That so many bands and musicians feel the need to regress their music to bygone eras in order to express themselves is something that plagues my mind. The modern-day movement of making one’s music sound like it’s already began accumulating rust and mold seems to indicate, to me at least, a low-level apathy, or perhaps even antipathy, towards recorded sound.
It’s all very teenage, isn’t it? I remember quite clearly the days when I dismissed all music made after I was born in favor of old classics, and I think the revival trend comes out of a similar lack of interest in what’s being done today. It’s a far stronger statement to deliberately make one’s music sound poorly recorded than it is to simply record a blues or soul album. Tarnished music sends out a message of disrespect to modern-day technology and style, especially when coupled with music that deliberately harkens back to pop music roots music from the 60s and 70s.
As I’ve said repeatedly on this blog, I have no issue with retro music. I don’t even a problem with music that isn’t cutting edge or trying to anything new save contribute to the ever-growing canon of great music. What I do have a problem with is using modern recording studios to mimic the sound of poor musicians playing to an oversized tape recorder, all in some grand statement against the soullessness of modern music.
Soullessness is a complaint that gets leveled, generally, at bubblegum pop, and it’s one that I myself usually put as a prefix to contemporary R&B. I’ll spare you a rehash of my rants against using ProTools and AutoTune to coax a song into the realm of ideal pop, but I do think it’s necessary to at least bring up, as it’s the most flattering backdrop possible for Naturally.
That title, to me, says it all about the album itself. The Dap-Kings are a band so tight and talented that the music appears effortless, much like the best James Brown songs. Like all R&B, the emphasis is on the rhythm, but like all great soul music that rhythm is also used as a treadmill to work out the vocals of Ms. Sharon Jones. And again like great soul music, the vocals are simply outstanding, and are likely the main reason why you may have heard of this album, since Ms. Jones is currently the benchmark against which all new R&B singers are judged.
That judgment is hardly ever fair. While there have been plenty of great soul singers in the past 20 to 30 years of pop music, hardly any of them have had real R&B music behind them. Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey both made music closer to one of R&B’s roots, gospel music, than to soul, and Amy Winehouse, though very talented and gifted with the Dap-Kings themselves on Back To Black, simply didn’t have the time or willpower to prove herself in the way Sharon Jones has.
As for contemporary R&B, I can only bring it up in order to mock it. The genre’s increasing tendency towards almost hip-hop-esque overproduction has rendered it impotent and populist. Talented though they may be, artists like Beyoncé, Rihanna, and the late Aaliyah were hamstrung by synthesizers and overzealous producers, a trend that continues to this day. They have more in common with Madonna than with artists like Aretha Franklin, regardless of what genre they get filed under.
R&B is typified by two main things: powerful, idiosyncratic singers and a strong rhythm section. The former can be traced back to vocal jazz singers such as Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, while the latter can be linked to blues music. Everything else, such as the lush strings of the Motown sound or the disco styling of Off The Wall, are stylistic additions that, as James Brown proved, can be stripped away entirely if the core elements are strong enough.
Like in virtually all music, the singer and melody provide the emotion, the soul, if you will, of R&B music. Unlike most other genres, however, the emotions in R&B are almost theatrical in their scale, drawing on the gospel tradition of miasmatic, wide-ranging vocals to make the strongest statement possible. Roy Orbison was possibly the king of that kind of cataclysmic emotion.
Keeping that in mind, it seems ridiculous to label anything with AutoTune on it as any kind of R&B. That isn’t necessarily a slam, mind you; this is purely an issue of definition, not quality. I’m not enough of a snob to start talking about certain genres being inherently superior to any others, and if I ever do feel free to flag this blog as hosting pornography so I get taken down. I’ll deserve it.
Getting back to Naturally, the one and only gripe I have with it is the production. Much like what was likely the last Dead Weather album, Sea Of Cowards, Naturally was made purely with acoustic recording equipment which, when coupled with the horrors of the Loudness War, make the album sound like a vinyl that got used as a Frisbee. It’s a damn tragedy is what it is; this album should not be as loud as The Woods.
Putting my qualms about relative volume aside, Naturally stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the true greats of soul music albums (so long as we ignore the uncomfortably-close-to-novelty track, “Stranded In Your Love”, at least). Though primarily soul, some of the tracks err closer to funk music, giving it a quality of R&B fusion. You can argue that Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson did that kind of thing first, but that doesn’t diminish the talent on display here: it’s virtually inarguable that the Dap-Kings are one of the last great session bands left in popular music.
Similar to the most famous songs of artists like Aretha Franklin, Naturally is also extraordinarily unique in the field of popular music in how strong the female viewpoint is. Like PJ Harvey, Sharon Jones heavily plays up her own sexuality: the first two tracks (“How Do I Let A Good Man Down?” and “Natural Born Lover”) are about great sex with men the woman in question isn’t dating; “My Man Is a Mean Man” recalls “Misguided Angel”, and with it a number of other country songs by strongly female artists; and “You’re Gonna Get It” is a pure and simple seduction song, which Ms. Jones uses liberally to sexually intimidate teenagers in her live shows (which is uniformly entertaining).
The two album highlights (in my opinion; this one is happily quite arguable) are, respectively, about an irritatingly prolonged breakup (shades of “I Will Survive”) and a stick-in-the-mud boyfriend. Beyoncé seems practically conservative in comparison, though I may admit that may be an issue of my own limited exposure to her music.
The cover of “This Land Is Your Land” (in its full, red-shaded version) included also points toward the most remarkable thing about Ms. Jones and her musical output, that not a word of it is her own. Much like most Motown artists (and most pre-60s artists in general), Ms. Jones acts purely as an interpreter of other writers’ music, much of it, in this case, being the product of Bosco Mann, the bass player and bandleader for the Dap-Kings.
Though Ms. Jones is aided by the fact that no one else is really recording these songs, it is still remarkable that she’s able to sing them as confidently and uniquely as she tends to do. For an example of how difficult it can be to sing another’s songs effectively, listen to anything Buble has ever recorded and note how lifeless, stale, and insignificant it seems. To record someone’s songs requires a singer to put a great deal of their own effort and soul into their singing; since the words are not theirs, they must find other ways to personalize their approach. In a genre with as strong and varied a history as soul, I’m surprised by anyone who is able to find a new voice. It’s rather like finding a new way to write a haiku, I imagine; it requires extraordinary creativity and a strong personality, not to mention a willingness to break certain rules.
The idea that we can’t simply take inspiration from our past but must also wear its hat and sleep with its wife is an absurd, claustrophobic notion, and it is the only thing that limits this album. A good soul album doesn’t need to sound like it came from the vaults of Stax records circa 1968, and it doesn’t need the pretense of retro-chic to discard the trappings of and its contemporary counterpart. All blues-derived music needs is honesty and forthrightness, and static is neither.
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