Time & Perspective Quote by Roy Ayers

Roy Ayers is doing something deceptively radical here: he’s rescuing “soul” from being treated like a vibe and returning it to history. In pop talk, soul is often a flattering adjective you can slap on a singer or a sample, a kind of emotional seasoning. Ayers insists it’s older than any record-store category, and he pins it to a specific lineage - African in origin, then force-shaped by the long catastrophe of American slavery and the afterlives of racial control.

The intent is partly corrective, partly protective. He’s drawing a boundary around cultural credit: soul isn’t a mysterious innate gift, and it’s not a free-floating “authenticity” anyone can borrow by copying vocal runs or drum patterns. It’s a tradition forged under pressure, where music becomes both survival technology and coded communication. That “250 years” isn’t trivia; it’s a reminder that the sound people celebrate was produced inside a system designed to strip people of personhood. The subtext is blunt: if you love soul, you’re already in conversation with Black history, whether you acknowledge it or not.

Ayers also sneaks in a critique of how America consumes Black art. By naming “other forms of racial oppression,” he stretches the timeline past emancipation into segregation, policing, and the market’s endless ability to monetize Black feeling while resisting Black freedom. Soul, in his framing, isn’t just emotion. It’s memory - and the cost of that memory is built into the music’s power.