Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings
100 Days, 100 Nights
Daptone Records
By Jose Fritz
The last several years have seen a glut of premium funk and soul compilations. These albums bump, shake, kick and swagger: Cold Heat, Raw Funk, Texas Funk, Bay Area Funk, Chains and Black Exhaust, Movers, Wheedle’s Groove, Midwest Funk, South Dallas Pop Festival, Funky 16 Corners, and dozens more. There have been so many retrospectives that we forget soul is not a dead genre in the archives. The real soul funk is not anachronistic; it is alive and well and is in the hands of artists much younger and less decrepit than Parliament. Sharon Jones has more Funk in her toe nail clippings than George Clinton has in his entire discography, and more Soul than Aretha Franklin at a Baptist Church Barbecue.
Good funk elicits that onomatopoeic behavior in its fans. We all become amateur scat vocalists trying to describe the record. It’s not enough that the drums are hot or that the sax grooves. They have to go badda-bam-bam-ta-blam! You crackers suffering from white-man’s rhythm deficiency might not fully grasp the fine differences between this and other expiations. But this is the real thing and you have to let it breathe.
It’s like the difference between St. Louis and East St. Louis. On the east side we eat smoked snout BBQ sandwiches and know for sure, that is soul food. On the other side of the river the crackers are eating steamed brisket covered in weak hot sauce and got no concept of what they’re missing out on. It’s the same difference between the Shirelles and the Vandellas, between Mary Wells and Kitty Wells. It’s not about skin color. It’s just simply that one has got rhythm and soul and one does not. The good stuff always has both. Take it in the context of the singles of Barbara Lewis: “Think A Little Sugar” is not soulful, “Sho-Nuff” is.
Point being; Sharon Jones has it in spades and the Dap Kings are ranking on my list of all time great funk bands on par with the JB’s. The Dap Kings are the same soulful devils on that Amy Winehouse single “Rehab.” They made that skinny-ass white girl seem like an R&B singer. That’s badass hoodoo magic.
On the title track “100 Days, 100 Nights,” Sharon shows a Mavis Staples command presence. She belts that puppy out with force. It takes what could have been a sappy R&B number and forges it into a funky soul single. The horn blasts are subdued, emphasizing the vocals instead of the reverse. The nuances keep the single out of the sweat box funk 45 arena. As the song develops and the B3 organ joins the horns and the tune becomes a killer opening on a record that will inevitably become a classic in the career of a band no one will ever forget.
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