| Title : | KEEPING UP WITH THE JONES: SHARON JONES AND THE DAP-KINGS RETURN |
| Article Section : | user |
| Article Summary : Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings release new record, "Give the People What They Want". The release date was scheduled for the passed summer, but was pushed later due to the diagnoses of Sharon Jones's Stage II pancreatic cancer. After undergoing treatment, | |
| Article Text : The new Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings record, “Give the People What They Want” (Daptone), was scheduled for release last August, but it was delayed when Jones was diagnosed with Stage II pancreatic cancer. She underwent treatment and is doing better, and the album now has a non-manufactured backstory that grants it significant goodwill. Which isn’t to say that the record doesn’t earn its goodwill. “Give the People What They Want,” like the four Jones-Dap-Kings records before it, is tough and tenacious, drawing unashamedly on the soul and funk of another era. “Retreat!,” the opener, is perhaps moodier and more atmospheric than the band’s usual output, and it is certainly more atmospheric than their last record, “I Learned the Hard Way,” which opted for straight-ahead pleasures. Because Jones has so recently and so publicly grappled with a serious health crisis—in the video for the bouncy Motown-inflected single “Stranger to My Happiness,” she is bald—it’s understandable if some of the lyrics on the new album are interpreted as autobiographical. But “Retreat!” isn’t a remission song, even if it seems like one. In fact, the entire album was completed before Jones’s diagnosis. The songs on “Give the People What They Want” are primarily about matters of the heart: unfaithful lovers, star-crossed lovers, creeping lovers. Maybe the next album will address Jones’s health head on. She doesn’t shy away from it in interviews, and her descriptions are gripping. As she told Spin in an interview that ran last week, she first discovered she was sick when she experienced a stabbing pain in her back during a performance. “Then,” she said, “my eyes turned jaundiced, so yellow, and my urine was so dark, like the color of brandy. I started itching, and my stool turned the color of chalk.” Jones and the Dap-Kings occupy a strange place in the contemporary-music universe. In 1996, Jones, a former corrections officer at Rikers Island who worked occasionally as a backup singer, appeared on a session for the journeyman soul vocalist Lee Fields. Fields was recording for Desco Records, which was co-founded by Gabriel Roth; Roth went on to found Daptone Records and play bass for the label’s house band under the name Bosco Mann. Jones became the lead singer of Daptone’s flagship act, starting with the début “Dap Dippin’ with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings,” in 2002, and continuing on through a series of albums and singles. Each release was highly acclaimed, and taken as a set they demonstrate an admirable commitment to American soul, with influences that range from James Brown (well, Lyn Collins) to Mavis Staples to Carla Thomas to Gladys Knight to Aretha Franklin. The music has toughness and tenderness, emotional directness and emotional intelligence, and plenty of interplay between band and vocalist. In a scene defined increasingly by electronic instrumentation and cut-and-paste composition, the Dap-Kings stood out. In 2006, the band (minus Jones) scored its biggest success with an album that wasn’t theirs when they backed Amy Winehouse on “Back to Black.” Jones and the Dap-Kings made statement music, and the statement was about soul survival. But what did it mean to be a soul-revival act in 2002 or 2006, let alone in 2014? Were Jones and the Dap-Kings practicing nostalgia? Were they reanimating a style that, in its original form, paralleled the Civil Rights era and, through that reanimation, attempting to transfer associations from that time to this one? Or were they bringing the soul back to life as they brought it back into the light? To put it another way: Whether or not the music contained new ideas, could it sound like it did? It’s instructive to compare the Dap-Kings with a more synthetic, if equally successful, soul-revival record: R. Kelly’s “Love Letter,” which was released in 2010. On that album, Kelly—arguably the most talented singer and songwriter of his generation—set aside his trademark raunchy (and often surreal) R. & B. for earnest, romantic songs that at times channel Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Donny Hathaway. “Love Letter” is often exquisite, but for the most part it worked for Kelly as counterprogramming, proof that he could do without his R-rated bag of tricks. Jones and the Dap-Kings have a different profile and, as a result, a different problem. For more than a decade, they have been making records that are only subtly different from one another. It’s left to fans, then, to pick out the songs that sound as if they could not have happened previously. Those moments leap like sparks out of an already glowing background. On “Give the People What They Want,” “Making Up and Breaking Up (and Making Up Again)” is one of those highlights. It’s a girl-group move, powered by close-harmony backing that returns it to the site of Laura Nyro’s “Gonna Take a Miracle” without rooting it there. It has Nyro’s energy and artistry without sounding like a pastiche. “Long Time, Wrong Time” moves beyond its Memphis-soul origins on the strength of a juddering, slightly off-rhythm vocal. The record never gives the people less than what they want, but it’s when it achieves this higher state that it gives the people what they need. | |
| Original Article Url : | http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2014/01/sharon-jones-and-the-dap-kings-return.html |
| Article Source : | The New Yorker |
| Author : | Ben Greenman |
| Submission Date : | 1389994144 |
| Article Category : | show_preview |
| Owner : | 187726 |
| Image Id : | 3986274 |
| Image Width : | 200 |
| Image Height : | 200 |
| Stored Original Image : | 3986273 |
| Listed By : | 187726 |
| Domain : | livevictoria.com |
| Allow Comments : | 1 |
| Comment Count : | -1 |
| Permission : | excerpt |
| Link Count : | 5 |
| Cat Ids : | 2 |
| Sort Order : | 99.00 |
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