The Retrographer, Issue 21 (September, 2 0 1 6)

October 15, 2016

Nick Cave, Moses Sumney, Danny Brown, Preoccupations, Cymbals Eat Guitars, Lydia Loveless, Dirty Projectors, Isaiah Rashad, Bon Iver, Solange, and Aretha Franklin.The Retrographer, Issue 21 (September, 2 0 1 6)

Bulletins

Ten Songs for September, 2 0 1 6

Listen to this playlist on Spotify and YouTube

“Rings of Saturn”, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (Spotify / YouTube) – The title of this song isn’t ever named in its lyrics. Yet those rings are present in their otherworldly permanence, ancient and ineffable in our minds and beyond, as impossible as they are eternal.

“Lonely World”, Moses Sumney (Spotify / YouTube) – You could be convinced looking at the cover shots of Sumney’s “Loney World” that he was going for a Miles Davis thing; Even more so, maybe, hearing his voice, like a trumpet with a mute in it, soar high above Gil Evans horns.

“Really Doe”, Danny Brown, Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, and Earl Sweatshirt (Spotify / YouTube) – Four legitimately different rappers, three of whom are impossible to replicate (sorry, Soulo). Kendrick starts his verse in the vein of “Swimming Pools”, but then takes it somewhere else completely. Danny starts it out dusted, Earl closes out with the persistent ham fists.

“Anxiety”, Preoccupations (Spotify / YouTube) – Definitely one of the loudest shows I’ve ever seen. Afterwards Ethan and I stood on the sidewalk just kind of laughing dizzily. This was before this record came out but even then this song stood out, despite its own volume.

“Shrine”, Cymbals Eat Guitars (Spotify / YouTube) – Standing on the boardwalk of Ocean Grove, looking over at Asbury Park, thinking about all the time spent, elapsed, and gone. All the people who were there in the past, who aren’t here anymore, until conjured by memory. “We’re all just wishing you were here, now we shiver in the sunshine.”

“Midwestern Guys”, Lydia Loveless (Spotify / YouTube) – A little “You’re So Vain”, a little PJ Harvey, a little Car Wheels on Gravel Road. A lot of fuck you. How much bullshit are you willing to put up with? More importantly, how much do you only realize the next morning?

“Keep Your Name”, Dirty Projectors (Spotify / YouTube) – “Idiot Wind” 2016. Dave Longstreth is pissed an, ahem, unnamed former collaborator / lover desired more glitz than him. (Or did she?) “What I want from art is truth, what you want is fame.” Professorial and pompous, sure. But cutting.

“Bday”, Isaiah Rashad, Deacon Blues, and Kari Faux (Spotify / YouTube) – Kari Faux’s second appearance in the Retrographer this year. Look out for her. It’s Rashad’s first, but this record, with vespertine flows and velvet beats represented well here, is near the top of ‘16 for me.

“8 (circle)”, Bon Iver (Spotify / YouTube) – This song is Justin Vernon’s bridge from his last record, the throughline back to “Beth/Rest” and all the candles he’s lit for Bonnie Raitt. He conceives of a reverent stillness, unwavering since he was back in that cabin. And on an album where his vocals are more manipulated than ever, here they’re clarion.

“Cranes in the Sky”, Solange (Spotify / YouTube) – There’s no cure for heartbreak, though damn if we don’t try. When you’re right in the thick of it, life’s a quest for diversions, any brief respite from the dull, static hum of longing. You can’t cure it, but it’ll cure you someday.

One Album for September, 2 0 1 6

Aretha Franklin, Young, Gifted, and Black (Atlantic Records, 1972) (Spotify / YouTube)

Otis Redding’s most famous song is “Respect”, a song he’s not famous for. It wasn’t until Aretha Franklin covered the song in 1967 that it achieved its position in the canon. Beyond a stylistic tune up, “Respect” became something different in Franklin’s performance. Some of this is because it came from the mouth of a woman. The flipped power dynamic reframed the story: Who’s coming home; Who’s got the money; Who won’t do whom wrong. 

Otis Redding released “Respect” on what many consider his best album, 1965’s Otis Blue. The record is the story of 60s soul in miniature: Redding wrote unbelievable songs for the album (“Respect”, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”, “Ole Man Trouble”), performed them as no one could, and pulled off the whole recording process, with prodigious facility, in just 24 hours. He also wasn’t allowed to appear on the cover, replaced by a sensual photo of a blonde white woman in a moment of repose. 

As with so much of African-American history, dispossession and dehumanization was the tariff levied on black music in the 1950s and 60s. Like Redding, Miles Davis famously wasn’t allowed on his own album covers for much of his early commercial peak, oftentimes replaced at the request of his record label by his then-wives. Black women weren’t uncommon replacements in cover art, and could pose softly on the fronts of their own records, too. But the power of their presence couldn’t be lost, even within the context of repression, with color correction and straightened hair and makeup. Take Franklin on her impeccable 1967 album I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, the album “Respect” appeared on. And just as on that song, the respect her beauty and power commanded couldn’t be painted over.1972’s Young, Gifted, and Black is Aretha Franklin’s greatest achievement. Throughout her career, which already spanned half her lifetime at the time of that release, Franklin made strides for feminism and civil rights, simply by lending incontrovertible perspective on songs like “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man”. Her music was political in the sense that she presented a voice too strong to ignore, if not embrace.

This moment in music nurtured a bloom in political speech. Artists who had heretofore struggled for scraps within a racialized industry spoke directly about their political concerns. Obie Benson, of the Four Tops, witnessed horrible police brutality in 1969 and went to work co-writing what would ultimately become Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”. When he presented it to his bandmates first, however, they rejected it for being a “protest song”. “No man, it's a love song, about love and understanding,” He argued futilely. “I'm not protesting, I want to know what's going on."

For these artists, the simple act of existing as a black person was a political act. Such is the revolution staged in Young, Gifted, and Black, an album of twelve songs that make no claims beyond these: I am in love, and I’m black. I am heartbroken, and I am black. I have family and friends and we are black. I’m black and I’m proud.

By naming her album Young, Gifted, and Black, Franklin frames its contents in the psychology of the listener, regardless what the subject matter of any of its individual songs is. To this point: In opening with a cover of Lulu’s “Oh Me Oh My (I’m A Fool For You Baby)”, a song about love, simple and pure, she challenges the listener to find anything wrong at all with its statement. Aretha admits a simple fact of life and love; Let the listener view their selves in their responses.

A summit of so many of R&B’s towering figures – Franklin, Billy Preston, Donny Hathaway, Burt Bacharach, Bernard “Pretty” Purdie, Jerry Butler, the Memphis Horns – Young, Gifted, and Black makes an expanding universe of soul music cohere. “Rock Steady” is a paragon of funk, on par in its party-starting minimalism as Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up”. “Day Dreaming” begins with an infinite whole tone sequence and glazed backup vocals, before settling into a tight, comfortable groove, and then finally dissipating, like a dream or a cloud of smoke, into hazy backups singing “Look at my love, floating away”. “The First Snow in Kokomo” views the presence of growth and change – learning the bass, having a baby – with wonder reserved for meteorological anomalies. “April Fools” and “All the King’s Horses”, all cascading strings and open guitar, sit suspended in dreamlike reverie before gliding down to reality again.

Like the Beatles, Franklin identifies life’s prosaic beauties as the phenomenology of psychedelica. Like the Beatles, this music is all about love. Unlike the Beatles, Aretha Franklin is a black woman, and the content of her character would be challenged irrespective of her message. If only all she needed was love. But her truths are deeper for her struggle, even when it’s only implicit to a given song. Her cover of “The Long and Winding Road” is distantly better than the original, not simply because it replaced Phil Spector’s marzipan production with a real gospel group, and reinterprets Paul McCartney’s sappy nostalgia as a document of perseverance, mountains climbed, and victories claimed. Her cover of Elton John’s “Border Song (Holy Moses)”, again towering over the original, cuts back to the source material in a way John could only reference: Wandering the desert, running from oppression, only belief leading the way.

Franklin’s thesis is stated in the track the album takes its name from, a cover of Nina Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black”. This song is part treatise, part encouragement, part sermon, part affirmation. It’s the hopeful voice of someone tasked with building belief and identity among a young generation – a generation who are today’s adults – that they deserve to believe themselves, even if the world presents discouraging evidence at every turn. “We must begin to tell our young,” she implores. Her agency is expressed in her self-identification, simply by making herself visible. She beats against the prevailing current by standing tall. That is what this album runs on. Simply by being there, by not moving out of the way, she states her humanity, even in spite of looming dehumanization.

Aretha graces the cover of Young, Gifted, and Black with honest beauty in the kaleidoscopic stained glass light of a church. She poses, in that scene, as proof of her claim: There she is. Not just young, gifted, and black, but human and real and present. And there she remains, for anyone who finds her, as a reminder that the words coming from her mouth mean something, just by being audible. Stand for her by letting it be heard.

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."