I think the reason Grok thinks I'm a neo soul musician boils down to its way of averaging out the different elements (what it calls my "musical DNA") in my musical background to one happy medium, a lukewarm "truth" that's actually far from. The real truth is that I'm well versed in more than one genre, from rock to jazz, R&B and dance, but rather than gathering those things under the pop umbrella as the labels that handle my music do, Grok is saying specifically that the jazz chords I occassionally use automatically make it experimental and essentially unmarketable, hence neo soul, not even "R&B with DNA that can cross over."
Grok bases that opinion on one marketer it keeps citing, which leads me to believe it's biased towards that one person's analysis, that the only kind of non mainstream music that crosses over into pop is one that has lost complex jazz and blues influences for marketing purposes.
How Grok squares that with calling Stevie Wonder a pop musician is a mystery to me, since most of his songs are much more complex than even those by most R&B artists. Also, I don't understand the difference between R&B and Soul, since to me, they're both genres that rely on jazz chords for their sound to be differentiated from pop. I can't think of anything that remains after pulling all jazz and blues out of R&B and Soul except plain ol' pentatonic scales running up and down, and I guess Grok can argue the point that the pentatonic scale is precisely why it can't ever fully become pop enough to lose its R&B/Soul label. The pentatonic scale might as well be the DNA of music that isn't pop, and I'm supposed to be its posterchild. Honestly, I think R&B and Country have a similar leaning towards pentatonic and using the major 6th, but for some reason, nobody can bridge that gap, not even Beyonce.
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