The king of retro-soul

The New York Times has published a lengthy Big, Important news story on each of the last two Sundays, first looking at the media-military industrial complex constituted by Barry McCaffrey, and then yesterday examining how a putative fiscal watchdog like bond-rater Moody's performed in the run up to the economical debacle.

Yet the NYT piece that really captivated me of late was Saki Knafo's terrific profile of Gabriel Roth, who "has spent more than a decade on the margins of the music industry, trying to recreate the urgent, brassy sound of the obscure old R&B 45s he loves. Suddenly, people are listening."

The story describes how Roth, a passionate music fan/curmudgeon, has overcome some considerable hardships by following his bliss:

The events of the past few years have made Roth look almost prophetic. While his label has grown, generating enough money for [Sharon] Jones, the lead singer of the Dap-Kings, to start a savings account so that she can move out of the projects, the mainstream music business has teetered on the brink of collapse. Roth says he believes the industry had it coming. Over the past three decades, he argues, a series of technological innovations — the synthesizer, the CD, the laptop — have emboldened major labels like Sony and Atlantic to replace skilled musicians with microchips, resulting in an inferior product for which the labels have foolishly tried to compensate by dumping more and more money into cynical marketing schemes — in Roth’s words, “Faster ways to get it, cheaper ways to get it, ways to give you more of it, ways to give it to you with a can of Coke, ways to give it to you with artificial breasts and a blond hair-job.” The one sector of the industry that has grown in recent years is vinyl manufacturing. In 2007, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, shipments of 12-inch LPs and EPs increased about 37 percent from 2006, to nearly 1.3 million records. To Roth, it makes perfect sense. Vinyl records, in his opinion, sound good, look good, smell good and are delightful to hold. They appeal to four of the five senses, and if you share Roth’s idea of a relaxing evening, they can even help with the fifth — to quote Roth, you can’t roll a joint on an MP3.