The Retrographer, Issue 17 (May, 2016)

Welcome to the Super Special Not a Distraction From My Lateness Summer Edition!Hiya. Sorry I've been AWOL for a while, I sort of didn't want to write a Retrographer for a while after my last one. But then Bernie Worrell died, and I figured it'd be better to write than not. So I'm back with a very timely May issue that's also now my Summer edition, too. I've reviewed my favorite Summer album, Ali Farka Touré and Ry Cooder's Talking Timbuktu and get to present the obvious song of the summer "No Problem", so I might as well take it the rest of the way, too.I also consulted the brain trust of Peter Walker Kaplan, AJ Guff, Jake Manoukian, and Chase Daniel on the song of the summer. Submissions could be new or old, and here's the very Drake / Beyonce / Chance results that came in:

• One Dance - Drake

• Weston Road Fows - Drake

• Controlla - Drake

• Go Flex – Post Malone

• Finish Line - Chance the Rapper

• Same Drugs - Chance the Rapper

• No Problems - Chance the Rapper

• Hold Up by Beyoncé 

• All Night Beyoncé 

• Final Song by MØ

• Be Alright - Ariana Grande

• Out of This Town - Sterkol

• Father stretch My Hands (Part 1) - Kanye West

• Say It - Flume/Tove Lo

• Untitled 8 - Kendrick Lamar

• Musicology - Prince

• Touch of Grey - War on Drugs

Pretty good!Finally, check out one of my proudest achievements of playlisting, the 13+ sunny hours of "Go West, Young Lady", which I made for my friend Hilary's cross-country drive two years ago. It's painstakingly sequenced and regularly updated, so you can just hit play anyplace you see a song you like and it should flow well from there. Good for road trips, BBQs, and even shitty rainy days like today.One last big thing: Cymbal launched it's Android and iOS 2.0 versions yesterday and the response has been great. If you're not on the app, hop on. I'd love to see you there!

Ten Songs for May, 2016

Listen to this playlist on Spotify or YouTube“Moonlight”, Ariana Grande (Spotify / YouTube) – Ariana is an old soul. Sure, there’s something politically regressive about it, but don’t deny her romance for the sake of correctness. He’s bossy because he makes you dance; Sweet like candy, but he’s such a man; he calls you moonlight.“No Problems”, Chance the Rapper, Lil Wayne, and 2 Chainz (Spotify / YouTube) – I don’t know how much of a christian rapper Chance really is. All I know is his music has the spirit in him in just the way Kanye once did, and that makes him a Chicago rapper above everything else.“Drone Bomb Me”, ANHONI (Spotify / YouTube) – Antony Hegarty lets synths plunk and ripple like drops of digital blood into the mud, singing in her beautiful, deep, loving voice about the impersonal ways we sentence strangers across the world to death.“Timeless”, James Blake (Spotify / YouTube) – This was supposed to have a Kanye feature on it, but it’s probably better off. It breathes freely and builds in a way that would be hard to match in verse. I’d definitely take a Young Thug remix, though.“Man”, Skepta (Spotify / YouTube) – I don’t care what they says on the radio, I’m buying the conspiracy theories that Skepta is going on about Dizzee Rascal. This is basically grime beef fanfic and I am on board for whatever the “tracksuit mafia” is.“GIRLS”, Joey Purp and Chance the Rapper (YouTube) – I don’t really go to the club (I write a newsletter sometimes). But I gotta believe that even if there aren’t that many people reading Ta-Nehisi Coates, they’re probably the ones who can designate drive you home.“Threat of Joy”, the Strokes (Spotify / YouTube) – All we want Julian Casablancas to do is charm us again. He doesn’t have to try, in fact it’s better if he doesn’t. Just please start out your song as a pouty little boy, briefly get hardcore, then turn back into a dad. It’s not asking much.“(Joe Gets Kicked Out Of School for Using) Drugs with Friends (But Says This Isn’t a Problem)”, Car Seat Headrest (Spotify) – Since this ridiculous title takes most of my line, he can have the rest, too. “Last week I took acid and mushrooms / I did not transcend, I felt like a walking piece of shit.”“In Movement”, Jack DeJohnette, Ravi Coltrane, and Matt Garrison (iTunes) – What you’ll hear first is Matt Garrison thumbing broadly on the bass, like the glint of constellations; Then Garrison again, on synthesizers like spacecraft sensors signalling descent. Then Coltrane, lining out the horizon. Then DeJohnette, giving the terrain contour and meaning. Then landing.“True Love Waits”, Radiohead (Spotify) – Sick and desperate, heartbreak is. Ugly and blotchy. Shortsighted and unforgiving. Numb and drained. Memories pull you away from reality to an observation deck over a dead landscape. It won’t answer you. 

Ali Farka Toure with Ry Cooder, Talking Timbuktu (World Circuit, 1994) (Spotify / YouTube)

There’s a lot in modern music that’s racist, imperialistic, or just frankly exploitative. The most famed variety, where a white artist appropriates some non-white music to white audiences with incomparable success, is often not nefarious or intentioned on any individual’s part: All artists borrow, regardless of who they are, but some find some success others don’t, and that has a lot to do with who gets what access and appeals to what audiences. Its diffuseness is its pervasiveness, and without culpability there is self-serving rationalization. If there’s any honest motive in this, we'd say, it’s that listeners enjoy plenty of music from outside their locality. Why live in a small world when you can live in a big one?This sort of worldiness was partly borne of a new media world that became possible after World War Two introduced technologies like the transistor radio at reasonable cost to a vastly expanded middle class. Suddenly, it was easy and cheap to disseminate information to places and between populations that had been largely inaccessible. Broader audiences liked new styles, but not necessarily from new people. The result: Lots of white people playing foreign sounds. Not to discount the work they made, but this has to give some of the explanation why Indian music finds some of its greatest penetration coming from four white men from England, or why black blues music finds some of its greatest popularity from five white men from England. This is not to say that the blame belongs to explorative artists, or even to the audiences who appreciate them, or that exploration is the same as exploitation. One of the most enduring legacies of this early period of popular media has to do with business and the infinite ways hustlers found to turn young audiences’ passion for new sounds into a healthy buck. Take the portrayal of Beatles and Stones manager Allen Klein, prominently featured in the new biography of Paul McCartney, who preached, “Don’t take twenty percent of an artist’s income—give them eighty percent of yours”. Or the gleam, visible from space, in the eyes of artist managers as myriad dirty teenagers pilgrimed to Woodstock. To these enterprising bloodsuckers, the muddy melee at Altamont could only be seen as a valuable lesson: Get the kids what they want, without any unreasonable discomfort. Likewise to one of the most conspicuous tags of exploitation, the genre “World Music”. It lives well at the Grammy’s, a place where lots of expired ideas still have currency, and in record stores, wherever they persist. In both contexts, qualification for the genre seemed to be simply not being Western European or American, even regardless of how that music itself sounds. The LA Times acknowledged this issue in 1997 by identifying the “understandable complications in compressing 75% or more of the world's music into a single award category”, which the award show attempted to remedy, making an “initial attempt to resolve the problem by broadening the definition of world music to include non-Western classical music.” Its organizing principle appears to be the assertion that everything that doesn’t sound like it came from here should live in the back left corner of the store.Certain non-Western musics get their own space, though, but not without exceptional, transcendent attention. People about my age may not remember Ry Cooder winning “Best Tropical Latin Performance” at the 40th Grammy’s in 1998, but they may remember the Buena Vista Social Club, for whom Cooder won the Grammy, performing, and they are quite likely to have encountered its eponymous album, which sold 12 million albums and was probably in your home.It’s a shame that Ry Cooder, an old Rolling Stones collaborator, won for that record, because it suggests that he was another in a rich, Kleinish tradition of fleecing talent. Another huge victory for the unworthy imperialist cause of “World Music”. In fact, he was able to bring a fantastic group to new light and present their music in a manner that was ostensibly authentic to their scene, rather than pandering or painting a cartoonish version of an exotic world.This is a lifelong interest of Cooder’s, who’s maybe the best living guitarist. He landed a “Best World Music” award at the 36th Grammy’s for A Meeting By the River with Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, and explored (no shit) Mexican / Irish fusion with the Chieftains on San Patricio. His Paris, Texas soundtrack His Paris, Texas soundtrackEach of his collaborations are curious and serious about his collaborators; He tries to make a record that sounds real, and if possible introduce something wholly new to complement it. Maybe none pull that off better than his 1994 collaboration with the late Malian blues guitarist Ali Farka Toure, Talking Timbuktu.Talking Timbuktu does a lot of things that seem impossible, impossibly well. The first is that its premise, a white American blues guitarist goes to Africa to play with a Malian master to get in touch with the roots of the genre, isn’t lame or condescending. The second, even harder to make sense of, is that it’s a modern blues record that doesn’t feel entirely worn out or trite – a true feat, given that Cooder was an important if peripheral figure in that great moment of appropriation as a Rolling Stones sideman, and then later churned out some of that unmistakable J.D. and the Straight Shot lazy white dude blues schmaltz on 1979’s Bop Till You Drop (there’s some really cool shit on that album, but close your eyes and imagine “Down in Hollywood” or “The Very Thing That Makes You Rich [Makes Me Poor]” is sung by James Dolan himself). Third, hardest of all to pull off, is that it sounds both as elemental as the earliest blues recordings, and present with a kind of guitar playing that should be where blues goes if it ever resurrects itself.Most of the credit here goes to Cooder’s chosen subject, Ali Farka Touré, one of the most visible Malian guitarists during his lifetime. That was a heavy mantle to carry. Malian music birthed the blues, and to this day it’s a wellspring of some of West Africa’s most indelible music: from Samba Toure to Bassekou Kouyate to Songhoy Blues, some of the strongest voices coming from the region were born there and draw from that tradition.Touré had been recording consistently for the two decades preceding Talking Timbuktu. His eponymous album is a beautiful, spare work of static harmony, kindred to great American acoustic blues recordings like Lightnin’ Hopkins’ Blues in My Bottle or Muddy Waters’ Folk Singer. He’d collaborated with American blues artists before, like with Taj Mahal, to beautiful effect.Cooder, who was on the other side of a career moment that involved a fair amount of chorus pedals before this date, accompanies Touré in clean, bright tones, as do the murderer’s row of sidemen that include Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and bassist John Patitucci. His production, like his work on the Paris, Texas soundtrack, is luminous and open. Touré sings in 11 different languages over the course of the record, and nine of the ten songs are his originals. The album’s two headliners play off the other expertly; “Lasidan”, sits on a chugging riff, toggling between two chords, Touré diving spritely in and out and Cooder seconding everything on guitar. The most lovely moment on the album is when the looped chant of “Soukora” lifts from Touré’s ever-lifting vocal line to a lead line from Cooder voiced in thirds, almost like flamenco guitar. And the most validating to the whole project comes on “Amandrai”, when Ry voices Ali’s lyric in sustained, pinched notes. You can hear, as the note breaks through the air around 3:30 in, Touré says the guitarist’s name aloud, like he’s pointing to his lofting lines floating weightlessly a mile above.Ali Farka Touré didn’t need any help making the music he wanted to make. He played the guitar like nobody else right up until he died of cancer, but his best instrument might have been feeling – the sound of a room, silence, the power of a repeated note. Things anyone can understand. Instead, listeners needed help hearing him. His music is all resonance, but is filed from sight. Those are the muddy straights Talking Timbuktu navigates. That would be enough, to bring a more than worthy artist into light, but instead we also got a natural collaboration, two sounds related in tradition and feeling but from different sides of the record store. A victim of worldiness. Lucky for us, music goes wherever we want as soon as the cashier hands it back.

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."May, 2016April, 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