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- The Retrographer, Issue 19 (July, 2 0 1 6)
The Retrographer, Issue 19 (July, 2 0 1 6)
The Retrographer, Issue 19 (July, 2016)
The “So You Think You’ve Earned a Vacation” Edition
Results of my first annual “Song of the Summer” Readers' Poll came in and guess what? There was no overlap between any of the responses. None! Okay, there were only four responses, but you’d imagine we’d end up with at least more than one “One Dance”, right? Nope. Our legendary readers’ responses have been compiled into a playlist available here. They fit reader Maeve Gallagher’s summer jam criteria, which she describes like this:
“It has to sound equally at home at the pool, at a party, and on those humid nights when your air conditioner is broken and you're sitting by your window in your underwear thinking about nothing but how much you're sweating. It can fade into the background of a party when you're having a conversation as easily as it can be turned up to dance to later in the night. “
It’s August, and the whole world is either on vacation or in the empty world the vacationers left behind. Musicians aren’t so different. They’re clowning around in department stores, watching TV high, noodling at garden parties, forgetting deadlines. Next time you read the Retrographer, the world will be starting up again. For now, we enjoy the silence.
Ten Songs for July 2016
“Real Love Baby”, Father John Misty (Spotify / YouTube) – You kind of can’t help but think that Josh Tillman’s point with this groovy, “Summer of ‘69” earworm is to remind you how sleazy those old free love types sound whispering in your ear. “Wait until you taste me!” Right.
“Stuck”, The Aces (Spotify / YouTube) – How cool does Cristal Ramirez’s voice sound when the beat drops out before the last chorus? It’s relaxed but rough throughout, never testing itself, before pushing out of its casing for just a second, so you know she means it.
“Because I’m Me”, The Avalanches and Camp Lo (Spotify / YouTube) – Shouts to stepsister Grace, a new mom, who bought me Since I Left You for Christmas when I was in High School. “Frontier Psychiatrist” was the title and opening song for my college radio show, but “Because I’m Me” could’ve easily been, too.
“Go Off”, M.I.A. (Spotify / YouTube) – Maya says she’s done, and that may be true, but why now? Maybe she doesn’t feel it anymore, even if it doesn’t feel that way in this steely appearance. I won’t be upset if this comes after the “Bad Girls” remix on her greatest hits.
“Intro”, Weval (Spotify / YouTube) – A master class in drama and development: One simple riff, a constant transforming as light changes around it. See its illuminated faces, see its shadows, see its contours, see its silhouette.
“Groovy Tony / Eddie Kane”, Schoolboy Q and Jadakiss (Spotify / YouTube) – Q has been vocal and militant in our new moment of police brutality awareness, and his point is this: A society pledged to persecute and eliminate you has earned none of your compliance or cooperation.
“1st Day Out Tha Feds”, Gucci Mane (Spotify / YouTube) – I’ll take “My own my mama turned her back on me – and that’s my mama!” over “My mama don’t like you, and she likes everyone” any day.
“1990x”, Maxwell (Spotify / YouTube) – Maxwell isn’t here for you, or your momentary fads. He rolls in over the ridge like a thunderhead and pours down around you. Then he’s gone, with no hint of when he’ll be back again, or in what form.
“For Marmish Pt. 2”, Floating Points (Spotify / YouTube) – Certainly a spiritual sister to my favorite song from the producer’s 2015 debut, but taken to its ambient, meditative extreme.
“Contain (Cedar Version)”, Ian William Craig (Spotify / YouTube) – Craig starts out like “Rain Song”, but proceeds as elegantly as he begins. Closing a record that sometimes felt preciously precise, this moment is like a full exhalation in its naturalness.
One Album for July, 2016
Michael Volpe met Brandon McCartney on MySpace in the Fall of 2007. Like countless other musicians their age, their careers would have been impossible without the internet. The old world of music was built on tight control – not just in how music got out and what it cost, but who worked with whom, and in what capacity. But the new world had to learn quickly to turn to voices wherever they drew attention. Volpe and McCartney’s relationship was an exceptional example.
McCartney’s group, the Pack, had a hit called “Vans” that reached Volpe, who hunted down the rapper’s email from his personal page to send him beats under his moniker Clams Casino. Given where McCartney would take the genre, Volpe’s pursuit of the rapper many now know as Lil B was either kismet or prescience. Together they changed the sound of popular music.
Lil B’s output can fairly be called performatively absurdist. In the last decade he’s released almost 50 mixtapes, including one with almost 700 songs, and 10 albums,, almost all of which came after his fated connection with Clams. Rap fans compare everything against their own legends and landmarks, with some peaks casting shadows over almost all others. Yet Lil B put out more music that almost anyone could consume, let alone reasonably evaluate. Even if you dug through all of those tapes, you’d never find anything a rap formalist would dub “classic”. He’s not interested in playing by those rules.
Lil B’s music itself is surreal and borderless – many rap fans thought he was awful, and if you judge him using the same standards you’d apply to Kendrick Lamar or Big L, you might conclude the same. For one, he won’t commit to a song as the unitary vessel for an idea. In the same way 50 Cent claimed he’s a P.I.M.P., Lil B claimed he’s Ellen Degeneres, Miley Cyrus, Bill Clinton, Paris Hilton, Tupac, the devil, Jesus, the police, Fabio, Katy Perry, Mel Gibson, Stephen Hawking. The hooks of all these songs were so formulaic they became almost episodic. He blurred boundaries out of recognition, and lots of listeners found that disorienting, stultifying, lazy, flattening. Others found it freeing.
Regardless whether you see Lil B as rap’s apostle of freedom, he clearly broke the rules and made a world around himself. He is the evangelist of his own pseudo-religious “based” spiritual philosophy, which elevates positivity and possibility beyond all else. He claims to be the temporal plane’s voice for a deity called “The Based God”, which voices itself through his Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter pages. Whether he believes in this faith or not is moot: The omnipotence he claims is just a proxy for the clear, open view of music he achieved rising above the restrictive rules of rap and touching anyone he wanted through the internet. The way he sees it, “Everybody that likes me online is my friend,” and this magnanimity has built him a cult of fans who look these ideas far beyond the context of music.
These are the emotional stakes of Lil B’s music. “I didn't stick to the regular script of regular hip hop and I explained my feelings,” Lil B said of his work during this period. “I cried for the positives." Clams Casino was the producer that evoked this in his most indelible works.
The strongest example of their connection might be “I’m God”, a Clams beat that may as well be Lil B’s psalm. At the time, Lil B was an oddity on the edge of the internet, and Clams was living in his mom’s basement in New Jersey finishing his training to become a physical therapist. The two artists emerged with this track together. “That was a major turning point for me for realizing where I fit in musically,” Clams said of the beat. “That song was a very important turning point as far as discovering my identity and sound. I skimmed through and first got a glimpse I would make it to this point. It's where I found the spot where I fit in musically — which is nowhere really. I feel like I've always been on my own, and I've realized I don't really fit in anywhere.”
The expansive singularity of Clams’ sound identified a sonic context for Lil B, and their synthesis elevated them together. The music industry hadn’t created Lil B, and they weren’t exactly encouraging producers who built beats around Imogen Heap samples, either. But his ascendancy, even given the number of people who thought he was willfully creating bad music, inspired a growing multitude who wanted to be liberated from formalism and share in the spirit of process.
Artists further from the edges of the internet turned to Clams for beats. Their association with him and, by proxy, Lil B’s lawless utopia, gave credibility that molded careers. Clams appears on some of the earliest major releases from artists like Mac Miller and the Weeknd, both legitimate pop stars by now, but back then were experimenting with what mixtapes meant in the era of the internet. Beats for Miller, like “One Last Thing” and “Angels”, were equal parts monesterial and oceanic, unusual for the rapper’s early period of marginal frat rap. His beats for the Weeknd contributed to the new face of R&B, which was becoming defined by an ongoing prescription pill addiction.
But none of Clams work would expose or establish him like the beats he gave to then-unknown A$AP Rocky for his landmark first mixtape, LiveLoveA$AP. Clams’ beats made up three of its first four tracks, five overall. They’re the moments where the narcotic experience identified on tracks like “Purple Swag” or “Kissin’ Pink” find their resonance. “Palace”, which opens the tape, is built around some sort of chanting army of monks, and positions Rocky like an outer-lands overlord. Paired with Rocky’s intermittent Houston-honoring chopped-and-screwed vocals on “Bass”, or whispered chorus on “Wassup”, or dispair on “Leaf”, Clams creates an emotional palette that bleeds out from the music.
Famously, Rocky signed a $3,000,000 deal on the strength of LiveLoveA$AP, which is still one of the most popular ever released according to many of the major outlets that distributed it. Clams’ sound and feeling seeped into broad sections of mainstream rap and R&B, to Drake and Beyonce, and is now sometimes referred to as “cloud rap” or “sadcore”. But that moment was also so far the height of Clams’ personal significance as a producer, with little further penetration until last month’s 32 Levels.
At the height of his moment, Clams Casino put out three beat tapes, including 2011’s Instrumentals and 2012’s Instrumental Mixtape 2. The former was unheralded and is a representative document of the unique voice he brought to production; The latter had fanfare and contains his most famous beats and remixes, including work for Mac Miller, Lil B, the Weeknd, and A$AP Rocky.
If you care about rap, it’s possible to listen to that first tape and have little familiarity with the songs made from it (though songs like Lil B’s “Real Shit from a Real Nigga” certainly deserve to be heard). It’s much harder for the second. But what’s remarkable about Instrumental Mixtape 2 is that it plays like a work all its own. Without verses, the subtleties of each beat’s development are foregrounded: They’re full of elements that are easily obscured by an MC. The airy hiss over “Swervin’”, for example, invokes the naturalistic sound analog tape music. They build like ambient works, ironically only breaking their medicated haze on Squadda B’s percussive “Kissing on My Syrup”. Compiled together, each beat reveals a hidden co-position as experimental music sharing DNA with the ambient works of Aphex Twin or the Cocteau Twins. His remixes of the biggest songs from Lana Del Rey and Washed Out, two of the internet’s greatest fascinations during that period, bear no resemblance to the source material, or to pop songs, rap beats, or R&B instrumentals in any form whatsoever. These do, explicitly, what Clams’ music had done from the start: Free the listener from restrictive preconceptions.
It’s rare that beat tapes let you hear them on their own, as the producer made them and as their artists heard them, not as their genre defined them. But that’s Instrumental Tape 2’s unusual read. This duality is also, apparently, Clams Casino’s intention for his works. In talking about 32 Levels, he revealed that there’s “two whole versions of the album — one instrumental and one with the artist contributions. So it's got layers for the audience to explore.” Instrumental Tape 2 is, even years after its alteration of our popular sonics, still a view of its field that rises above.
Near the end of the tape is a song called “Unchain Me”, where a children’s choir supports a lead vocal obscured by misty synths, reflecting in a pool of echo before returning again and again. It’s a voice that calls out to sisters and brothers to come together. It's based.
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."