On January 2, the indie music blog Brooklyn Vegan posted a set of photos from a December 30 show that Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings had played at Brooklyn Bowl. Based in New York, they’re at the forefront of a widespread vintage-soul revival that also includes the Budos Band, Mayer Hawthorne, Eli “Paperboy” Reed, Kings Go Forth, and Nicole Willis—and of all the artists involved, only Amy Winehouse, whom the Dap-Kings have backed in the studio and on the road, is better known.
The second comment: “Right now, I am so ashamed to be white.”
“So what’s that term mean to you?” I ask.
“That’s bullshit, man. I don’t cater to any hipster market,” he says.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Eli “Paperboy” Reed, who’s also white, told Austinist in September 2008 that he’d much rather see random teenagers, middle-aged couples, and yuppies at his shows than the “fair share of hipsters” they attract. This isn’t an antihipster stance, though, so much as it’s the way any artist who wants a big audience has to think. Asked if he thought his music’s accessibility and lack of ironic distance limited its hipster appeal, he replied, “I think it just broadens the scope of who you can get to be interested in your music.” In fact he thinks this lack of irony is why he has a hipster audience at all—and why, as the Boston Herald put it in an article on the Dap-Kings in 2005, soul has the potential to be “the latest vintage music to inspire a new generation of hipsters.”
Mitter recently gave I Learned the Hard Way a positive review, but when I spoke to him he was still uncomfortable with the racial and social politics surrounding the Dap-Kings. He didn’t want to be quoted, but many of the sentiments in his 2005 review still hold true: “The entertainment of white audiences by black performers is an American tradition and not inappropriate in itself,” he wrote. “Still, an odor of exploitation hovered in the room. . . . Perhaps it had to do with the fetishizing of old-style soul, which often carries the false corollary that there is no good new soul and R & B.”
Fri 5/21, 8 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield, 773-472-0449 or 312-559-1212, sold out, 18+.
