Free Daptone Records Sampler

awesome! I tried to look for other freebies on amazon – is there any “free mp3s” category that I’m just not finding.

Sebastian,

I found this. It’s a bit unwieldy, but you can sort by artist or album.

Is there anyway to get access to it without installing the “Amazon downloader” software? I’m leery of those sorts of things and anyway don’t like clogging my computer with them.

Make the Road By Walking

Make the Road by Walking was founded in 1997 in a Bushwick church basement by local residents to address the potentially devastating effects of welfare reform on America’s poor and immigrant communities.

Make the Road by Walking initially focused exclusively on organizing immigrant welfare recipients, but soon expanded its focus to combat the systemic economic and political marginalization of Bushwick residents. More importantly, Make the Road by Walking galvanized Bushwick’s untapped commitment to democratic participation and resistance to oppression. Make the Road by Walking became a powerful force for low-income immigrants across New York City. In keeping with our democratic values, Make the Road by Walking became a membership organization in 1999. Make the Road by Walking’s low-income members paid dues to support the organization, voted to elect the Board of Directors, and constituted the majority of voting seats on the board.

In response to the outpouring of interest and expressed needs from community members, Make the Road by Walking expanded substantially since its initial start at St. Barbara’s Church. In less than a decade, it moved from an all-volunteer organization to a staff of 25 full-time and 20 part-time employees, plus an ever-growing membership base of over 2,300 community residents. Its initial budget of $72,000 grew to almost $2.5 million in 2007.

Please, please don’t stop linking to this stuff. Some of the best music recently added to the collection has come from your links. Perhaps I should try to get out more.

It’s unclear to me, though, why people on Amazon insist on calling this motown. “Retro funk soul” seems considerably more appropriate.

“the systemic economic and political marginalization of Bushwick residents.”
Hipsters are gentrifiers (just in case you didn’t know).
Rosalie’s bakery is gone. So is Cono’s Pizzeria. Rents have skyrocketed.
The local community has become the local “color.” And this music is technically sharp nostalgia.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings is one of my musical discoveries of 2008 as well, having gotten their album on the strength of the videoclip to “100 Nights” which is absolutely brilliant. Soul as she should be.

As long as the response was just re: me not understanding a ‘hood I have never been to, I felt no need to reply, but the extrapolations are general and generally wrong. First of all, I call “bullshit” on the disidentification of hipsters with an authentic left. Gavin McInnes is a (capitalist) tool, but hipster culture is American left culture: the kid in thrift-store clothes with “eclectic” music tastes working behind the counter of a coffeeshop has a hell of a lot more claim to be an “authentic” part of the left going back a looong time than well-heeled professionals with “social-democratic” values.

I also fail to see how Bushwick remaining an alcázar etnico in the style of the now-famous Bloomfield would have been better from a leftist point of view; I’m not too “New York”, but I remember certain goings-on in some place called “Howard Beach” about twenty years ago. That’s what I was talking about by bringing up Make the Road, which is an organization independent of white people grooving to tunes on the Internet. If they are revivalists, they are revivalists of a ’90s American (!) project far to the left of the products of for-real imperialism and monarchy who are going to school us all for being “center-right” in spite of ourselves and our sitting the experience of fascism out.

As for Dap-Tone, it hurts a little to listen to the music because I have to remember it is not 1972 and I am not a groovy white revolutionary down, at least as regards the aesthetics of urbanism, with “The Movement”. However, consider this: perhaps it is more or less an open secret that “contemporary” black musical forms like hip-hop left a fair piece of space open for something like “neo-soul”, because rappers and DJs happen to kind of like that sort of thing, maybe even secretly kind of better than hip-hop sound-bombs?

nicole willis is pretty rad as well.

though neither really compare to the best of the stuff to come out of the late 60s and 70s

and if you have listened to all of that, you are just as well served by reissues from numero group and other labels putting out some of the more overlooked stuff of the time.

I’m so tired of people who get their politics only from books and then through a process of self-designation proclaim themselves objectively leftist. No problem for Hobsbawm of course.
But manners are not actions. Moral seriousness is not moral responsibility. Good intentions mean nothing, and when I hear the word sincerity, I reach for my gub.

Why don’t you ask people who live in these neighborhoods and have all their lives, how they feel about the people moving in and forcing them out? Instead of talking about the working class, of any race, why not talk to them? That’s obviously something you haven’t done much of in your life.
Better yet, take some advice from me and styles p.
Try working a real job for a while. Learn a hustle, learn a trade. Spend 3 years in the fields, or the streets. And if you want to proclaim solidarity with the workers of the world by riding in the freight elevator remember that by doing that you’re just forcing people to wait for you to get out so they can get back to work.
And if you want to have a discussion of history and nostalgia begin start here. There are plenty of people as enthusiastic as you, and as unwilling to ask themselves just what it is they’re enthusiastic about.

At this point you’re making no sense at all, at least inasmuch as you imagine you’re responding to anything I’ve written.
And I’m not posing as anything, I’ve just met a lot of people in my life.
I’m out.

For the record the latinization of Bushwick is decades old.

“creating an environment where he wasn’t welcome (and I do know those neighborhoods)”
I’ll try to do this without going into rhetorical overkill.
I grew up as a white kid in a black neighborhood and an odd duck to be sure, there as elsewhere, but I didn’t pretend to be anything other than what I was and in the end it was my home and I was welcome. I’m sorry if I missed a reference but the one I made was based in fact: I’ve worked and socialized with deeply intelligent men who understood more about life than the stereotypical white kids in Yale (I’ve known a few of them too) or in fact anyone who writes on this site. And they’d killed more than once, and not in the line of duty. I’ve also worked with men who made it clear that in a different time and place they’d slip my throat for laughs. But they knew as I did that that meeting would never happen, and we worked together and we got the job done. I showed them no disrespect nor would I now in their absence.
It always amused me that in my 20 years as a carpenter and construction tech in NY the condescension of young architects and interior designers towards me as a worker mapped so closely the contempt of political/academic conceptualists, artistic or otherwise, for those who did not share their faux radical intellectual agenda; even though they too needed me and people like me to fabricate things for them; since as designers the use of hand tools was beyond them (or beneath them).

John Holbo was smart enough to shut the fuck up. You should follow his lead and do the same.

John Holbo was smart enough to shut the fuck up. You should follow his lead and do the same.

Well, you’re clearly looking to have a “chilling” effect on discourse: holding your cards as a youthful ‘United Nations’ politician and member of the ‘labor aristocracy’ close to the vest was a good way to do that. Clearly you have some kind of credibility, and it would be lovely if you would explain to us in great detail why exactly the conclusion I found ‘primitively compelling’ is wrong (maybe you could put in a good word for me at Fairway, too). Otherwise, it looks like you are a person with interesting experiences who is one-sidedly prosecuting an anti-intellectual agenda.