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- The Retrographer, Issue 22 (October, 2 0 1 6)
The Retrographer, Issue 22 (October, 2 0 1 6)
Like, Kali Uchis, Bruno Mars, NxWorries, Kero Kero Bonito, Andy Schauf, Amber Coffman, Samiyam, Earl Sweatshirt, Joyce Manor, Mick Jenkins, Pinegrove, Donald FagenThe Retrographer, Issue 22 (October, 2 0 1 6)
Bulletins
Ten Songs for October, 2 0 1 6
“Blah Loops”, Like and Kali Uchis (Spotify / YouTube) – Pac Div’s Like joins with Kali Uchis to channel Tribe and Digable Planets in their blunted 90s nostalgia. From the boom bap to the electric piano to the jazzy horn loop, Like is just in time for this weekend’s SNL.
“24k Magic”, Bruno Mars (Spotify / YouTube) – When you deal heavily in impersonation, you run the risk of being derivative, appropriating, corny, and basic. Given Bruno’s track record of copyright infringement and whiffs, you can forgive him for this Friday night pregame banger.
“Scared Money”, NxWorries (Spotify / YouTube) – Anderson .Paak’s project with producer Knxwledge helped get him on six songs from Dr. Dre’s Compton, and from there all the way to Ellen. Success won't forget him his roots: This release is even better and more vivid than his pre-fame tracks.
“Picture This”, Kero Kero Bonito (Spotify / YouTube) – This song is older, but the album is new and any opportunity is a ripe one to spread the doe eyed gospel of KKB, who view even today's most prosaic objects of cynicism with jubilance and novelty.
“To You”, Andy Shauf (Spotify / YouTube) – Something funny is going on with the time here, not just that it's slow, or that Shauf’s delivery is viscous and leaning. When the oboes join in, tempo takes its eye off the ball; in the chorus it taps back in.
“All To Myself”, Amber Coffman (Spotify / YouTube) – Her whilom beaux spat invective last month; Here's Coffman responding just with her humanity, playing it tender and straight, fact-checking her ex’s ugly portrait of her.
“Mirror”, Samiyam and Earl Sweatshirt (Spotify / YouTube) – Earl’s still talking about his mom, his rehab, and the opiates he wasn't supposed to be doing, just like he was the last time a president was elected. But even so he’s more of a man now, with beats from MF DOOM progeny like Sam.
“Fake ID”, Joyce Manor (Spotify / YouTube) – Relish in these lyrics: “Don't be fooled, the first two hours ruled. But then she seduced herself out of her room, singing, ‘What do you think about Kanye West?’ "I think that he's great, I think he's the best’ ‘Yeah, I think he's better than John Steinbeck! I think he's better than Phil Hartman!’”
“Spread Love”, Mick Jenkins (Spotify / YouTube) – I'm glad to hear Mick stretch out. He could always rap, but today spreads more than water. “The basis of his message was love. The basics: Just loving yourself and projecting your love onto others, treating the next man like your brother.”
“Aphasia (Audiotree Live Version)”, Pinegrove (Spotify / YouTube) – I write a music newsletter so I can explain how I feel about the songs I love. I can’t say more than this performance can. Some Jersey / Philly bands – Hop Along, Titus Andronicus, Pinegrove – let the truth cut through the pain but not leave it behind.
One Album for October, 2 0 1 6
Like Philip Roth, Donald Fagen focused on the city’s glow upon New York’s penumbra suburbs. No Bruce Springsteen or Stephen Sondheim, whose hot romanticism kept them peering to the Emerald City through the fence post obscurity of its provinces, Fagen vibrated beside his transistor radio to hear the stations local to the world capital of jazz. When he made his way to Bard College, up the Hudson, he played in a big band and met Walter Becker, and together formed Steely Dan. In truth, he hated it out in hilly New Jersey, but that priapic lit major could write about it like I-95 was newly carpeted.
Steely Dan, a band popular culture has compromised to politely deign “slick” and “jazzy” when not deriding it with all the resentments reserved for “adult” music, found its sound over close to a decade from 1972’s Can’t Buy a Thrill until 1980’s Gaucho. Becker and Fagen always had an irresistible predilection for upper structures; New York left those fingerprints, crawling by airwaves through the hi-fi.
A novelistic lyricist, Fagen’s embrace of jazz’s by-then-passé cool stops many at the door. But his development of this style tracked with the gradual development of Steely Dan as the main character of Aja, Gaucho, and 2000’s resumption Two Against Nature: An urbane fogey whose taboo encounters highlighted his seniority. Gaucho’s “Hey Nineteen” and Two Against Nature’s “Janie Runaway” “Cousin Dupree” and “What a Shame About Me” relished in their account of Autumn-Spring relationships, a perversion of the maturity of the music.
If he were a literary character, this late Steely Dan was Donald Fagen with his age distorted in grotesque. So as his first solo outing, 1982’s The Nightfly, he wrote instead of the world of his past. “It was kind of self-examination of my childhood,” he said of the album – The boy who fathered the dirty old man.
On The Nightfly, the patina of jazz radio that abounds in New York – WBGO, WKCR, WNYC, WFUV – shines through in programming and jockeying. Most faithful to this golden remembrance is the title track, “The Nightfly” which, in movements, contains all the voice, announced or implied, of Fagen’s dialed-in heroes. It has pastiche (“You must spring for that little blue jar / Patton's Kiss And Tell”), comedy (“So you say there's a race / Of men in the trees / You're for tough legislation / Thanks for calling / I wait all night for calls like these"), character development (“You'd never believe it / But once there was a time / When love was in my life”), and heartbreak (“I've got plenty of java / And Chesterfield Kings / But I feel like crying / I wish I had a heart like ice”). All that drama and complexity, rendered in the distinctive glossy harmonies from station IDs nationwide.
The Nightfly pivots around the DJ, but its world is beyond the booth, in the cautious optimism of Fagen’s 1950s youth. Opener “I.G.Y.” leads with the era’s equally unlimited hope and anxiety for the future. It takes another form later on “New Frontier”, which stages a swinging courtship in the gleaming convenience of a residential atomic fallout shelter. He hits it from both sides, writing both of love’s futility in the face of destruction, and rationalism’s futility in the face of prevailing optimism. But never without giving the sunny tones of the era a dark, wry, absurdist buff. On “The Goodbye Look”, Fagen finally absconds to a remote island nation, where he’s ultimately murdered behind a casino by a member of its military dictatorship, and not before asking for a Cuban breeze from his traveling companion Gretchen over a tropical beat.
“The Goodbye Look” has the Jerry Lewis wackiness of earlier songs like “Glamour Profession”, but set on the deck of a cruise like something from the Honeymooners. Wherever these oddball comedies are staged, they trace back to the cultural experiences of a New York orbital in the years after the war. Even “Walk Between the Raindrops” the jaunty closing track which stages a lovers quarrel on the beach of a Miami resort, sounds like something Fagen’s parents might have recounted after a vacation away. Stretching back, Fagen’s Scotch blotto sportswriter of “Deacon Blues” may as well have been listening to Lester of “The Nightfly” as he sped through those suburban streets; “Maxine” may have known “Josie”; Aja may have been Lou Chang’s Capulet sister. His universe is as rich as it is local. Its locality is just at the skirt of the city, peering up.
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."