From the NYT:

In the early 1990s, while the cool kids in the New York University dorms were listening to Nirvana and Pavement and P. J. Harvey, Gabriel Roth, a Jewish teenager from California, sat in his dorm room, night after night, listening to one obscure James Brown record after another. He listened to “Dooley’s Junkyard Dogs,” a 45 that Brown cut in honor of a college-football team. He listened to Brown’s esoteric rock version of “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing.” He listened to “Gettin’ Down to It,” a collaboration between Brown and, as Roth puts it, “these white jazz guys — but it was really actually a cool record.” Mostly he listened to “Hot Pants,” an album that largely consisted of just one chord. It was like “some kind of strange calculus,” Roth told me recently. “Everybody playing one little note or one little beat. But the whole thing worked together.” Roth and a friend would sit in his dorm room and listen to “Hot Pants” for hours on end. They’d listen to one side of the album several times in a row, and then they’d turn it over and listen to the other side. “We would smoke weed and listen to the album,” he told me, “or not smoke weed and listen to the album.”

Fifteen years later, Roth is a 34-year-old songwriter, bassist and sound engineer, as well as the somewhat-reluctant co-owner of Daptone Records, a small record label in Brooklyn. He is still a musical outsider: he says he strongly dislikes almost every pop song recorded since 1974, including one or two that bear his own imprint. What appeals to him — what consumes him — are dusty soul and funk records from the 1960s and early ’70s. By studiously emulating these recordings, he has gained a reputation as a devoted, even obsessive, musical purist. In an age of MP3s and computer-generated sounds, he has distinguished himself by making vinyl records featuring actual musicians manipulating real-life instruments. He has rejected the music industry, and in doing so, he has aroused its interest.