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- The Retrographer, Issue 23 (November, 2 0 1 6)
The Retrographer, Issue 23 (November, 2 0 1 6)
The Retrographer, Issue 23 (November, 2 0 1 6)
Bulletins
Trying to stay strong over here.
Mac DeMarco in the Yukon's Dawson City is pleasurable.
Erykah Badu at the NYT is delightful.
Listen to Winston playing solo piano.
Ten Songs for November, 2 0 1 6
“Have Some Time”, Childish Gambino (Spotify / YouTube) – Glover’s getting lots of Parliament Funkadelic comps for “Awaken, My Love!”, and it’s clear enough where this song’s coming from, but he’s far from alone in claiming that parentage (see below). That odd bass/falsetto harmony is rife in today’s black revolutionary music.
“We the People”, A Tribe Called Quest (Spotify / YouTube) – “Skilled in the trade of that old boom-bap” Tip rapped back in the day, and here’s the case study, a refresher course on rap’s best-ever group that calls students back to class with a siren call, then this thesis statement.
“Love S.O.S.”, Justice (Spotify / YouTube) – No need to listen to this record, which, regretfully, doesn’t signal an evolutionary step from their unforgettable debut almost a decade ago. But this, with its fashionable gloss, faithfully recalls the elegance of “DVNO” and others.
“I Feel It Coming”, The Weeknd, (Spotify / YouTube) – One Daft Punk feature? C’mon. Two? If Abel is opiated MJ, he’s only spottily made good on his legacy. This is close to as good as his best impressions, thanks in part to his own personal French Rod Temperton and Quincy Jones.
“On Hold”, The xx (Spotify / YouTube) – It’s easy to forget now, after his mutations as dub remixer, dancefloor maestro, summer jam nominee, dystopian future cult leader – Jamie xx started out with Romy as a mysterious, nubile New Wave indie rocker. So here he reminds us.
“The Woman That Loves You”, Japanese Breakfast (Spotify / YouTube) – This didn’t make the newsletter when it came out, but it’s grown on me enough lately to slot in here. A record made about a mother dying of cancer, with this song’s first line, “You’re embarrassing me…”
“Stress”, Weaves (Spotify / YouTube) – Is this issue a little dark, is the music a little removed? Such is November, 2016. No political anthems here, nothing to galvanize or organize (that was earlier). Just the dread and ask, like Weaves sings it, “Can you betray the light in the day?”
“Amerika”, Wintersleep (Spotify / YouTube) – Wintersleep deny political valence, but Donald Trump’s voice is given place in this song’s video, sharing the song’s desperate doomsaying, “We used to have victory.” They respond, “If the worst is true, is it just a waste of time?”
“The Case of Louis Warren”, Luke Temple (Spotify / YouTube) – Bewitching lyricism, so vivid that it’s grating to try to engage in another activity while listening to this, one of the year’s best records. Almost no song shows so much empathy, gratitude, resonance, humanity.
“You Want It Darker”, Leonard Cohen (Spotify / YouTube) – “Hineni”, or “Here I am” what Abraham said to God in the Torah before preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac. It’s happening sooner and faster than any of us hoped, the extinguishing of our lights. Forgive me for seeing everything as Trumpism, but flames are killed daily to satisfy his craven exploitation of our darkness. Pray there is a higher power to save us from it.
One Album for November, 2 0 1 6
The term neo-soul was created by Motown’s Kedar Massenburg, a manager and producer, as a way to market the artists he worked with – D’Angelo, Erkyah Badu, India.Arie. Long before that, he got his start working for Pepsi, and then later GlaxoSmithKline, which makes everything from Nicorette to Aquafresh. The neologism helped stock his artists in a new section of the supermarket. “I knew the movement would be there,” he explained, “because I always knew there was a certain amount of culture that existed.”
His artists benefitted from this commodification in Grammys and platinum plaques, but couldn’t quite understand or accept the label. “I feel like the term is brilliant, but it’s not me,” Badu said. “I never claimed I do neo soul”, D’Angelo echoed. “When I first came out, I said, I do black music.”
Its coinage as a term was of convenience to Massenburg, and to Motown, and nicely packaged a young, stylistically distinct group of artists for whatever purposes they had.
These artists resisted the categorization of neo-soul in both its connotations: That their work was somehow a back-to-the-roots return for the genre, or that it was an epochal move beyond it. It was neither: It was a continuation of black music, with all its inherent challenges and history, through a lens that had been fundamentally transformed by the day’s modern means of production.
Mama’s Gun, Erykah Badu’s second record, stands as a cornerstone of neo-soul’s moment, and exemplifies its distinction. Where other records from this period – Fan-tas-tic Vol. 1, Voodoo – might stand as better examples of the unique sonic oddity of neo-soul, Mama’s Gun is proof of its continuity with its strained personal and political past.
Mama’s Gun’s framing is 1997’s Baduizm, its spiritual, youthful, cosmopolitan predecessor, concerned with the challenges of a modern afrocentric life. Singing brassily over boomy standup bass and electric keys, Badu garnered comparisons to Billie Holiday, and deserved nods to Sade and Roberta Flack too. As a prominent product of rap’s “alternative” or “backpacker” tradition, her music voiced discontent but shunned violence.
Three years later and things had become more complicated. Badu had a child with one of the hip hop’s most indelible alternative voices, Outkast’s Andre 3000, and now shared custody with him. She was an adult, and Mama’s Gun is adult in its concerns and execution.
Her development is staged in the album’s opener, “Penitentiary Philosophy”. As D’Angelo would a decade and a half later on Black Messiah, the pressures of Badu’s life show in cracks and fissures that ultimately take shape in the heavy tones of the 1970s’ electric psychedelica. Where she once smoothly lamented the risks of the illicit economy on Baduizm’s “The Otherside of the Game”, “Penitentiary Philosophy” is a feminist anthem that witnesses those pressures reach a breaking point in step with Parliament’s America Eats Its Young and Sly & the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On.
The music’s style and subject matter converge as life’s tolls appear everywhere: She is wise, but so much of her wisdom is offered introspectively, in testing moments. “My life / sure ain’t been so easy”, she sings on “My Life”, not clearly to anyone other than herself. She reiterates later on “... & On”, “What good do your words do / if they can’t understand you?” The day’s new responsibilities robbery her of youthful carefree love on “Kiss Me On My Neck” (“It’s been such a long time, I forgot I was fly”).
That said, Badu’s power is and always has been in her ability to rise beyond the workaday. “Bag Lady”, one of the album’s two collaborations with foundational funk vibraphonist Roy Ayers, is an instructive item to this point. At one level, it uses the metaphor of materialism to paint a fatalistic picture of a woman whose emotional history undermines her ability to maintain new relationships. It’s also a reuse of Dr. Dre’s “Xxplosive”, itself a sample of “Bumpy’s Lament” from the Shaft soundtrack. So much of hip hop from this period shares a lineage to the soul of the 60s and 70s, in particular blaxploitation soundtracks, but “Bag Lady”’s reconvergence with its soul roots through the lens of hip hop might be the most cogent example of neo-soul as continuous with its past, but inherently altered by rap’s ubiquity.
Whatever label she has, Erykah, like the music she made, is an “analog girl in a digital world.” What made her world digital was black music’s reimagination of its past as it’s present as hip-hop’s postmodernisms, but what kept her analog wasn’t just her continuity with the music of the past. It was also the pain and frustration she shared with the generations that came before her, the shared turmoil of their surroundings, and most importantly, the shared love and optimism animating their solutions and perseverance. Mama's Gun is her self-reliance. Badu’s final point may have been that if she was neo-soul, then all soul was, too. Or, as she sung it, “All you must hold on to is you.”
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."