Politics & Power Quote by Boz Scaggs

There is a quiet flex in Boz Scaggs naming Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, and Erykah Badu as the engines of “new American music”: an older, canon-certified craftsman publicly relocating innovation away from the usual rock lineage and toward Black women who were reshaping R&B, hip-hop, and neo-soul from the inside out. It’s less a compliment than a map update. The “I think” softens the declaration, but the list lands like a corrective to an industry that historically treats Black women as interpreters, not architects.

“New conceptual things” is doing heavy lifting. Scaggs isn’t praising vocal chops alone; he’s pointing to authorship and design: Hill’s album-as-worldbuilding and moral argument, Blige turning autobiography into a shared language for pain and survival, Badu blending futurism, spirituality, and groove into a coherent aesthetic. In each case, the voice isn’t just an instrument; it’s a curatorial tool, a way of arranging narrative, texture, and cultural reference into something that feels freshly American.

The subtext also nods to a late-90s/early-2000s moment when genre borders were getting porous, and “Americana” was quietly being rewritten by artists who didn’t need permission from rock radio to define the center. Scaggs frames it as “women” first, then names them, signaling both solidarity and a recognition that their gender shaped the stakes: these weren’t just new sounds, they were new modes of public selfhood. By calling it “American music,” he’s arguing for their permanence in the national story, not a temporary trend line.