it an official reissue. The road that took forty-plus years to complete passed, as it turns out, through the same city I'm broadcasting from right now.

What makes "You've Got a Woman" impossible to set aside isn't technical polish — it's the urgency. There's something in that voice that doesn't ask permission to be there. And that, it turns out, has no passport. The same thing was happening on the other side of the Atlantic, at the same moment, in the same musical language — with neither side knowing about the other.

Some songs exist on their own. And some songs only exist in relation to another song — they only make sense when you know where they came from and where they ended up.

"Use Me" is both.

The original is Bill Withers. 1972. Produced by Creed Taylor at Kudu Records, arranged by Pee Wee Ellis — the same musical director who was behind James Brown for years. It's a song about complicity in a destructive relationship, and Withers delivers it with the calm of someone who already knows and stays anyway.

Esther Phillips took it the same year. What Esther did with that song, according to Paul, is something you can only do if you've lived what the lyrics describe. The Withers version is a man understanding his situation. The Phillips version is a woman who understood it a long time ago — and chose to stay anyway. Same year. Same song. Almost two different songs.

Pee Wee Ellis provided the arrangement. Esther Phillips provided the experience. And the result is that forty-some years later, in a room in Chicago, Paul still can't explain it without pausing first.

There are two kinds of invisibility in 1970s music. The first: the artist who never had distribution. The second: the artist who had distribution, even success — but in the wrong place, the wrong language, in front of the wrong audience.

Emílio Santiago was the second kind. In Brazil, he was known. To the rest of the world, he didn't exist.

"Bananeira" was written by João Donato and Gilberto Gil — two of the architects of MPB, Música Popular Brasileira — and Santiago recorded it in 1975 for CID Brasil. It comes from the Brazilian funk and soul tradition, the fusion that emerged when North American soul crossed the Atlantic and Brazilian popular music absorbed it without losing any of itself. The horn arrangements and rhythm section do exactly what groove has to do: convince you it was always there. Santiago's voice sounds relaxed and urgent at the same time. Like groove is a natural state, not something you reach for.

Fifty years later, Michelle, Paul, and I were listening to it in a room in Chicago — and none of us had planned it.

That's what time does with good music: it distributes it.

Mónica raised a question before putting this track on: what happens to a musical tradition when the decade that created it ends? Does it die? Or does it find new bodies?

Orgone is the answer.

They're a Los Angeles collective that spent years learning the grammar of deep funk and Afrobeat the only way that actually works — by playing it. Not as nostalgia, not as an academic exercise. As living practice. "Who Knows Who" sounds like something that could have come out of the seventies not because it's recreating the seventies — but because Orgone understood what made that music what it was, and applied it. There's a difference between imitating a tradition and inheriting it.

Fanny Franklin sings over a rhythm section that flat-out refuses to rush. The pocket that matters to Paul — that space where musicians breathe together — is here, built by musicians who were born after the year the music they're playing was made.

What connects Orgone to Lion, to Esther, to Fela isn't chronology. It's posture. Groove isn't a historical period. It's a way of listening.

"Water No Get Enemy" comes from a Yoruba proverb. Water has no enemy — because everyone needs it.

Fela Anikulapo Kuti knew that when he named this track. He was 37, had already founded the Kalakuta Republic — an artistic and political commune in Lagos that the Nigerian government tried to destroy more than once — and had spent years building Afrobeat as a form of resistance. Not as a genre. As a position.

Fela's Afrobeat is not what the world calls Afrobeats today — that distinction matters. Fela built something very specific: complex rhythms rooted in Yoruba tradition with North American funk laid over them, lyrics in Nigerian Pidgin English that ordinary people could understand, and live performances that could run forty minutes per song. The album version used here is edited — and even so, when the groove settles in, it's hard to want it to stop.

Paul heard it and asked what Fela meant by the title. The honest answer is: several things at once. Water as the basic sustenance no one should be able to deny. And music as water — inevitable, universal, impossible to contain.

Fela never asked permission to be political. He was from the first note.

Before I put this track on, I asked Michelle and Paul a question that has no right answer.

The original is a Togolese funk track from 1973 by a group called Cos-Ber-Zam, released on Editions Makossa. The vocals are in Ewe — a language spoken across southern Togo and Ghana. Caribou — the Canadian producer Dan Snaith — heard it in 2012 and remade it as a dancefloor record, releasing it on his debut album Jiaolong through Merge Records. Is that transmission? Or transformation? What do we owe the source?

"Ne Noya (Daphni Mix)" doesn't answer the question — it embodies it. Snaith keeps the central percussive loop that defines the Togolese original. On top of it he builds something that in 2012 sounded like avant-garde dancefloor. The Ewe vocals from Cos-Ber-Zam are still there, recognizable to anyone who knows them, invisible to anyone who doesn't.

I didn't leave the question resolved. Neither did the groove.

Paul came to this track through a film I hadn't seen yet. Sinners, directed by Ryan Coogler, 2025. A story set in the 1930s Mississippi Delta. And this song — "Last Time (I Seen the Sun)," performed by Alice Smith and Miles Caton — sounds like the blues always sounded this way.

That's exactly what makes it hard to set aside. It doesn't sound like a recreated past. It sounds like a present that knows its history. Alice Smith has one of those voices that isn't built — it's formed, over decades of being close to music that matters. Miles Caton, who was eighteen when the soundtrack was recorded, brings something different: urgency without nostalgia, because for him this isn't history — it's language.

Michelle called it "churchy in the best way." Paul didn't add words after the song ended. We sat with it. That's also an answer.

The thread running through everything we heard today — Holland, America, Brazil, Nigeria, Los Angeles, Mississippi — ends here, in Brazil, in 2019.

Afterclapp are producers from Florianópolis who took Jorge Amado's classic novel Capitães da Areia — the story of street children living on the beaches of Salvador, Bahia — as their starting point. The result is cinematic: trip-hop, jazz, and Brazilian rhythms woven together with samples and live instrumentation, saturated with the warm, nostalgic light of the Northeast. "Capitão de Areia" sounds like all the songs we played today had a conversation somewhere, and this is what came out the other side.

Not citation. Not homage. Continuation.

The map nobody drew had this point marked from the beginning.