Soul is the most powerful expression of American music—a distinct combination of roots, migration, race, culture, and politics packaged together for your dancing pleasure. But if you thought the sounds of Motown or Stax Records died along with 8-tracks and macramé, you’d be wrong. For two decades, Daptone Records has churned out hard funk and such beautiful soul that these records sparked a musical revolution.

Run by a collective of soul-obsessed producers and musicians, the Brooklyn-based independent label launched the careers of artists such as Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, Charles Bradley, and Bruno Mars. Daptone’s records—and those of the larger soul revival scene—pay homage but never lip service to the original artists, proving that soul is still culturally relevant, and just as exciting as ever.

It Ain’t Retro charts this revival’s players, sounds, and tectonic shifts over the past twenty years, taking you from dingy clubs where soul crazed DJs packed the dancefloor, to just uptown where some of the genre’s heaviest musicians jumpstarted the renaissance in a basement studio, and all the way to the White House. This definitive tale of Daptone Records’ soulful revolution chronicles the label’s history, players, and sounds while dissecting the scene’s cultural underpinnings, which continue to reverberate in pop music. The book also contains rare and unseen images of Daptone artists past and present, including Sharon Jones, Charles Bradley, Lee Fields, Antibalas, The Sugarman 3, The Budos Band, and more.

An excerpt from It Ain't Retro: Daptone Records & The 21st-Century Soul Revolution by Jessica Lipsky

Forty or fifty musicians are swarming behind the scenes at Harlem’s famous Apollo Theater—they’re jamming in small groups backstage, performing personal pre-show rituals, talking around an overfull beverage table and clustered in groups, watching from the wings as their friends work three nights worth of sold-out crowds into a palpable frenzy. The Apollo residency was a reunion of sorts, an occasion for a family of musicians who had played together in various funk, soul, jazz, and Afrobeat projects for nearly twenty years to celebrate what made them unique: a dedication to showmanship, a highly attuned ear for and devotion to music made in the 60s and 70s, and an appreciation for the collective spiritual bond which informed the intensity of their shows.

Each night of the Daptone Super Soul Revue, held during the mild early winter of December 2014, was a chance to revel in the unifying, groovy power of soul music in all its forms. Every musician who had worked with Brooklyn-based Daptone Records took the stage in a series of continuous sets, adding and removing players (most of whom performed with multiple groups) and equipment between bands without intermissions or curtain calls. Mississippi-based a cappella group The Como Mamas and locals Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens brought devotional music from the church to center stage; instrumental groups The Sugarman 3 and session musicians Menahan Street Band performed meditative cinematic soul and hybrids of jazz and boogaloo; Antibalas and The Budos Band delivered their respective versions of Afro-funk euphony; during an interlude, Dapettes Saun & Starr reminisced about performing at the Apollo’s amateur night as young women in the 1980s. Nearly the whole of the 1,500-capacity theater stood from their chairs, compelled to dance and pay witness to the heartfelt, heavy, and energetic performances from Daptone’s headlining acts: Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, and Charles Bradley, also known as the “Screaming Eagle of Soul.” As an independent, musician-owned label that made most of its money on the road, orchestrating a hometown soul revue was a dream come true.

A soul revue like Daptone’s hadn’t been attempted in decades, its success a tribute to the label’s pioneering and often defiant ethos. Daptone took a page out of the book of James Brown, whose residencies at the historic venue in the 60s and 70s were so legendary that they were commemorated in multiple records. Sharon Jones had first performed at the Apollo in 2007, her mark (“Love ya! Sharon,” written in silver ink) gracing the venue’s famous wall of signatures alongside those of Paul McCartney, Al Green, Prince, Tony Bennett, rapper 50 Cent, and President Barack Obama—though the Super Soul Revue was a markedly different occasion.

Beaming from ear to ear, Jones readied herself in a series of sparkly dresses and strappy two-inch heels in dressing rooms once used by beloved divas Billie Holiday, Diana Ross, and Patti LaBelle—each a force of personality with a fervent fanbase, though their energy was surely eclipsed by Sharon’s. “She belongs here!” Apollo historian Billy “Mr. Apollo” Mitchell asserted to the revue’s documentarian.1 But the road to sold-out Apollo residency wasn’t linear, or even paved, for most of Daptone’s musicians. Some first overcame illiteracy and homelessness, others a lifetime of rejection by record companies or decades working multiple jobs to support their musical passions when the only gigs were at underpaying clubs. The majority were simply nerds, obsessed with rough cuts of funk and soul from the likes of Motown, Stax, Brunswick, or Dynamo records. And, while record-collecting and crate-digging culture was having a moment at the time of the Daptone Super Soul Revue—largely due to the label’s unwavering commitment to its favorite genres—the popularity of 60s and 70s era soul had long been relegated to oldies radio, hip-hop samples, and overly nostalgic film soundtracks. By the mid-1990s, when Daptone precursor Desco Records came into the world, funk in the key of The J.B.’s was only relevant for its breaks, and Aretha Franklin—the Queen of Soul and an idol of Sharon Jones—was waiting to exhale.