gone writing.

I'm off working on my feidl exam, so this blog is going to go on hiatus, Or, if i indulge in procrastination, which is pretty much a given, it'll be sporadic at best. I'll post if i see something worth posting about. But i may pop up every now and then anyway to share music i would be listening to if i weren't reading or furiously writing. In that vein i give you two tracks from youtube from artists you've probably heard me rant about before. The first, the honey cone, were one of the best bands signed to Holland/Dozier/Holland's Hot Wax and Invictus labels. "Innocent 'Til Proven Guilty" got sampled recently by Kanye West on Common's "Testify," but I like the original song more than I like that particular moment in Common-Kanye collaboration.
The second track i'll leave you with today is a video from a french TV show of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings performing "Hod Do I Let A Good Man Down," which generally vies with "How Long Do I Have to Wait for Your Love" for my favorite song off Naturally. I have reservations about this band. I've written about this before here. Briefly, i'm extremely uncomfortable with the ways in which a hipster "revival" of sixties and seventies funk and soul fetishizes authenticity and a supposedly unmediated musical neo-luddism. I'm leery of the racial politics of some of Jones's international fandom - the comments on Youtube that try to read her as a mute reincarnation of Marva Whitney or Aretha, or worse as a museum artifact demonstrating the "natural" musicality of black womanhood. I wonder if the retro chic of the band's self-marketing and self-framing erases some of the ways in which the frames the band uses were problematized by the very figures it seeks to conjure. Which is not to say that there's an erasure of politics going on here - the radical, fierce reworking of "This land is your land," on Naturally and several of the songs on the new record attest to the particular ways in which this project is evoking the political. (On NPR's Fresh Air this week Gabriel Roth explains that "When the other foot drops, Uncle," with its refrain of "You better pack up and run," is about Bush and Cheney.) A cynic might argue that this occurs in ways which don't disrupt or problematize the troubling politics of the band's self-representation or consumption. I will not make that argument here. Anyway, the songwriting's often very sharp and the band is fantastic. But i would like to see more of a dialogue on the blogosphere and among critics (and perhaps it happened five years ago before Dap-dipping and i just missed it because i was too busy storming Woodbridge) about these concerns, not only with regard to the Dap-Kings, but concerning "retro-soul" more broadly, (which means you, Amy Winehouse.) Anyway, here.