YOU LOVE IT: sharon jones & the dap kings - "naturally"

-- Mr. Harvey Weinstein (h...), March 18th, 2005.

I'll be in the bathroom, washing the egg off my face.

I wrote something on Sharon Jones recently (a piece that owes DW's a hefty debt): http://www.citypages.com/databank/26/1263/article12972.asp

Here is Douglas Wolk's review of the album:

http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0513,wolk,62487,22.html

Didn't really like the latest Solomon Burke--I'm a fan of his Atlantic stuff and even of his soundtrack for "Cool Breeze" on which he does a version of the William Tell Overture...but he doesn't sing well, that Band tune he does is not such a great song ("stampeding cattle, they rattle the walls" sounds like a line from a bad parody Pavement tune), and while I'm a fan of Ray Parker Jr., why have Ray Parker play guitar, as good as he is, when you have Reggie Young? So I'm a purist. I think Howard Tate's last album was better than Burke's or even Al Green's last two, actually, as an updating of that sound.

Top 25 Southern Soul Chart
http://www.soulandbluesreport.com/Top25Chart.html

The Nation's Official Southern Soul Chart

August 12, 2005

1
1
Baby I've Changed
Floyd Taylor
Malaco

3
2
If You Wanna Get It
Big Cynthia / Mr David
Tony Mercedes

2
3
Ten Toes Up J Diamond Washington
2 Brothers

7
4
Stroke It Easy Tazz Mardi Gras

4
5
Cheating & Lying T. K. Soul Soulful

5
6
Can't Nobody Do me Lenny Wms
Universal

6
7
Southern Soul Elec. Slide Team Airplay Allstars
Team Airplay

8
8
Better When You Steal It
Mr. David
Tony Mercedes

10
9
Somebody's Gonna Lose J Floyd / Wm Bell Wilbe

12
10
Stage In The Sky O. B. Buchana Ecko

13
11
Ease On Down Lee Shot Wms
Ecko

9
12
I'll Be Good To You Donnie Ray Ecko

11
13
Grown Folks Muzic Problem Solvas
Over 35 Sounds

17
14
The Blacker The Berry Chairmen OTB Surfside

18
15
Dance Like You're Naked Lee Fields BDA

14
16
Why Me Reggie P Allison

16
17
Scared Of Getting Caught Luther Lackey Good Time
19
18
I Came To Party
Sergio Davis Lyric

20
19
If Ever You Get Lonely
Willie Clayton Endzone

21
20
Sit Down On It Willis Pugh Hep Me
15
21
I Can't Stop Drinking O. B. Buchana Ecko
22
22
Cheatin John Marvin Sease
Malaco

23
23
I'm Missing You Babe
LeBrado Ifgam
-
24
Let Me Put The Head In It Theodis Ealey Ifgam
24
25
Its You
Troy Johnson SA

The Top 25 is calculated on a percentage formula based on stats from our reporting panel Of Radio Stations, Clubs/Record Pools & Retail Stores /Distributors

New album 100 Days and 100 Nights due out in October. The new stuff up on their myspace is spectacular, particularly "Tell Me". Really excited for this.

http://www.myspace.com/sharonjonesandthedapkings

I hope this means they tour again. Best live show I've ever seen.

She is blowing up. Every hipster maggot I know is throwing her name around. But damn if she's not the real deal?

my roommate gave her weed!

Album's in my top five for the year, and if anything I like the Binky Griptite bonus disc even more. Alas, I have neither danced with her nor given her weed.

The Beacon show last night was the best thing I've seen thus far this year. What a great time!

new orleans show was like the white people can't dance revue. they sounded great but ffs stop hauling people on stage to make asses of themselves. nb i'm sure you were great forks.

no, i'm pretty sure I was lame. Fun tho'!

Not bad but way overhyped. This is soul for people who have never gone to see uh, old-school or current southern soul, with songs that aren't written by folks in blues brothers shades trying to imitate the past. Denise Lasalle and Miss Jody and other Southern soul/chitlin circuit artists have so much more vibrancy and better hooks. It's also annoying that she's like the token performer on that Dark Was the Night compilation that NPR blogger Carrie 'I only listen to bearded dudes since my band broke up plus Sharon Jones' Brownstein raved about.

I know this is a douchey question, but have you seen her live? The records aren't much cop, but onstage she's a whole nother story.

Just saw her live for the 1st time the other night. Yea, she's energetic but there's something fake about the whole thing to me, plus as I think Douglas Wolk stated on some thread somewhere, the material just is not as catchy as it should be. Sorry to sound all uh, curmudgeonly, but as someone who's seen a fair amount of old-school soul live that's just how I feel.

there's something fake about the whole thing to me, plus as I think Douglas Wolk stated on some thread somewhere, the material just is not as catchy as it should be

Second both of these points. And I also think her singing is maybe C-level, from the perspective of the kind of music she's imitating. (But no, I have not seen her live myself. Maybe I should someday.)

Also possible that, with better material, I'd like her more; hard to tell.

Thought her single a couple years ago "How Long Do I Have To Wait For You?" was not bad. But "What If We Stopped Paying Taxes?" (what, a tea party anthem already?) and her version of "This Land Is Your Land" just seemed ridiculous to me. As lady-soul-tokens-curated-by-indie-nerd-rock-labels go, I actually think the new Betty Padgett album (on Nomo-associated Uni/Luv N' Haight) beats any Sharon Jones album I've heard. But even one that one doesn't hold a candle than any number of random '60s or '70s soul-gal LPs you could pick up for a buck or two at your local thrift store (not to mention, judging from curmudgeon's recommendations and the songs I hear on Southern Soul shows on the radio, any number of current records by soul women still performing to 40/50something soul fans in the South -- which is to say, possibly bigger crowds than go see Ms. Jones).

But even one that one doesn't hold a candle than any number of random '60s or '70s soul-gal LPs you could pick up for a buck or two at your local thrift store

oh to have such a thrift store available.

Actually, I just noticed that I'd posted a similar rant, making some of the same points, upthread four years ago; oh well. Should say though that I'm maybe being a little unfair in calling Sharon a token for her record label, since she's long been associated with indie-nerd labels curating several such soul revivers. But I do get the idea she's a token for much of her audience (unless, say, Beth Ditto, counts. Or, I dunno, Lisa Kekaula of the Bell-Rays, if any indie rock fans still even care about her.)

I feel like Sharon Jones shows the danger of reverence—it's necessarily distancing, a sublimation of the individual to this Platonic soul ideal that ignores the idiosyncrasies of soul performance. It's being bounded so much by their love of the genre that they (her, Dap Kings, and their fans) are afraid to push at the edges of it. And it's conservative in a way that the great themes of soul music—teenage love, heartbreak, dancing, fucking, civil unrest—never were. She sacrifices being in the moment for being of the genre, a trade-off that I don't think is worthy.

Oooh.

Does Sharon Jones need to care that her audience is full of white hipsters?

I've been noting on the chitlin circuit soul thread for years that Sharon Jones is marketed exclusively to indie-rockers. And of course, while it's not quite retro-soul in the same vein, the kind of soulful stuff that Chuck Eddy and I have been writing about on the chitlin circuit soul thread gets ignored completely in this article(because it is not so marketed).

Chitlin Circuit Double-entendre -filled Soul 2004 (and onward) Theodis Ealey's "Stand Up In It" is a song of the year

i dunno is this any different than, say, jazz guys in the late 50s playing to mainly white audiences? Also, dang, long article based on Brooklyn Vegan comments.

or jazz dudes going to france and scandanavia and etc to find audiences that would pay good money to see them.

i just hate articles like this, it's like any musician is lucky to find people that love what they do and are willing to pay to see them...

xp Different in that she's only really actively sought a career within the past ten years, I guess? Maybe someone like Betty LaVerne would make a better comparison with your jazzers.

sharon jones should not be concerned that there are white people in her audience, no.

I just want to say that I replayed her few-years-old "How Long Do I Have To Wait For You?" 45 a few days ago, and was surprised to find that I still like it enough to keep it. But right, she's dime-a-dozen compared to most of the current music by beloved singers her audience has never heard of that I hear on Southern Soul radio shows all the time; there's a good chance that music's fans -- who seem to, mainly, be black people in their 40s or older -- would find her mediocre. In the indie/adult-alternative realm, she still strikes me as a novelty act. More power to her, I guess; it's cool that she found an audience.

(Haven't read that piece linked to yet, fwiw.)

the beach music scene of SC (which also grew out of the 60s soul tradition) has been fueled by a largely white audience iirc

xp (And I've still yet to hear any other songs by her as good as that one. Though I admittedly haven't checked out everything she's done.)

I read one page of that article before becoming too disgusted to finish.

Sharon Jones OTM, basically.

Tangari agrees, but he thinks it's fair to ask if the Dap-Kings would be as popular if Jones were white.

"That's really hard to say, but I kind of don't think so," he says. "She'd just be coming from a different place, and it's also unlikely they'd have the same sound they do, which is part of what helps them."

questions like this are kinda bullshit IMO...like music "quality" is this scientific thing, you put a sharon jones MP3 in a petri dish and use and eye dropper to put some chemical on it and it turns blue if the music is "good"

i mean, sure, yeah race, class, clothes, personality, a whole shitload of things make a difference in how you see a performer

would bowie have been the same if he dropped the exact same ziggy stardust album but looked like rupert holmes?

http://www.comicgenius.com/DiscoFever/disco_profiles/rupert_holmes/images/rupert_holmes.jpg

Oh yeah -- Also heard her version of "This Land Is Your Land" again this week, by accident -- it was played over the opening credits of Up In The Air, which I finally rented through Netflix. Her song struck me as worse than the movie, which I didn't like all that much.

There are African-Americans still interested in soul though--but for the most part they're not interested in Sharon Jones because she's not marketed to them (and / or they may not like her throwback approach). When I saw Southern soul circuit regulars Lattimore and Marvin Sease and others on a big bill a year and a half ago at the Showplace Arena in Maryland outside Washington DC the nearly 3,000 people crowd consisted almost entirely of age 40 and up African-Americans. White guy me counted 5 other white people there. When I saw Sharon Jones at the 930 Club, the 1,000 person crowd was nearly all 20-something white folks. The Southern soul music labels are not reaching out to those Sharon Jones fans and those fans (including the likes of David Byrne, and Carrie Brownstein) are not seeking out Ecko and Malaco and other Southern soul label releases.

failure of marketing imo

sharon jones has a story angle -- the rikers island cop turned soul diva thing -- that npr-types love. that definitely accounts for some of their higher profile, right? but i'm curious -- you put sharon in front of a crowd like you describe in Maryland ... and they wouldn't go over well? they sort of strike me as a band that would go over well *anywhere*.

these kind of discussions always strike me as a way of avoiding having to handle the more difficult task of evaluating an artists work honestly & critically ...

It would be very sad if this kind of thing fuels a backlash against her. But it's not unlikely.

I hope this means they tour again. Best live show I've ever seen.

― The Reverend, Thursday, July 26, 2007 7:13 PM Bookmark

So should I splurge for NYE tickets since we have nothing else to do other than a couple of parties where we won't know anyone?

Tribute on WKCR right now

http://www.stereogum.com/1912250/sharon-jones-had-a-stroke-while-watching-election-results/news/

RIP

just because.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmLl21gZjfM

Friend who did a lot of her photography is selling these amazing prints rn for $65 each in a giving tuesday flash sale

https://www.alltogetherprints.com/category/sharon-giving-tuesday?fbclid=IwAR1p8Ep6_d3MTGjpe39Qe5ZczKKH3QxYSlLF4Grmnvbv5vkDp9GPbeVazl0

https://assets.bigcartel.com/product_images/287488632/0112.08.18_daptone1341.jpg?auto=format&fit=max&w=1200

https://assets.bigcartel.com/product_images/287489058/0314.12.04_daptoneC32.jpg?auto=format&fit=max&w=1200

didn't know you knew Jacob!