My summer unofficially closed yesterday afternoon with a visit to the Central Park SummerStage. I hadn’t made it there all summer, for various unexciting reasons, and was happy to get in at least once, even if it was on the final day of the series. And what a final day it was–headlined by Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, the afternoon was full of old-school R&B and funk or the sort that hot August Sunday afternoons demand.
None of my photos came out, so here’s one I found on Flickr.
Anyway, so the Dap-Kings are the house band for Daptone Records, which specializes in making new music that sounds like it’s old music. If you didn’t know that Daptone was run by a bunch of young cats in Bushwick, Brooklyn, you’d think they were a bunch of 60s/70s Stax/Volt disciples somewhere in the American South. Live, the Dap-Kings certainly looked and sounded the part, sweating in their dark suits and skinny ties while Sharon Jones bounced all 4′11″ of herself around the stage, inviting audience members up to dance with her (”Security, LET THIS MAN UP!”), pushing the band to go faster and louder, and making even the jaded Brooklyn hipsters who trekked up to Manhattan for the event shake their things. Unironically, even.
The whole event was sort of a Daptone showcase, which made me think, naturally, about Desco Records, my college radio days, and what I love about music.
When I was the world music/jazz/music-geek director at WFNM, I had the task of listening to something like 10-15 CDs a week and deciding which ones should be highlighted in our music library. I’d write a pithy 2-3 sentence review on a little sticker, which I’d affix to the CD’s case, and put the thing on a shelf near the control board for some DJ to stumble upon in one of those what-the-hell-do-I-play-next moments.
One of the only CDs I remember from that time was the Daktaris’ Soul Explosion. Famously described as “a well-disciplined army of two hundred African Bull Elephants marching relentlessly up your business to the beat from Funky Drummer,” Soul Explosion was one of my go-to CDs for my senior year of college, and the CD that got me interested in (authentic) Afrobeat, to the point where I wrote a major paper on Fela Kuti for my grad school Art Ed class (I also tried to get The Believer to publish that paper, but no dice. Oh well).
“Authentic.” I believed, as so many others did, that the Daktaris were a real band from Nigeria who, in the 70s, had recorded a long-lost classic that luckily was discovered and re-released by the Desco Records people. It turns out, though, that I was wrong. Eventually, my friends and I figured out that the Daktaris were imposters, a bunch of mostly-white kids from NYC who loved Afrobeat, gave themselves West African pseudonyms (ie, Gbenro “Mr Icee” Fakeye), and put out this completely mysterious hoax album. A completely mysterious hoax album that still rocks, still is the heaviest funk I’ve got in my collection. Check out Mad Professor’s remix of “Eltsuhg Ibal Lasiti” for a little flavor of what the Daktaris were about.
And no, I never realized that “Eltsuhg Ibal Lasiti” is “it is all a big hustle” backwards.
Anyway, so the question now is about authenticity. Like, is it okay that the Daktaris were a bunch of American guys who were infants when Fela Kuti was in his prime? And even though Sharon Jones was an R&B backup singer back in the 70s, what about the Dap-Kings, who are pretty much ripping off every move in the Stax playbook? And what is authenticity, anyway?
I don’t know. What I do know, though, is that people who create art in homage to the bygone masters are the ones who are inspired by what they’ve learned, and they are often the ones who make the stylistic changes necessary to push the art form forward. Painters used to learn by copying the classics; writers start with emulation. I’m reading 1919 by John Dos Passos right now, and E.L. Doctorow’s introduction mentions all of the writers (Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, and James Joyce) and artists (Diego Rivera and the creators of “thirteenth- and fourteenth century European tableaux — those with the saints painted big and the ordinary people painted small, filling up the background”) that influenced Dos Passos. What Dos Passos created, of course, was something entirely new, a series of plotless novels that tell the story of the first part of the 20th century in America through the intersecting stories of a few typical people. This is not what any of his direct influences did. But without them, he never would have been able to do what he did.
So when you’re listening to a band and you think, “C’mon, [insert band from 30 years ago here] did this already,” start listening for what makes the new band different. During my time spent playing with the Terryl Lee Band, I’ve tried to incorporate bass styles from Motown, classic reggae, and more modern funk into my playing. At times, I’ve shamelessly ripped off lines I’ve liked, but through the writing and rehearsal processes, those lines have evolved into basslines that are unmistakably my own and unmistakably for this band. Am I being authentic? I think so, whatever that means. Is there a lot of room for debate about what’s “real” in art? Absolutely.
In the meantime, I’ll keep rockin’.
