JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound – “Get it Together” b/w “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” 7” (Rabbit Factory)
Call me a negative ninny, but I’m just going to write what many of you are thinking anyway: I find the idea of a soul revivalist cover of a Wilco song to be infinitely irritating. Any guess as to what might be worse? Listening to a soul revivalist cover of a Wilco song. 100% of this is a safe and predictable made-for-NPR circle jerk. I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes to soul, R&B, funk, and the blues, I have about as much soul as a former kid from the proto-sprawl of a mid-sized American city should have. None. My roots are in a bedroom, poring over zines and losing my shit to Mercury Rev and TFUL282. My “blues” was listening to the first Dinosaur album on factory-made cassette over and over the day after my father died, and still failing to conjure a great deal of emotion over a man I really didn’t know that well. And get this: The mid-sized city of which I write is none other than Memphis, TN, and I’ve never felt the need to dive into its Stax/Hi/Volt or Sun history, even when I worked at a local record store for over half a decade (I was the token go-to person for “indie” or “out there” inquiries). Watching French and Japanese record-geeks file out of cabs in the parking lot of said record store was enough to make my stomach turn at the thought of spending the next three hours pulling $100 records down from the safe spots near the ceiling, or giving directions to eateries where one can have their meal served to them through a hole in the wall. I’ll also admit to deriving an ounce or two of pleasure when a Yank or a foreigner realized that “authentic” could be another word for “very, very fucking dangerous.” Serves their asses right, the goddamn slummers. So am I really the right person to review a record of mirror-image soul-funk made by Second City funnymen-via-theater-geeks? Yes, because the music that I love is music that makes me feel something, and slummers like this claim to feel something from a form when that type of art-to-heart communication is completely impossible. And yes, I am writing all of this with an accurate understanding of the band’s racial make-up, a fact that means nothing in this context. Here’s a challenge for all of you: Make or get into something interesting for a change. Trust me, I understand the appeal of the ‘90s – I lived the times that I miss – but the minstrel show/omnipresent slumming aspect of that decade is one tradition meant to be left in the past. (http://www.therabbitfactory.net)
(Andrew Earles)
