Straight Love, No Chaser: Authenticity and the Soul Music Revival

Abstract

This project explores the revived interest in American soul music and the ways that contemporary soul musicians negotiate the concept of “authenticity.” Two contemporary record labels, Daptone Records and Numero Group, have spearheaded this revival. As I argue, their ascendance is symptomatic of larger, more sweeping concerns; a response to something lost that needs to be reclaimed, or something underrepresented that needs to be represented. For these reasons, I view Daptone and Numero Group as instructive case studies in the analysis of authenticity as a term of separation, distinction, acclaim, and prestige. Further, articulations of authenticity define the terms under which these disputations are fought. They illuminate soul music’s contentious relationship with its past and explain its enduring relevance in the present—a relevance necessarily wrought with assumptions about what types of ethical commitments from the past are worth reclaiming and preserving. This dissertation aims to reveal Daptone’s and Numero Group’s ethical commitments, showing them to be disciplined by the selective uptake of certain sonic qualities, attitudinal dispositions, and aspirational goals that critique popular music aesthetics. Contestations of authenticity appear both in the ways that these two record labels perceive and interpret the legacy of soul music in the 1960s and 1970s and in the affective and sonic qualities that they champion in doing so. I argue that the term “authenticity” be foregrounded in rhetorical scholarship as a primary object of concern. More importantly, however, I also argue that the story of American soul music is a particularly fertile site from which scholars in communication can reassess their understandings of how aesthetic values become authenticated through time.