The Retrographer, Issue 16 (April, 2 0 1 6)

No usual Retrographer this month. If you received last month's issue, you read my piece on Prince's self titled album. His music meant a lot to me, so writing this issue helped me deal with his death. I still made a playlist for this month, but didn't write about it. Listen to it on Spotify or YouTube. 

There’s a space in each of my parents’ houses for music. They’re different homes, and their record collections have little overlap. Starting from when I was maybe 13, I’d sit in front of shelves of CDs and look. My dad’s library was marked by classics, big band jazz and showtunes; my mom and stepdad’s emanates from the revolutionary music of the 60s; my stepmom, Lisa, who’s a little younger than my dad was, had everything after.Through these windows of plastic and paper, I could see the world. Music’s greatest spell on me is that it brings me into the experience of its creator. When I listen, I relinquish my power to the recording, and in return it gives me the impossible gift of new perspective. In life, other people exist too often as events: “Why did she do that?” more often means “Why did this happen to me?”; “I love him” can mean “I love him for me”; “You’re wrong” means “That’s not how I see it.” We’re the hegemons of our own minds, but in music we give the wheel to another. When I listen to music, I’m confronted with alien views. It's not me vs. them; it's someone else. In this way, music introduced me to the world. It lets me see through a million eyes.Lisa moved into my dad’s house when I was a kid and brought with her about a hundred albums. They’re stacked in rows in the dining room, near a glass door to the porch that lets golden light pool in the afternoon. I sat there, day after day, filing out albums. One day I alphabetized them. It’s a way to get to know someone.Lisa’s music was different from my parents’ in a major way, and that’s how it was talked about. My dad’s taste was for the American Songbook, the music the artists my mom loved rebelled against. Both of my parents were open-minded and celebratory about music, to a point. I relished their different tastes the same but different, like how I relish dinner and breakfast. But as I explored those worlds, I found that each regarded itself with a relativistic exceptionalism defined by the other. Depending on who you read, it’s either order vs. chaos, or prison vs. freedom. Rules vs. noise. Something like Sinatra vs. Lennon, Gershwin vs. Jagger. White man vs. white boy.I loved the music, and I hated that it asked me to choose a side. I wanted to explore, because I remembered every window I looked through. To borrow a pun from Lennon, I want the author’s story in his own write. This is important to me, maybe, because life doesn’t give you much of a chance to choose what perspectives confront you, even if you make sure to surround yourself with the ones you agree with. The musical fiefdoms of my childhood were proof enough of that point.Lisa owns all sorts of albums by artists that were, at my time of exploration soon after the millennium, too contemporary to be canonized, and as such weren’t much of a threat to what I saw as the baby boomers’ binary clash of civilizations. I remember hearing “Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust” for the first time; The idea had never occurred to me. When I pulled down People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, say, or Tim, or Fear of Music, I didn’t feel that social order was being toppled or defended, but that its promises were being challenged. It wasn't me vs. you; it was all or nothing. A voice was making itself heard. If this boat was going to stay afloat, more room had to be made on the deck.Albums came down from the shelf, one after the other. PW and I shared an iMac, a machine capable of sucking the content from all those CDs from all those different places and giving them a single home where they’d never know their origin, and to where they belonged in the order of things. Raw Like Sushi. Armed Forces. The River. Off the Wall.This is where I met Prince. He looked like this. I remember pulling down Prince, 1999, Purple Rain, Sign ‘O’ The Times, Dirty Mind, Emancipation, Rave Un 2 the Joy Fantastic. There may have been more and I may have loaded that collection with albums it begot my curiosity to find. The cover of Prince made me laugh. Here was a small, swarthy man with a tuft of black hair on his chest, a miniature of the windswept Farrah Fawcett mane on his head. He looked soft and vulnerable and feminine. I thought it was a joke, and it made me laugh in the way anyone doing anything wrong makes me laugh. In front of a powder blue sky, he stares demurely into the distance.In Ben Ratliff’s biography Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, he describes the saxophonist’s adventures beyond the norm. “In time, that questing-without-end attitude became his signature, what people expected of him,” Ratliff writes. “Here it was, early. On the 1960 tour with Miles [Davis], with his long, screaming split-tone solos, he could seem as if he were not just screaming through his different devices, but embarrassing himself. But it was a different order of embarrassment. He was open. He knew what he was doing, and felt strongly in doing it. The audiences weren’t always up to speed: either they hadn’t been much exposed to jazz like his before, or the records, which he was now churning out, had simply not reached them yet.”I knew what I was doing was wrong by listening to Prince. I knew this isn’t what a man wasn’t supposed to be, and I was supposed to be becoming a man. But this is why I listened to him, because he held open a door to a place I never knew how to enter and invited me inside.Prince aims for various types of confectionary perfection. The tracks that initially clobbered me were, “I Wanna Be Your Lover”, “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?”, “Sexy Dancer”, the first three tracks on the album, and “Bambi” and “I Feel For You.” To begin, they are each tremendously fun. Further, they’re astoundingly well-executed. Finally, they’re built of wildly inventive parts. Listening to this music, I felt like my every urge was validated. I wanted to dance listening to “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?”, so dancing must not just be good, it must also bring me closer to who I am. He made lots of people feel this way. Listening to “Bambi” made me realize how weak and lame so much of the music that shares that song’s hardcore palette was, because of how it lacks that song’s puckish debauchery. It was taking a risk with me, the listener, that, I dunno, Kiss wouldn't. Couldn't. What were other artists trying to do with their guitar solos? Hardly anyone played the way Prince did, and even if they came close, they were just telling me what I already knew about people who play guitar solos. The guitar solo on “Bambi” feels like an elope with a stranger.Then there was Purple Rain, which I probably listened to more in this first era because I recognized some of the song titles. It also evolves him from nymph to spirit. Where, on “I Wanna Be Your Lover”, Prince aspires to be your mother and your sister too, the Prince of “I Would Die 4 U” evolves to pansexuality. “I’m not your woman, I’m not your man. I am something you could never understand.” Join me to dissolve your bonds, Prince offers. This is freedom, and it’s why I never really got that into similar virtuosos like Van Halen. I don’t want a golden calf erected for me. “Let’s Go Crazy” ends in pyrotechnics that level everything to make room for the utopia beyond.Last summer I spent a lot of time in my car, where I keep a few dozen CDs – Stop Making Sense, Brown Sugar, Born to Run, Rejuvenation. I have to make sure to not over-listen to Purple Rain. But I listened again and again to “Take Me With U”, the album’s second song. Its components and construction strike me as a world apart from Prince’s previous music. To begin, it starts with these nasty synths. They sound loud and distorted, like they’re reverberating from stacked PAs in a park down the block. It’s dusk and someone is soundchecking for a block party. It spoke to my noisy life in Crown Heights. When they break, an acoustic guitar drone builds in the background and stays ringing throughout the song. Mixing with a tambourine and low bass synth drone, it scintillates and shimmers. Those synths return briefly again making way for the song’s the last 30 seconds, a cloudburst of shooting stars. It makes the song’s story – its elegant escape – feel like the dream it is.The presence of story in Prince’s music is what makes him more than a symbol to me. He could’ve simply taught me to embrace joy wherever I witness it, to see it as the indicator for self, and to love whomever shares it. But Prince was also a gorgeously bizarre-looking individual. His hair was, by Purple Rain, high and coiffed like a Little Richard James Dean; He wore Marlon Brando’s double-rider motorcycle jacket, but his was a luscious purple; he smirked and smiled and said very little, even as he starred in his own movie. He was more than a lesson.I witnessed all this on my 16th birthday party when a gang of my friends came over to my basement after school to hang, and we stumbled upon Purple Rain on VH1. They all knew at that point that Prince was my thing, and, probably more honestly, they didn’t know anybody else who gave a fuck about the guy beyond that Chappelle's Show reference.My friend Clare Hiler was with me on that day, and she made me a chocolate cake with two of her friends. I didn’t eat any of it. I just stared at the screen and made occasional astounded references at it, without really breaking my gaze on the screen, to falsely make my friends feel that I was still there with them.Here was his corporeal being. Even in that early moment of the internet, Prince’s obsession with control rendered his image absent to me – I remember a conversation on AIM with my friend Rob, the only other member of my high school’s Prince fan club, that briefly considered buying a membership to the NPG Music Club. Purple Rain was a glimpse I didn’t realize I’d get. I was stunned by “Darling Nikki” because, besides that I didn’t know voices or bass drums could do that, or that I couldn’t wrap my mind around the rhyme “Sex fiend” / “Masturbating to a magazine”, it suggested a sexual experience that had nothing to do with domination. It was mutually filthy.Prince warns that abuse is inheritable, masculinity is violence and men worship their own power, society will try to steamroll you for your difference, and all these things can be toppled by committing to yourself. That movie was the closest I ever came to investigating his personhood – closer, even, than when my friend Chris and I ran down from our Izod Center nosebleeds to watch him close his third encore with my favorite of his songs, “Adore”. That oneness I felt with him the first time I saw his album cover, that freedom apparition –Freedom was Prince’s holiness, this is what made him so important to me. Making the choice to disavow along with him resolved an oppression I was not aware I was under. Self-consciousness and its strictures came into stark relief in Prince's soft, pulsating light. This is, I think, the most powerful element of his music: Its appeal is indivisible from his character. To reject him, you must reject his music’s influence over you. Puritan, your engorgement is a forbidden fantasy. Turn away or turn on.

And he makes it so easy to accept its influence. Prince doesn’t explain himself, but he invites you in, in to meet a person whose ostensible differences from you are flattened under the God of rhythm. He shows you that there can be more, and only by example. He plays every instrument and writes every song to show you the infinity of possibility. He dances so you can dance. He leads you inside where you sit, in a pool of golden light.

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."April, 2016March, 2016February, 2016January, 2016November, 2015October, 2015September, 2015August, 2015July, 2015June, 2015May, 2015April, 2015March, 2015February, 2015January, 2015Best of 2015Best of 2014 (Honorable Mentions)Best of 2013 (Honorable Mentions)Best of 2012Best of 2011