Despite widespread praise, even the most ebullient reviewers echo the album's detractors. "Is I Learned the Hard Way a record or a museum exhibit?" notes Jody Rosen of Rolling Stone. "Sharon Jones sings with force and feeling, but there's only so much she can do to breathe life into music so in thrall to the past." Slant Magazine's Jonathan Keefe echoes Rosen's sense of boredom. "Without doing anything new to challenge themselves or to push their style in any new directions, the album feels rote and predictable," scoffs Keefe. "Their retro fetish has grown stale." Even Jeff Tamarkin senses the holding pattern in hisA+ review for the Boston Phoenix: "Their fourth album isn't substantially different from their first three."This strikes me as one of those times when critics and listeners are listening for different things on an album, and where the disconnect serves the critics poorly. If you're a critic, one of the metrics you're looking for in assessing an artist's career is progression. The assumption is if a musician works within a space they find comfortable, and doesn't reinvent themselves periodically, they're doing something wrong. It's an incredibly common narrative: the Beatles go to India and come back musically and personally transformed, SMiLE, Brian Wilson's lost album later in his career becomes this incredible treasure that has to be salvaged and brought forth for the world (It's true, it's very good. Having "In Blue Hawaii" in my life has made it richer.).
But all of those progressions don't make it less necessary that I have, say, "I Saw Her Standing There" or "Surfin' USA" on my iPod. I just need different albums for different moments. And so when I think of a group like Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, I think of them filling a particular slot on my musical menu. If they started making radically different music, that later work would fit in a different slot, but it wouldn't mean I didn't need more funk. If I keep acquiring indie rock, and hip-hop, and pop, I need more funk revival to keep the balance. In fact, I think that's one of the reasons retropastiche musicals do so well: people continue to be hungry for the sound of dance-show tunes, or fifties male performers, or whatever, but mainstream groups aren't reviving those trends. For example, Hairspray songs like this kind of hit a Motown sweet spot I have, that isn't necessarily getting revived by groups today, Beyonce's homages not withstanding:
I don't need Jones, or anyone else, to evolve to keep me particularly happy, as long as what they keep making sounds good, and hits a sweet spot. Particularly not when they record stuff like this particular throwback: