A crazy thing happened to me in the post-office the other day-I found out people are listening to soul again. But, it wasn’t just anybody; it was three little girls with blonde hair and pig tails. They had choreographed a dance to the song on the radio, and one was the lead-singer while the other two backed her up.
They knew all the words, and looked just like the Drifters (with a little grain of salt)-except they had no idea. This wasn’t their fault though, the Drifters weren’t the ones singing on the radio, and they probably won’t stumble upon the original version of “Some Kind of Wonderful” for at least ten more years. However, they were more than clear on who Joss Stone is. So suddenly I found hope in the world again, and I saw sunshine at the end of a pop tunnel that all the elitist have claimed to be closed off since the “Golden Age” went disco. There’s a barely-seventeen-year-old British girl whose got a timbre that flirts with Dusty Springfield, and a voice mature beyond her years-and yes, little kids are buying it.
Joss is the wildcard that soul has been waiting for. She’s as easy on the eyes as Jessica Simpson, and looks pop enough to sneak into all of her fans stereos-while their not looking of course. And people are really buying it! Just last summer her record, The Soul Sessions, which featured mostly soul classics, including “Some Kind of Wonderful,” went gold. Now, out of nowhere, a at one time seemingly hopeless generation of Britney fanatics are singing Aretha Franklin’s “All the King’s Horses” instead of “Hit Me Baby One More Time”-now that’s cool. Of course this record angered as many people as it did give enjoyment. The elitist rock n’ roll community was up in arms over her remake of the White Stripes’ tune, “Fell in Love with a Girl,” morphed into Joss’s “Fell in Love with a Boy.” They were horrified by what they found to be absolute debauchery and nerve, feeling forced to protect their elitist values, contemporaries, and standards from this re-make’s insidious intent. “And well, well,” I said to myself, “isn’t this the very idea that rock n’ roll was based around, putting the ‘community’ up in arms?”
This is one of those things about this so-called “community” I’ve never understood, and pathetically have become a part of. Rock n’ roll formed as a discourse of many things, one of them being a social movement for those that despised thumbing your nose, and living by guidelines. Rock n’ roll pissed on the mainstream while morals and words-proper were left to the squares that listened to Mozart, and drank nice wine. And when I had this conversation not too long ago, with a twenty-something-year-old male with an iPod, sporting a crisp-clean CBGG’s t-shirt that he bought thirty dollars overpriced at a vintage clothing store-he pretentiously asked me “Dude, do you believe in rock n’ roll?” I, taken back by this question at first, then looked at his t-shirt and ipod, and said “Dude, do you?”
