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- The Retrographer, Issue 14 (February, 2 0 1 6)
The Retrographer, Issue 14 (February, 2 0 1 6)
February, 2016
The Retrographer, Issue 14
Bulletins
Ten Songs for February, 2016
Whitney, “No Woman” (Spotify / YouTube) - I loved Smith Westerns, partly because I could understand their infectiousness as the product of the partnership of Cullen Omori, their singer and songwriter, and Max Kakacek, their guitarist and arranger. Now they're split, and it's Max who's come out with the better song, and better arrangement too. Shows what I know.
Mavis Staples, “Dedicated” (Spotify / YouTube) - #Goals, basically. Not just because this song describes a love that lasts, just getting more grateful over time, but because Mavis keeps living and creating and never selling out, never getting bored, never going dull.
CEREAL, “Molloy” (Spotify / YouTube) - “There's a spirit within me / a single, silent stroke.” There's a power in silence, which this song pulls tidally back towards. Prose which is filled with this holy silence, from, say, Marilynne Robinson and Denis Johnson, is called luminous.
Porches, “Be Apart” (Spotify / YouTube) - Pretty shockingly good live band, they. They play loud and hard and mostly look like Aaron Maine sings, which is to say, like they don't give a fuck.
James Blake, “Modern Soul” (Soundcloud / YouTube) - Cheeky Jim premiered this on his radio show and then gave us no place to listen to it. Can't fool me! He can go big, eerie and dramatic like “Retrograde”, with the complexity of jazz and the pain of soul. I’ll sniff him out whenever he does.
Kanye West feat. Chance the Rapper, Kelly Price, Kirk Franklin, and The-Dream, “Ultralight Beam” (Spotify / YouTube) - The cult of Kanye, ostracized yet mainstream, this month sound a lot like Chance defending him on The Life of Pablo's opening track. “When they come for you, I will shield your name. I will field their questions, I will feel your pain.” As Ye says later in the album, “I'd be worried if they were saying nothing.”
The 1975, “Somebody Else” (Spotify / YouTube) - The visual references are mostly INXS, and the stated influence is The Blue Nile. But Matt Healy spent his first record aping Phoenix and he's not going to cop to worshipping Simple Minds and the princes of New Romanticism that easy.
Kari Faux, “Supplier” (Spotify / YouTube) - At first I thought this was “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo”. A closer listen is much cooler and more nocturnal, making leisurely use of its tidy 2:12.
Ramriddlz, “Hey Mr. Ramrod” (Soundcloud / YouTube) - So here's this Canadian of Egyptian parentage, with dub beats and a fake patois. Timbaland drew inspiration from a similar place, but Ram gives voice to the sonic touchstones with a twisting melody and hiccuping delivery.
Kamaiyah, “How Does It Feel” (Spotify / YouTube) - This one takes me back. The melodic “It's Kamaiyah / Please retire!” feels like rap from a bygone time, in particular given the humble message of the song. Donald Trump 2016.
One Album for February, 2016
The 90s was the period when the forms rappers would occupy, and then later deconstruct, were created: the uber-criminal, the enlightened backpacker, the fed-up moralist, the nihilistic amoralist. Rappers, listeners, and industry figures enforced this limited emotional range for mainstream rap, derived partly from a real-life paranoid post-traumatic stress that manifested into narratives of violence, mistrust, fear and exploitation.
It’s not unreasonable, after the fact, to suggest that the albums from this period that persist in our memory do so because their epilogues are as morbid as their prologues; Death and misfortune follows their creators until the end. As a result, some of our fascination is about the what-ifs. A lot of rap fans will suggest this, and it’s fair to see why they would: The sad nature of rap is that it arose from a culture afflicted by violence, and as such created many martyrs, whose disciples inscribe hagiographies in their albums as much as tribute as a sort of self-canonization. You only need to look as far as the fabricated interview with Tupac Shakur that closes Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (originally To Pimp a Caterpillar, or ToPAC) to see the power in holding a candle for (and to) the sainted dead.
This is part of it, but not everything. Illmatic, The Infamous, and Reasonable Doubt are still so celebrated because of their artfulness and undeniable perspective, and their authors survived. But even so, the exercise of singing the praises of dead rappers can be misconstrued as nominations to the pantheon, or even personal endorsements. Big L is one of this problem’s more complicated cases.
Lamont Coleman was a rapper from New York at a moment when the music industry was fully capitalizing on the city’s ascendence in the genre. He is, without a doubt, one of the most skilled rappers in its history. Take his legendary freestyle battle with prime Jay-Z – as worthy competition as rap has ever had to offer – and listen as they wrestle to a stalemate, each rattling out rhymes with preternatural fluidity. Both have timeless lines, but hear L: “I’m so ahead of my time, my parents haven’t met yet.” At that moment in time, in that room, they were equals.
Big L put out just one album before he was murdered in a drive-by in 1999, 1995’s Lifestylez Ov Da Poor & Dangerous. It’s an album that showcases his impossible coexistence of composure and dexterity, in how he breaks in and out rhythmic ideas without losing velocity or delivery. Within the city, he was an important figure for a generation of artists evolving the form; A Harlem rapper who stood shoulder to shoulder with the Brooklynites, Jay-Z and Biggie, who were setting the highest bars on the biggest stage. For that, he’s still cited as a gold standard for the practice of rapping.
However, Lifestylez adopts an emotional bleakness that breaks into full-fledged nihilism after its first two radio-baiting tracks. Some of his contemporaries – Mobb Deep, Nas – grew from similar circumstances, and made music similarly dark, but thoughtfully offered the iniquity of their upbringing to the empathy of their listeners. Big L, in contrast, followed this hopelessness to its logical extreme.
Take the appropriately titled “All Black”, L at his most aggressively hopeless: “If Big L got the AIDS every cutie in the city got it.” Violence, and in particular, violence against women plagues the record, often obscuring if not invalidating the prodigious talent displayed in his performances. His campaign was against order and morality, and his strategy scorched earth. “A chick asked me for a ring,” he sneers, “and I put one over her whole eye.”
Later on, this subgenre would be named horrorcore, and indeed many of the rappers who fell within this type drew character inspiration and even samples from the slasher films of the 80s. But Big L doesn’t try to hide his deplorable fantasies behind pop culture references or cosplay. He insists on inculcating his monstrousness from a personal place. “I killed my mother with a shovel like Norman Bates did” “I’m killing infants for ten cents” “I’ll even fuck a dead bitch”. Some songs lament the “danger zone” of his 139th Street and Lennox Ave neighborhood (“Street Struck”, “Fed Up With the Bullshit”), but make no attempt to find hope or meaning there; Instead, they paint it as a black hole for dreams. His most famous line declares his devoutness to annihilation: “You can’t kill me, I was born dead.”
The album’s sonic palette matches closely, though less artfully, with Mobb Deep’s classic and similarly traumatized The Infamous, released just a month later. Virtually all the beats are minor key and midtempo, built on dissonant piano breakbeats. The mixing is sometimes inexplicably poor; while voices are clear, the bass throughout is boomy and overwhelming, so several songs on the album sound like you’re hearing them from the outside of a car. But even this undesirable characteristic too reveals an uncomfortable truth about the environment this record grew from. Cars, in hindsight, are particularly important: the rumbling booming from a car is a big way music is shared in New York. It often sounds wrong for a studio, but not for Harlem. They’re also L’s stated symbol for making it (“No more iron horses cause I’m buying Porches"), and, fatefully, signaled his end in a drive-by meant for his brother. Listening back, this album’s sonic shortcomings evoke truths, albeit perhaps exaggerated ones, about the New York it was made in.
Indeed, this album is riddled with uncomfortable truths, sonically and lyrically. But truths nonetheless. Examining music this intentionally appalling for its execution may seem unfeeling, but then again so is, for the most part, the music. This sort of listening, for execution primarily, was a common pastime for the day’s hip hop heads, who justified their complicitness with the genre’s norms of misogyny, violence, and poverty as part of a study of L’s one-of-a-kind skill on the mic, what that meant for the legitimization of rap as an art form, and the album’s realistic distillation of the gothic environment of New York in the 90s when that sort of realness, whatever its veracity, had currency. Whether or not you buy such a justification is up to you; Big L, for one, never seems to hint how much of the character he’s playing reflects his true heart, or if it’s all a device to illustrate the desperation of his circumstances.
Which is to say: The album aims to be a sort of diorama of Harlem, 1995, and to present its poorness and dangerousness as they mold those lifestyles. It's narrator is far from enlightened, just the opposite. Does that make Big L culpable for the hatred in his music? Is it better to not know how bad things were in his life, or to hear a terrible story faithfully told? Here’s a question that has been examined before, elsewhere: If you decide to listen, is it possible to ascribe the ills in L’s writing to the writer himself, to divine his meaning as you see fit to assume, or to consider them the vicious heuristics of a cruel existence? Can we ever tell for sure, particularly with him cold in his grave? He was, after all, born dead.
Best-of Playlists
Though these playlists are all on Spotify, not every song (including many of my favorites) is available to stream.
To see what tracks are missing, go to "Preferences", scroll down to "Display Options," and then switch on "Show unavailable tracks in playlists."