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- The Retrographer, Issue 28 (April, 2 0 1 7)
The Retrographer, Issue 28 (April, 2 0 1 7)
The O’Jays, Frank Ocean, Paramore, DJ Khaled, Kodak Black, Ty Segall, Alex G, Playboi Carti, Rostam, Wilma Archer, potsu, and moreThe Retrographer 28 (April, 2 0 1 7)
Bulletins
How do you share a song?
My guess is you likely use YouTube links because that’s how you can make sure that anyone you send to can listen. That’s why I’ve done it for the two-and-a-half years I’ve been writing this newsletter Between Spotify and YouTube, I figured I'd cover enough bases to be okay for most readers. But increasingly, we’re paying for streaming services and are building our musical lives on them. It’s where we make playlists, save albums, find radio features, and enjoy useful algorithmic recommendation services like Discover Weekly. We build our listening habits around streaming services now. It’s the main way Americans listen to music. And good luck finding any Frank Ocean on YouTube (see below).
So do you usually send Spotify or Apple Music links instead? I’d wager no, or at least not with reservation. That’s because it’s likely that if you share that same song from your streaming provider, the person you’re sending to won’t be able to listen to it. That’s actually a worldwide phenomenon: As of late last year, only 43m of the 100m streaming subscribers in the world have Spotify, the most popular service. That means that even if you take your best odds, the majority of your recipients will only be able to hear a preview of the song you share. This is especially silly because most streaming services have the exact same library of music, save Taylor Swift and some choice albums from Beyonce and Jay-Z. So you can’t listen to the song a friend sent, even though you paid to listen to it already, because of a difference in consumer choice. That’d be like if you couldn’t text a friend because you were AT&T and they were Verizon.
This drives some of my thinking about how broken sharing music is in the era of streaming. I personally experience this problem constantly. Every month since January 2015, I’ve sent this newsletter with the simple purpose of sharing songs with my friends. I’ve got no idea what service my friends subscribe to, but based on what I learned above, I can be sure most don’t have Spotify like me. When I joined Cymbal, I encountered this problem again, in a similar way. How were we supposed to build a social network for music when our users couldn’t even speak the same musical language? This problem happens in any context you share songs in, too: Send a song in a group chat, most of your friends can't listen; Post a song to Twitter, most of your followers can’t listen; Post a song to Reddit, most subscribers can’t listen; Post a song on your blog or publication… you get the point.
So I’m announcing a change to the Retrographer that will scale up over time. I’m going to begin using a new piece of technology that we built at Cymbal to share music with you going forward. It’s the Universal Player, and it fixes this issue.
When we at Cymbal realized that this was a problem that affected anyone sharing music online, we realized we had a unique advantage to resolving it. We have an algorithm that matches our library of Spotify songs to Apple Music. As a result, whenever you tap to play a song in the app, we quickly find out what streaming service you use and play that song from the service you shared from. If you use the app (and you should), you’ll likely never notice where a song was shared from, even though it was likely shared from some other service than your own. The songs will play all the way through just the same, fixing the walled garden issue of streaming music.
We realized there was incredible potential here: If streaming was going to become the internet’s lingua franca for music, this solution would be utterly necessary for sharing of any kind to go on. We built that playback experience for the web in the form of the aforementioned Universal Player. Here it is. You’ll be seeing it a lot more as time passes: I’m going to use it as the main way of sharing songs to my readers. Once we match albums and ultimately have the ability to build or match playlists, I’ll extend this feature to those sections of the newsletter, too. You can use it, too – search and share any song from the homepage.
I’m very excited for the world this technology suggests. We’ve been hard at work scaling this experience to more and more use cases: We recently built an iMessage app that allows you to share these matched links to friends quickly by text, added it to our New Song emails, and incorporated it into our social sharing. I want everyone to use it so all streaming, sharing, and discovery in music can be seamless. It’ll be a feature of this newsletter going forward, too, so please don’t hesitate to share your feedback, complaints, and ideas. I’m excited to hear what you think.
Ten Songs for April, 2 0 1 7
“Biking”, Frank Ocean, Tyler, the Creator, and Jay-Z (Cymbal) – Like the Beatles, Frank’s greatest strength is capturing the inherent oddity of regular life. Unlike the Beatles, he finds not love but melancholy. “God gave you what you could handle,” he sings, like no one else can.
“Hard Times”, Paramore (Cymbal / YouTube) – I remember the first time I heard “Ain’t It Fun”. It came from a YouTube search. Who was Paramore? Why were they derided? Instead, I found then, as on “Hard Times” some of the most mature thinking on the anxieties of young adulthood.
“I’m the One”, DJ Khaled, Chance the Rapper, Quavo, Lil’ Wayne, and Justin Bieber (Cymbal / YouTube) – I’d been wondering what Bieber was up to. I never wonder what Khaled is up to, though. He’s always working some sort of Linkedin of rap luminaries to put together songs like this one to reiterate his point: We the best. Speak it into existence, Khaled.
“Patty Cake”, Kodak Black (Cymbal / YouTube) – “I’m finna paint a picture”, Kodak says. So, he does. “I like this little beat right here!” Kodak comments when his work is done. “Yeah, this is a nice little beat,” Kodak’s little picture replies, just after it’s come to life. “I’ve got a feeling today’s going to be a fantastic day.”
“Black Magick”, Ty Segall (Cymbal / YouTube) – Not that Harry Styles needs any apologizing to but: Anyone who really knew Bowie’s music knows Ty is the inheritor, at least of his early “The Man Who Sold the World” work. Even down to the faux British accent and Tolkien-fantasy lyrics.
“Proud”, (Sandy) Alex G (Cymbal / YouTube) – Something’s off in all of (Sandy) Alex G’s music (formerly no parenthetical, but lawsuits, you know). Like the literal use of “baby” here, or the sparkling, celestial synthesizer that lifts this song from an open field up to the firmament.
“Location”, Playboi Carti (Cymbal / YouTube) – ASMR: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or that tingly feeling on your neck when you experience something moving, or hear a sound like the one Harry Fraud carpets for Playboi here. The world loves “Magnolia”, too.
“Gwan”, Rostam (Cymbal / YouTube) – Baroque with expensive taste since we first met him with Vampire Weekend, Rostam is stepping out under his own name and sounding like no one else. His new music is an illuminating reflection to the still-singular Modern Vampires of the City.
“Like a Hunger”, Wilma Archer and Amber Mark (Cymbal / YouTube) – Thanks to my friend Brandon for tipping me off to this new song from Will Archer, AKA Wilma, neé Slime, helmed with poise by New York’s Amber Mark over churning bass and scintillating synthesizer. I love the subtle handclaps and rising action.
“im closing my eyes”, potsu and Shiloh (Cymbal / YouTube) – Sounds more than a bit like Swell’s collaboration with Shiloh last year, but there really are worse things. Vaporwave was once thought to be a thing of the past, but its neo-chillwave and anime iconography live on.
One Album for April, 2 0 1 7
You’ve heard “Love Train”. Even if you’re nowhere near Philadelphia, don’t care for soul music, don’t drink orange juice – you’ve heard it. It's a stalwart of classic soul radio. It closed The Martian. It was used, for some reason, in a ubiquitous Coors Light commercial.
The song was released in December 1972, just a few months after the release of the O’Jays' seventh album Back Stabbers in August. It broke into the Top 40 a month later, on the same exact day that the Paris Peace Accords were signed ending the Vietnam War. Its sentiment of aspirational unity is emblematic, even today, of that era’s struggle and spirit. It projected a single-mindedness – “All You Need Is Love” – shared by so much music of that moment.
One element of what makes Back Stabbers so special is that can end on such a beautiful, universal moment, calling for the oneness of all mankind, even after nine preceding tracks which play like a jeremiad to mankind’s foibles, woes, and betrayals. Songs like “992 Arguments”, “Shiftless, Shady, Jealous Kind of People”, and the titular “Black Stabbers”. Back Stabbers ends with a clarion rallying cry, but begins with another kind of globalism. The first song, “When The World’s at Peace” asks in completing its first rhyme, “Will we still be in one piece?” Behind its all-encompassing conclusion is a nine-act play of despair.
The O’Jays formed in the late 1950s, but remained peripheral at best for almost a decade and a half after their formation. The band considered breaking up, and in fact lost two of its five original members in its slog through the music industry. It wasn’t until Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff signed them to their Philadelphia International label that their fortunes changed, and they changed dramatically. Gamble and Huff were a sort of miniature, 1970s’ answer to Holland–Dozier–Holland, the songwriting trio that defined Motown in its heydey. They were responsible for some of soul music’s favorite ballads: Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones”; Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “If You Don’t Know Me By Now”; Dee Dee Warwick’s “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me”. They wrote almost every song on Back Stabbers.
On Back Stabbers, Gamble and Huff captured the escalating drama of the decade on both the personal and political stages. 1972 was the year Watergate broke; Political leaders had been murdered; Young men were being torn from their homes, sent overseas, and returned in caskets. So, on this album, they employed the O’Jays’ two muscular lead vocalists, Eddie LeVert and Walter Williams, as a Greek Chorus to the lament the infirmity of the moment. Back Stabbers’ stomping opening number, “When The World’s At Peace” pleads over a heavy minor groove, the group sings about a world that’s far from peaceful. “If we learn to love, the way we learned to kill…” they imagine. It’s not so much hopeful as it is grimly present; diagnostic.
Shifting from the global conflict of the first song is the title track, “Back Stabbers”, which imagines a similar conflict within the home. Paranoid, possessive, and jealous, the song’s narrator recounts a nightmare sequence of friends coming over to take his woman. The worries are universal, “All of you fellas who have someone who you really care, then it’s all you fellas who better beware.” Life is a seige of infidelity and deceit, and no one is there to help, even to explain. LeVert sings, “What can I do to get on the right track? I wish they'd take some of these knives out my back.”
And yet, several tracks later, the O’Jays sing the same story from the other scenario in “Listen to the Clock on the Wall”, telling the story of a rushed liaison with a married woman. It spends as much time looking over its shoulder as it does at it’s counterpart. The two rush to bed one another, as the narrator directs his partner to pay attention not to him, but to the looming threat of being found out. Even committed monogamy has its pitfalls on “992 Arguments”, about endless clashes between a couple. It opens, with some humor, “I can’t even go down to the corner to get myself a cold, cold beer, 'cus when I come back to the house, your mouth is the only thing I’m going to hear.” Later, backing toward the door, they sing, “Maybe we just weren’t meant for one another, we might’ve made a big mistake.”
Like “Smiling Faces Sometimes”, the previous year’s hit by The Undisputed Truth, Back Stabbers pictures a world where no one can be trusted. Not only is the outside world unworthy of trust, as on “Shiftless, Shady, Jealous Kind of People”, but neither are you. “Who Am I” appears early in the tracklist, but presents shame and romantic doubt against dreamlike production.
The album’s few respites from anxiety are jubilant and celebratory, however. “Time To Get Down” is vocally virtuosic and lighthearted, and “Sunshine” and “(They Call Me) Mr. Lucky” are utterly devoted in love. And then, of course, “Love Train”, which seems to rise, transcendentally, above the earthly foibles documented by the preceding tracklisting. Out of context, its message is perhaps idealistic or even saccharine: certainly a throwback to the bygone summer of love. But, taken after the entirety of Back Stabbers, it’s an almost saintly plead to humanity’s innumerable shortcomings. “Please don’t miss this train at the station”, they sing. “Love Train” leaves the listener with a prayer to change course. It doesn’t suggest it can come as simply as smiling – the back stabbers themselves are “Smilin’ in your face”. Overcoming that paranoia and duplicity means joining hands, and without knives in them.
Best-Of Playlists
Though these playlists are all on Spotify, not every song (including many of my favorites) is available to stream. To see which tracks are missing, go to "Preferences", scroll down to "Display Options," and then switch on "Show unavailable tracks in playlists."