- The Retrographer
- Posts
- The Retrographer, Issue 18 (June, 2 0 1 6)
The Retrographer, Issue 18 (June, 2 0 1 6)
The Retrographer, Issue 18 (June, 2016)
Yo! it's Summer, so all sorts of fun stuff his happening:
My bigass Summer playlist is booming from every BBQ in the tri-state
Cymbal is doing fun stuff – check out #hiphop for all the summer jams you can handle
I played a solo set for the first time in years and it only threw me into a mild panic attack
My friend Matt's band the Shadowboxers put out this fantastic cover of Ariana Grande's "Greedy"
Gucci Mane is out of prison and watching his own movies on TV
I had the distinct pleasure of writing about an amazing document of James Brown's live band, paying homage to Allen Touissant, and sharing my love of the new French Montana and Kodak Black song (video is amazing too). I hope you enjoy this issue!Also: After last month's issue, I wanna do a poll of the "Song of the Summer". Hit me back on this email with your top three favorite songs of the summer in order and I'll put out the poll results in July's issue, likely coming in October (kidding). The rules are:
It has to have come out this year
Your number one pick gets three points, number two gets two, and number three gets one
You've gotta pick three different artists
Hit me up! The people wanna know.
Ten Songs for June, 2016
“Mardi Gras in New Orleans”, Allen Touissant (Spotify / YouTube) – The late Allen Touissant’s career was a paean to his home town, a stew of black, white, French, American. How apt and beautiful for him to leave us playing Professor Longhair like Gershwin’s “An American in Paris”.
“Wristband”, Paul Simon (Spotify / YouTube) – Starts with a plausible misadventure – locked out the backdoor of a gig, forced into the indignity of entering the front with the plebes. Zooms out to a vision of social unrest. Who knows if it makes any sense, but good to see he still cares.
“In Your Eyes”, BadBadNotGood and Charlotte Day Wilson (Spotify / YouTube) – Once categorized as a rap covers combo, BBNG became a backing band more than once, then wandered through more soul-sample impersonations, and have landed right in the source material itself, thankfully with enough taste to cede the floor to the sumptuous Wilson.
“Witness”, Clams Casino and Lil B (Spotify / YouTube) – Six years ago, the collaboration between these two then-unknowns changed rap music, making it looser, freer. You didn’t need to understand it, you just needed to feel it. “Money up to NASA”? Yeah.
“Lockjaw”, French Montana and Kodak Black (Spotify / YouTube) – Speaking of which: This is the sort of beat we got from the moment that yielded Clams, or French’s longtime collaborator Harry Fraud. Kodak and French are molly’s apologists, the beat as bowlegged as Kodak’s eyes.
“Thank You”, Blood Orange (Spotify) – If Freetown Sound listens to black life in America from a fire escape above an alley, this is the prayer said before bed, question asked to a mysterious God who brings daily news of strife. “Even if you promise me away, out of your gaze escape.”
“Intern”, Angel Olsen (Spotify / YouTube) – Like her forebearer Grace Slick, Olsen trips on the quiet drama of life with a big, powerful voice and instrumentals from another plane. Algorithmic recommendation alert: check out Frankie Rose’s Interstellar.
“Why You Always Hatin’?”, YG, Kamaiyah, and Drake (Spotify / YouTube) – An absolutely ideal assemblage of personalities, and with producer Scoop DeVille in tow, YG seems grateful to host all three. Call him a frontrunner, to me Drake is just a citizen of the world, and here’s hoping K goes platinum, too.
“Paul”, Big Thief (Spotify / YouTube) – I’ve woken up with this song in my head at least once, standing in the shower wondering about, “I’ll be your record player, baby, if you know what I mean” and “True Love Waits”, too, if this was how the other side sees it.
“Acceptance Speech”, Deerhoof (Spotify) – Decades on and Deerhoof still finds new ways to look at even the most prosaic rock ideas as abstract and bizarre. “We love to visit your towns”, Satomi Matsuzaki sings. Also: Greg Saunier is one of my ten favorite living drummers.
One Album for June, 2016
We don’t get to choose how we’re remembered, or if we’re remembered at all. Become great enough and you’ll secure an epitaph, a single line, just concise enough to mean nothing at all. Poor Prince, remembered tearily by millions on Instagram with “Purple Rain”, decontextualized from the coiled tension that made that emission mean anything. Watch the instant reduction of Kurt Cobain to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, Louie Armstrong to “Wonderful World”; Watch as a range of pinnacles get squashed so closely together they form a flat plane.
James Brown has been gone for a decade. How is he remembered? Would a kid raised from his first-remembered birthday parties to sing along to “I Feel Good” feel anything revisiting it? How about anyone inculcated about the “Godfather of Soul”? What happens if they’d heard “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” and, just hearing its paternalism, find it disqualifying of appreciation? What about if they got cynical about that all that received wisdom, and found this sad video of James a much-needed puncturing for all that hot air? Worst of all, what happens if they only really knew him from a parody?
Here’s what happens: Nothing. The influence, the career, the work, the innumerable splits and squeals and cape-drapings, it’s all heat burning off in the atmosphere. The story gets told, maybe, but the torch isn’t carried, and it lights no one.
James Brown, the man who named his backup singers the Famous Flames, is the musician in modern history who most deserves his fire fanned, because fire was the core of his being. Not a conflagration, leveling everything to charred remains, but controlled explosion, internal combustion. With his voice, his body, his being, Brown exerted energy too powerful for the fineness of his execution.
He grew harder and tighter and wilder as he became freer. Look to 1963’s Live at the Apollo, a perfect moment before R&B’s bifurcation from funk, which documents as few records can (Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club comes to mind) how sexy and sweltering the black music of that moment was live compared to its sanitized radio version.
By 1971, Brown had busted through the themes that kept his flammability private from the radio and records. He’d said it loud, he’s black and he’s proud; he felt like a sex machine. All the while, he’d built a legendary band of unparalleled discipline. Under impossible standards, they reached his expectations of precision and tightness. Like James, they could drive perilously close to the edge, without losing control of the wheel for a second. And in 1971 at Paris’ famous Olympia Theater, Brown produced the document of the peak of his powers, Love, Power, Peace.
Love, Power, Peace is the only live recording Brown ever made with the original members of his backing band, the J.B.’s. After this, bassist Bootsy Collins and his guitarist brother Catfish left the group, after one too many onstage acid trips, to join Parliament-Funkadelic, a group that changed the face of funk forever. It is, as such, both the pinnacle of Brown’s live act, and therefore arguably the strongest live show ever, and a dizzying possibilities of hitmaking, performance, and arrangement.
Hear Catfish refract from road-running rhythm to lead on “Sex Machine”; J.B.’s OG Fred Wesley’s greasy slide trombone on “Ain’t It Funky Now”; the interlocking Mechanical Turk arrangement that unfolds on “Super Bad”; the high, wailing horn harmonies and locomotive bassline on “Give It Up or Turnit Loose”; the borderline-silent drop at the beginning of “Soul Power”; the breakneck transitions of the album’s midsection medley. If they’re playing his early-period soul, or churning through the steps of his new hyper-syncopated formula, the J.B.’s play with an urgency and control that somehow channels whatever each song demands, yet performs it with continuity to everything else.
This is because no individual musician in the band approached its leader. Hear Brown switch from roman candle takeoff to intimated coo 2:13 into “Bewildered”; His preacherly introduction to “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World”; the panther’s screech that peels out at the end of “I Got the Feeling”. No feat was too far to reach in the torrid swing of the James Brown Show.
What Brown shouts on “Super Bad” – “Watch me! I got it!” – was prescient. He possessed something that wouldn’t be replicated again. Even the few competitors to his multivariate facility, Prince or Michael Jackson, never committed themselves so singularly to showmanship as to turn songs into blurs. Like how good food tastes when it’s hot, Brown’s has a totally different character simply based on the intensity of its execution. Take his rendition of “Georgia On My Mind” – always inextricable from Ray Charles’ version, Brown somehow pays homage to the genius, while showing how much was in his reach. To hear the driving breakbeat exchange between Bobby Byrd and Brown during “Soul Power” is to hear this music the way the generation of hip hop producers that wrote samples of Brown’s music into the DNA of the genre did.
Closing the set with a finale reprising “Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved”, Bobby Byrd ushers Brown offstage, but, as always with his schtick, James can’t quite say goodbye. But that was written in the script – he wanted to make it seem like he’d keep playing forever if someone didn’t stop him. Even as he limped toward the door, some uncontrollable urge would hurl him back, like a widow to a casket, at the microphone. It was all part of the illusion that for the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business, this wasn’t an act.
With all the light and heat James produced onstage to keep your attention, his reluctance to relinquish it without a fight seems fair. But he did keep coming back, in different capes, in the music of the people who loved him, only to reveal himself again and again. Look to the stage, and he's returning to the microphone.
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."