Titling an album Black Soul is a risky move. Soul can mean anything, depending on who you’re talking to. And Black Soul – the name that adorned countless compilations the world over in the early 1970s – is generally used to refer to that specific breed of soul music that came to the fore when James Brown rocked a pompadour, and Aretha Franklin's weight was southward of 160 pounds. But leave it to Madlib to use the term Black Soul to refer to a dynamic point in the Black American musical experience – the mid to late 70s, when soul was giving way to disco, when the groove was on its way to the boogie, when funk was on it’s way to fonk. This is a mix that, like the previous entries in the Madlib Medicine Show, skirts convention while testing its listener's music acumen.