The Retrographer, Issue 20 (August, 2 0 1 6)

The Retrographer, Issue 20 (August, 2 0 1 6)

Bulletins

  • Sorry for the massive delay on this issue! This newsletter was accidentally flagged and then forgotten about by TinyLetter, and only just yesterday reinstated. Bummer, but I'm back Expect September’s coming soon after this one.

  • Not a big Donald Glover guy, but this is cool.

  • Life on the subway.

  • If you haven’t seen M.I.A.’s “Borders” video, I’m not sure how I didn’t include it until now.

  • Young Thug doing it.

Ten Songs for August, 2 0 1 6

Listen to this playlist on Spotify and YouTube

“22 (OVER S∞∞N) - Bob Moose Extended Cab Version)”, Bon Iver (Spotify / YouTube) – Justin Vernon used to sing about the past, but now he’s consumed by imminence. I chalk up his novel shift into constructive production to the tutelage of Mr. West and James Blake respectfully.

“Adults”, CEREAL (Spotify) – The drama of this argument builds and builds, but it’s delivered with darkness and resignation. “Standing kitchen screaming / Really breathing” as drones build under plodding doubled guitar. Synths that sound like oboes, a trumpet that staggers in like a morbid little balloon deflating amongst “Laughing Stock”-like quietude.

“We”, Mac Miller and CeeLo Green (Spotify / YouTube) - I kind of can’t believe this isn’t Thundercat gessoing the chorus with backup vocals, but then again CeeLo always had a similarly impressionistic darkness in his style. Mac, for his part, admirably stays out of the way.

“Diddy Bop”, Noname, Cam O’Bi, and Raury (Spotify / YouTube) – Noname has been a consistent leader of the new school. Even if she’s as skilled a storyteller as Chance, her name isn’t where his is. She meets Cam’s starry nocturne with nostalgia and musicality.

“Season 2 Episode 3”, Glass Animals (Spotify / YouTube) – With its deft, baroque riffs and powered up Super Mario synths, Davey Bayley lends an unreality to the prose of slackerdom. I guess that happens when you eat mayonnaise from a jar while getting blazed.

“Wyclef Jean”, Young Thug (Spotify / YouTube) – Rapping over reggae is far from novel, but like all things Thugger, he makes it his own and leads it someplace new. The backup vocals, “I do maye, I do”, take it from Jamaica straight back to Africa, and then back to Atlanta again.

“Nights”, Frank Ocean (Spotify) – Obscured by all of his known enviable strengths, Frank is now one of the best lyricists we’ve got. It’s the juxtaposition of tiny quotidian tragedies, phrased so, alongside their psychological tolls. “Did you call me from a seance? You were from a past life. Hope you’re doing well, bruh.”

“Black Beatles”, Rae Sremmurd and Gucci Mane (Spotify / YouTube) – Referring to one of Ye’s most celebrated lines: “What’s a Black Beatle anyway, a fucking roach? Guess that’s why they got me sitting in fucking coach.” Swae, Jimmy, and Wizzop put more cracks in that glass ceiling.

“Nas Album Done”, DJ Khaled and Nas (Spotify / YouTube) – Khaled looms even as he stands aside, but let’s talk about Bevel. The first time I heard about the specialty beard trimmer brand was from ads on Taxstone’s podcast. Black-owned business buying influencer marketing on a Nas-helmed Khaled song isn’t selling out, it’s buying in. “So I'm askin' Gs to go in their pockets / The racial economic inequality, let's try to solve it.”

“Ruby”, Charly Bliss (Spotify / YouTube) – I think about the Pixies, Hole, Veruca Salt, Ten Things I Hate About You. That bass is so crunchy and Veronica Hendricks’ voice is so unaffected by her environs, even as she wakes up on the subway with blood in her hair.

One Album for August, 2 0 1 6

Dave Matthews Band, “Under the Table and Dreaming” (Spotify / YouTube)

In the case of The People vs. David Matthews, the prosecution claims:

  • Damages from accepting your parents’ evaluation of Dave Matthews as “good, unlike most music these days”

  • Damages from then making that same argument to your friends

  • Damages from later realizing Dave Matthews’ voice sounds sort of like Scott Stapp’s

  • Damages from embarrassment over having liked a band with a full-time violinist

  • Damages from thinking the hippie stance of Dave’s fans forgave his all-white audiences

  • Damages from your casual usage of his first name

  • Damages from realizing the band had a saw composting differently from its fans

  • Damages from watching the “Eh Hee” video

  • Damages from noticing his frequent appearances in late-period Adam Sandler movies

  • Damages from risking your parents’ life savings downloading the whole DMB catalog on LimeWire

  • Damages from spending your parents’ life savings on Dancer merch

  • Damages from reading Ray Paczkowski’s Wikipedia page

  • Damages from feeling weird about admitting you ever liked jam band music

  • Damages from regretting once finding “Crash” kind of romantic and sexy

  • Damages from remembering choreographing a dance at camp ending with “lights down you up and die” from “Ants Marching”

  • Damages from encountering people who still like the stuff you loved when you were 14

  • Damages from realizing how work you put into separating yourself from the music you liked as a kid

Yield the floor to the defense. Today I'm going to ask you to temporarily divorce your idea of a piece of music from its context. Yes, context is important, because it can frame creative circumstances, and show evidence of change. But in the case of Dave Matthews, especially on his first full-length, context is a distraction. His story is about music made vulnerable to its listeners. 

I know how people who don’t like Dave Matthews think about his fans. And I know how his fans think about people who don’t like Dave Matthews. Both view one another with a dismissive high-mindedness, like their position on either side of the topic is implicit proof of superior taste. Matthews’ fans claim the quality of his music partly on its particular characteristics. His songs bear career-long dabbles in a quilted yet typifying range of styles, taking flights in bluegrass, fusion, and latin. He’s supported by his band’s unconventional and able instrumentation (LeRoi Moore’s many horns, Boyd Tinsley’s violin, Carter Beauford’s jazzy drums, the occasional blues harmonica solo feature from John Popper). The band picked up in popularity among listeners who felt they filled a needed space for eclectic music, and soon grew into a huge movement. They’re sometimes compared to modern jam bands, but their fanbase was much larger. At their height the band played Giants Stadium, a venue booked by Taylor Swift and Beyonce today, nine times in a three year period.

Critics of the band saw things much differently. The qualities that define the Dave Matthews Band – their stylistic tourism, easy-listening sound, not to mention Matthews’ froggy voice, vague lyricism, and cornball romanticism – came off as counterfeit authenticity and repelled many (Robert Christgau wrote of his first album, 1994’s Under the Table and Dreaming, “He's as bland as a tofu sandwich.”) However, in the long term, these stances became corroborations, not pure arguments, for or against the Dave Matthews Band. The actual qualities of the music were just supporting evidence for a backlash that tracked in intensity with the band’s rise in popularity.

Early on, Matthews was a Virginia-based songwriting bartender who gigged with local jazz musicians. But his following grew as he toured, and through the 90s the band developed a large, dedicated following of fans of a certain breed: young folks in cargo shorts and pooka-shell necklaces, baby boomers who don’t like rap, people who think mainstream music is by definition bad. That fanbase united an unlikely coalition of fratty types looking for chill jams and hippies who thought the band and its signifiers represented an enlightened and endangered tradition in music.

The topic was always moot, frankly: Matthews was not the single alternative panacea music needed to escape the imagined monotony of the mainstream, and no fanbase has a monopoly on yuppie, weed-smoking, “this is real music” types. It was never people who loved mainstream music against people who didn’t, that was always a straw-man claim made by listeners. Rebellious antiestablishmentarianism has been big money in pop music since Elvis. Rather, the rift over the Dave Matthews Band is primarily a factionalist argument within the pluralism of 90s alternative music. Fans wanted them to represent what mainstream music wasn’t, even as his music was going mainstream.

But Matthews’ primacy in that debate is over. Now, in 2016, he is far from his commercial peak, and the band’s output has shriveled in the wake of Moore’s death. Setting this varied and oppositional discourse aside, there is still music, and in the case of the Dave Matthews Band, one interesting and foundational album that charted the band’s music, as well as listeners’ sentiment one way or another, through a dominating 15-year stretch of platinum records.

Fans liked Under the Table and Dreaming in part because it was hard to place stylistically. Songs are longer and full of mumbly bass riffs, but don’t have the unbounded, ponderous soloing that defines jam bands. Its deviation from the foundations of rock music recommends an alternative tag, but it sticks out alongside Radiohead or Nirvana. “Satellite”’s banjo-like fingerpicking shares a thread with Tinsley’s fiddle that might place the music as country or bluegrass, but nobody who’d heard either of those styles of music would feel right about such a placement. “Rhyme & Reason” gets heavy, but it’s not slowcore. “Jimi Thing” sounds nothing like Hendrix, it’s named for a condom.

This is part of the point. Matthews stylistic fluency kept his music a moving target. He can employ seemingly incongruous elements comfortably. Whether such combinations are tasteful are up for debate. Under the Table and Dreaming does so down a defined emotional arc. Beginning with the supportive “The Best of What’s Around” and the playful “What Would You Say”, the music is all about colors. But as the record progresses, Matthews sinks deeper into darkness and introspection. If his big hits are sometimes derided for their basicness, his album cuts show a little more vulnerability and self-consciousness. “#34” and “Typical Situation” are more feeling and fluid (though hardly scot-free; his propensity for the king of cheap reductionist sentiment specific to weak alternative music is neatly presented in “Typical Situation”’s refrain: “Why are you different? Why are you that way? If you don’t get in line we’ll lock you away.” That’s the musical equivalent of a Che Guevara t-shirt at Hot Topic.)

Who doesn’t have occasional moments of self-parody? What’s nice is that Matthews seems to find himself out of his songs’ occasional cul-de-sacs in musical movements that evolve in step with their emotional content. “Dancing Nancies” swaps from minor to major whenever Matthews dark introspection gets knocked out realizing the enormity of the universe. Sure, there’s lots of components here for haters to hate (soprano sax, slap bass, mandolin, kitchen sink). But if the music is arguably sometimes awkwardly amalgamated, that doesn’t much affect the narrative or emotional character. Dave Matthews is trapped in his head most of the time, and grateful for the moments he’s freed by a little optimism and perspective. He’s best-served in this regard by Beauford and Moore, who are capable of delicate and unobtrusive accompaniment when warranted. Whatever you think of Dave Matthews, that’s what this music’s about,: Trying to get free of ruminative struggle with perspective. Sometimes he succeeds, like “Warehouse”, and sometimes he doesn’t, like on “Rhyme & Reason”. And like somebody really tussling with their own way of seeing things, the music never seems to settle any place permanently.

A forgiving listen to Under the Table and Dreaming, temporarily setting aside the popular narratives around the artist and his fans, has to allocate some credit for Dave Matthews’ honesty about his struggles. Like how the record sounds or not, that’s what this is really about. He doesn’t speciously appeal to some identifying philosophy or claim to solely hold the flag for “real” or “alternative” music. He was just going through his shit, and some people loved it. The second part is what got him into trouble.

He stays in trouble. Like his lesser contemporaries Jack Johnson and Dispatch, it’s hard to find major or acclaimed artists cite him. Chalk it up to the narcissism of small differences; Chalk it up to the music sucking. He was big, and now he’s invisible, either cut out or woven in.

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."