As Sasha Frere-Jones points out nicely in the latest New Yorker, there’s something of a soul revival going on. Frere-Jones has a hard time taking it seriously. Like a lot of people, he really values music that breaks new ground, so any revisitation of older styles strikes him more as gratuitous fandom than legitimate musical expression. There is a certain validity to that argument: people remember the Bachs, the Beethovens, and The Beatles because they created new modes of musical expression. Their music holds the imagination precisely because it was so new and so revolutionary.
All that being said, the claim that backward-looking music is of lesser value rings false to me. We remember Beethoven because his music is still played in concert halls, and The Beatles still top the charts on Last.fm. Beethoven also idolized Bach, from a century earlier. Even the Beatles’ White Album featured songs like “Rocky Raccoon” and “Honey Pie“, which were as retro as “Revolution 9” was avant-garde.
There have been many revivals of different types of music, and many good bands have emerged from them over the years. The garage rock revival spawned bands like The White Stripes and The Hives, while the swing revival launched the careers of the Squirrel Nut Zippers and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. These bands all started looking backward, but have since developed their own unique sounds. In some ways, they are more revolutionary for drawing their sound from a different source than what is popular at the time. The songs of Motor City are some of the most memorable and most tuneful in the history of American popular music. A return to that style of sound could prove to be a shot in the arm for the ailing music industry. Frere-Jones admits in his article that he was perhaps too hasty in dismissing the work of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. For my part, I’ll be keeping my eyes, as well as my ears, on the soul revival.
Here are a few videos to put this sound in your ears. Notice that their visual language is as retro as their sound.
This second video, as you can probably tell from the title, is a bit … blue. Mind your speakers if there are sensitive ears about.
