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Jawbone Press - Jessica Lipsky

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101 pages

English

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Soul is the most powerful expression of American music—a distinct combination of roots, migration, race, culture, and politics packaged together for your dancing pleasure. But if you thought the sounds of Motown or Stax Records died along with 8tracks and macramé, you’d be wrong.

For two decades, Daptone Records has churned out hard funk and such beautiful soul that these records sparked a musical revolution. Run by a collective of soul-obsessed producers and musicians, the Brooklyn-based independent label launched the careers of artists such as Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, Charles Bradley, and Bruno Mars. Daptone’s records—and those of the larger soul revival scene—pay homage but never lip service to the original artists, proving that soul is still culturally relevant, and just as exciting as ever.

It Ain’t Retro charts this revival’s players, sounds, and tectonic shifts over the past twenty years, taking you from dingy clubs where soul crazed DJs packed the dancefloor, to just uptown where some of the genre’s heaviest musicians jumpstarted the renaissance in a basement studio, and all the way to the White House. This definitive tale of Daptone Records’ soulful revolution chronicles the label’s history, players, and sounds while dissecting the scene’s cultural underpinnings, which continue to reverberate in pop music. The book also contains rare and unseen images of Daptone artists past and present, including Sharon Jones, Charles Bradley, Lee Fields, Antibalas, The Sugarman 3, The Budos Band, and more.

Sujets

Musique

Culture musicale

Music

Soul

Genres

Styles

R 'n B

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Publié par	Jawbone Press
Date de parution	20 août 2021
Nombre de lectures	2
EAN13	9781911036746
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	5 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

IT AIN’T RETRO DAPTONE RECORDS & THE 21ST-CENTURY SOUL REVOLUTION JESSICA LIPSKY
 
A Jawbone book
Published in the UK and the USA
by Jawbone Press
Office G1
141–157 Acre Lane
London SW2 5UA
England
www.jawbonepress.com
 
Volume copyright © 2021 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Jessica Lipsky. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.
 
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE: IT’S NOT WHAT YOU KNOW...
INTRODUCTION: SOUL EXPLOSION
1 DAMN IT’S HOT: NYC AT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE
2 LET A MAN DO WHAT HE WANNA DO: DESCO RECORDS DIGS
3 GOT TO BE THE WAY IT IS: SUBCULTURE, COLLECTORS, AND DJS KEEP THE LOVE OF SOUL BURNING
4 YOU BETTER THINK TWICE: DEATH OF DESCO, BIRTH OF DAPTONE
5 DAP-DIPPING: CREATING THE HOUSE OF SOUL
6 FISH IN MY DISH: SHARON JONES GETS HER SHINE
7 WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR ME LATELY? AMY WINEHOUSE RECORD HERALDS A NEW ERA FOR DAPTONE
8 MAKE THE ROAD BY WALKING: REVIVAL SOUL STRETCHES OUT
9 HEART OF GOLD: CHARLES BRADLEY REBORN AS THE SCREAMING EAGLE OF SOUL
10 OUT WITH THE NEW, IN WITH THE TRUE: A CULTURE OF SOUL
11 YOU PUT THE FLAME ON IT: DAPTONE AND THE SOUL REVOLUTION GROW
12 SOUL TIME! REVIVAL SOUNDS GAIN STEAM
13 I’M STILL HERE: DAPTONE’S STARS FIGHT FOR THEIR LIVES
14 KEEP PUTTING SOUL UP: SOUL’S BIGGEST LABEL LOSES ITS STARS
15 WHATEVER IT TAKES: DAPTONE IN THE MODERN ERA
16 CAN I CALL YOU ROSE? DAPTONE HEADS WEST FOR THE SWEETEST SOUL
17 LONGER AND STRONGER: DAPTONE AT 20
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES AND SOURCES
AUTHOR’S NOTE 
IT’S NOT WHAT YOU KNOW...
In 1998, I was a tomboyish, cow-licked kid whose taste for bell bottoms and paisley had yet to come back into fashion. Peering over the cliff of puberty in the era of boy bands and Britney Spears, I was quickly realizing that I had an exceedingly unpopular taste in music—which I played loudly, constantly, on a boom box my folks had purchased for my ninth birthday.
Popularity was a concern, sure, but I could not listen to “… Baby One More Time” even one more time . When Spears’s debut was unleashed to worldwide obsession, I wasn’t caught up in the hype. The manufactured perfection of The Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, and the like are embedded in my brain, and yet I don’t remember actively listening to any of these groups. Nothing about their sound felt engaging, and even though I could handle being marketed to, my burgeoning angst wasn’t down with the pop I was being digitally dosed with every afternoon on MTV’s TRL .
But I had to pretend like I dug it. After all, enduring pop music is a rite of passage among every alt kid, and a resumé-worthy skill. I was somewhat successful because I had a secret love, and we got down every morning before I went to school.
KFRC 99.7 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area—an oldies station that played sounds from approximately 1956–74—saved me. It was a sonic elixir of classic rock, Summer of Love hits, and, most importantly, soul. The station opened my ears to the sounds of Motown, Stax, and Chess; made me dance; and drove me to buy books, CDs, and movies that evoked sounds of the era. I called the station almost every morning from age nine to make requests and answer trivia. I wished so badly that I lived in a time where this music permeated like Britney Spears did, where the sounds of The Shirelles, Otis Redding, The Temptations, Martha Reeves & The Vandellas, and Booker T. were known by my peers. Where vocal harmonies weren’t autotuned, and actual musicians were highlighted.
But those dreams made me sound like an old man, and they would make me deeply unpopular among my peers. So I told no one and shared no music.
By October 2007, I no longer thought about Britney or boy bands, and I felt confident that my distaste for such tunes made me cool. Smoking a joint as I perused the stacks at KUSF 90.3 FM, a San Francisco community radio station where I had a late-night show, I landed on a CD with an orange cover featuring a proud but serious Black woman. The album looked vintage, but I didn’t recognize the Daptone Records label, so I pressed play on track 2, “Nobody’s Baby.”
A simple walking bass line was interrupted by a woman’s voice crying “Whooooweeee,” a powerful alto commanding you to pay attention to her tale of independence, told over a late-60s-style horn arrangement. Holy shit , I thought, after skimming through the liner notes. This is new . The sound of Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings catalyzed something deep in me, and one of the band’s songs would make an appearance on nearly every show of mine for the next two years.
It also, in an instant, gave me a swell of hope for more modern sounds in soul and funk. Although I was a few years behind the curve (Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings already had three records out), I felt as if that moment was the start of everything—the start of the soul revolution.
It turns out that my lifelong musical quest was rooted in something much more common: I was too young and in the wrong city. Had I been ten years older and living outside of the Bay Area suburbs, I could have heard DJs bridge the gap between funk and hip-hop at LA’s legendary Root Down party, or at Frankie Jackson’s long-running Soul Kitchen in New York. These deep diggers—along with dozens of other DJs and collectors across the country and in Europe—had fueled a soul fire, keeping alive a culture that valued older, raw-edged music.
What I couldn’t have known, or perhaps even dreamt of as the pop of the late 90s turned into the indie rock of the mid-2000s, is that musicians were also itching for something soulful. In New York, Gabe Roth and Neal Sugarman built off their shared interest in rare funk records and recorded a slew of LPs and seven-inch singles with their friends for the hell of it. Closer to home, musicians at the cross-section of LA’s turntablism, funk, and breakbeat DJ scenes played together at parties and formed a cohort of funk diggers called The Breakestra. These burgeoning modern funk and soul sounds first percolated locally, then cross-pollinated in hipper places. The rest of us were left to wonder how the hell Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi” was nominated for five Grammys.
The soul revolution has given rise to dozens of artists, each with their own unique influences and style. Indie groups from New York, California, Indiana, and Washington have grown from the family tree of Daptone and Sharon Jones, sprouting new soulful communities. In the mainstream, artists such as Amy Winehouse, Bruno Mars, Aloe Blacc, Alabama Shakes, and Leon Bridges created funky pop that similarly iterated on the sounds of the 60s, 70s, and early 80s. Heavy bass, breakbeats, and raw vocals made appearances in hip-hop, reggaeton, and rock, developing into today’s most popular sound that you didn’t know you were listening to: the sound of Daptone Records.
INTRODUCTION 
SOUL EXPLOSION
Forty or fifty musicians are swarming behind the scenes at Harlem’s famous Apollo Theater—they’re jamming in small groups backstage, performing personal pre-show rituals, shit-talking around an overfull beverage table and clustered in groups, watching from the wings as their friends work three nights worth of sold-out crowds into a palpable frenzy. The Apollo residency was a reunion of sorts, an occasion for a family of musicians who had played together in various funk, soul, jazz, and Afrobeat projects for nearly twenty years to celebrate what made them unique: a dedication to showmanship, a highly attuned ear for and devotion to music made in the 60s and 70s, and an appreciation for the collective spiritual bond which informed the intensity of their shows.
Each night of the Daptone Super Soul Revue, held during the mild early winter of December 2014, was a chance to revel in the unifying, groovy power of soul music in all its forms. Every musician who had worked with Brooklyn-based Daptone Records took the stage in a series of continuous sets, adding and removing players (most of whom performed with multiple groups) and equipment between bands without intermissions or curtain calls. Mississippi-based a cappella group The Como Mamas and locals Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens brought devotional music from the church to center stage; instrumental groups The Sugarman 3 and session musicians Menahan Street Band performed meditative cinematic soul and hybrids of jazz and boogaloo; Antibalas and The Budos Band delivered their respective versions of Afro-funk euphony; during an interlude, Dapettes Saun & Starr reminisced about performing at the Apollo’s amateur night as young women in the 1980s. Nearly the whole of the 1,500-capacity theater stood from their chairs, compelled to dance and pay witness to the heartfelt, heavy, and energetic performances from Daptone’s headlining acts: Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, and Charles Bradley, also known as the “Screaming Eagle of Soul.” As an independent, musician-owned label that made most of its money on the road, orchestrating a hometown soul revue was a dream come true.
A soul revue like Daptone’s hadn’t been attempted in decades, its success a tribute to the label’s pioneering and often defiant ethos. Daptone took a page out of the book of James Brown, whose residencies at the historic venue in the 60s and 70s were so legendary that they were commemorated in multiple records. Sharon Jones had first performed at the Apollo in 2007, her mark (“Love ya! Sharon,” written in silver ink) gracing the venue’s famous wall of signatures alongside those of Paul McCartney, Al Green, Prince, Tony Bennett, rapper 50 Cent, and President Barack Obama—though the Super Soul Revue was a markedly different occasion. Beaming from ear to ear, Jones readied herself in a series of sparkly dresses and strappy two-i