Show Notes (3/29)
Skull Snaps, Sincerely Antique, and Skorpio; or, What’s Soul Got to Do With It?
Listen to Vinyl On Queue this Sunday at 10am EST 9am CST on radiofreebrooklyn.org.
Disclaimer: Unanswerable questions ahead. Consider, for a moment, two necessary and irrevocable conflations: that between “soul” as a genre and “soul” as a sound; and, more fundamentally, that between a thing’s material manifestation and its animating spirit. How do you know you’ve encountered (a) soul? And insofar as you believe to have encountered (a) soul, would you necessarily be mistaken for apprehending it as a thing rather than the very force that constitutes that thing and, thus, could never actually be that thing? I already had such questions on my mind (well, I always have such questions on my mind) when I met up with Matt yesterday to plan Sunday’s show, a show we initially thought would be one focused on “Soul” (specifically Charles Bradley and Lee Moses). Instead, I think we put together a show that offers a chance to think about a few scenes of soul’s unfolding.
Tomorrow’s show starts with what might be thought of as a standard Soul song, a rare recording of Stax songwriters Allen Jones and Homer Banks’s “Ain’t that Lovin’ You” (1975) (not to be confused with “Ain’t That Lovin You” or “Ain’t That Lovin’ You, Baby”) performed by the short-lived, New York-based band Skull Snaps. Its down-tempo groove, comprising quarter-note hi-hats and Curtis Mayfield-style electric guitar riffs, supports a three-part vocal harmony characteristic of the transition from Doo-Wop to Rhythm & Blues to Soul that took place across the 1950s and 60s. It’s a sweet song, its uneven lead vocals, occasionally searching for the correct riff, the perceptible form that accords with the song’s emotional energy. What is a Soul song if not this particular juxtaposition of rhythm and melody, a secular performance of a spiritual experience? (Hear how, towards the end of the song, an organ enters during a musical breakdown and the lead singer begins to sermonize about his baby.) Whether in 1965, 1975, or 2025, it is easy to hear, in “Ain’t That Lovin’ You,” nothing so much as a Soul Song. Alas, if it were only that simple.
There’s a thread that runs through tomorrow’s show that highlights the convergence of three musical aesthetics: 1950s and 60s Soul and R&B - especially their connections to the Blues; late-60s and early-70s psychedelia; and, concurrently, a global shift to folk instruments and song forms. Take the track “Taboo” from the Miami-based Cuban-American group Sincerely Antique (they also released albums throughout the late 60s and 70s as Antique Formula, Antique Sorcery, and Los Antiques). This one’s a cover of a song from Santana’s third album Santana III from 1971. It’s a guitar-driven psych-rock tune drenched in organ and distorted guitar, but structurally it’s a 12-bar blues. In this way, it participates in the psychedelic blues tradition of – among others – Traffic, Cream, and early Steve Miller Band.
Now, there’s nothing less interesting to me than the taxonomic pursuit of veritable soul songs, obsessed as they are with naturalizing their endlessly contingent criteria. Much more interesting to me is the historical context in which soul’s impression is perceptible. The bongos in “Taboo” contribute to the coherence of a category like “Latin Soul,” and Latin Soul, as a category, indexes the historical connections spanning the Black Atlantic. This suggests a historical narrative that grounds the psychedelic rock of a group like Sincerely Antique in a musical and cultural history somehow beyond the commodification of popular music. The “antique” in the group’s name perhaps evokes an inaccessible, yet somehow more “real,” past accessible through the wash of sound that distinguishes their music from more formalized radio play. (Of course, the very idea of “escaping” commodification through certain musical aesthetics is always trapped in a paradoxical context that can turn that very escape into its own commodity.)
Skorpio’s “A Que No” (1975), which you’ll hear towards the middle of the show also combines South American rhythms, in this case from Panama, with analog distortion in a similar attempt to combine the folk with the mystical. You’ll hear echoes, reverbs, and interruptions throughout the song that almost resonate with Jamaican dub cuts – a systematic, technical cutting of musical source material aimed at both denaturalizing the song from its immediate commercial context, and reinscribing it into another aesthetic frame.
But consider another track you’ll hear early in the show; the Cuban singer La Lupe’s 1968 version of the R&B standard “Fever.” Here, Afro-Cuban musical aesthetics are borne out in the salsa rhythm and the brass section supporting her highly stylized phrasing. African-American, meet Afro-Cuban – but is this meeting even possible considering their already having met and created each other? Further, her version seems almost anachronistic by 1968, harkening back to the pre-revolutionary Cuba of Western cultural excess depicted and trenchantly critiqued in Mikhail Kalatozov’s seminal 1964 film Soy Cuba.
If “soul” is a helpful heuristic for understanding music and culture in this period, it is not simply because it was a genre identifier (though that is one helpful way of thinking about it). It is also because soul was the language through which popular cultural movements articulated questions about the relationship between the commodity and the work of art; between a thing’s content and its meaning; between a long and contradictory history and its necessary reduction into an aesthetic experience; between spirit and its material form. Music, art, life (insofar as they are discrete realms of experience) are exciting because of the gaps between what we can perceive and what these things mean — a process that is synonymous with being human, (and which dwindles with every piece of AI-generated content that suggests the thing is the same as itself.)
How is a thing enlivened? Is there animation without that which weighs it down to its material form? Is a song still a song when it becomes the very noise that makes it a song? Such contradictory and impossible questions befit perhaps the oddest entry in this week’s show, one that pursues the threads of Latin Soul, Cumbia, Son, Salsa, and psychedelia without tying them in a neat bow. Bogatá-based Meridian Brothers have been mixing Colombian rhythms with experimental flourishes since the early 2000s. You’ll hear “Cumbia del Pichaman,” their positively baffling cover of “Son of a Preacher Man,” made most famous by British songstress Dusty Springfield in 1968 (read Jack Hamilton’s chapter on Springfield, Janis Joplin, and Arethan Franklin in Just Around Midnight [2016]). Is that soul you hear peaking through? Humble messenger that I am, I do not propose answers to such questions. I hope only to sketch a schematic in which you might perceive a notion, and in that perception, reify it. Maybe I’m onto something, or maybe I’ve just been reading too much Moby Dick.1
Some more notable tracks from this week’s show:
“Lay it on Me” (1977) by Sylvia Robinson. Yes, the same Sylvia Robinson of Mickey & Sylvia. Yes, the same Sylvia Robinson who co-founded Sugarhill Records and produced “Rappers Delight” and “The Message.”
Lynn Collins’s legendary “Think (About It)” (1972), backed by the JBs with its iconic and highly-sampled drum break.
“Can’t Live Without Your Love” (1979) by Tamiko Jones. You’re hearing a Japanese pressing of a disco track by a West Virginia-born, part-Cherokee, part-Scotch, part-Japanese singer whose mother ended up in Charleston, WV after being held by the American government in a Japanese internment camp during World War II.
This, and much more from the Rance Allen Group, the RAH band, and Celi Bee and the Buzzy Band. It’s a good one – enjoy.
Listen to Vinyl On Queue this Sunday at 10am EST 9am CST on radiofreebrooklyn.org.
“There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!”