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- The Retrographer, Issue 29 (May, 2 0 1 7)
The Retrographer, Issue 29 (May, 2 0 1 7)
The Retrographer 29 (May, 2 0 1 7)
Bulletins
I’m in a band called Office Culture, and we just put out our first album, “I Did The Best I Could”. It was written by Winston Cook-Wilson and took several years to make and release. I love playing with the band, so I’d love for you to give it a listen.
If you tapped that link, you know: Cymbal’s Universal Player now has album matching too! So you can share any song or album in the form everyone can listen to. If you’re in the business of getting songs to people, or just a regular person who likes sharing songs, use it! Also check out our iMessage app and Chrome Extension (it makes everything universal).
I wrote my thoughts about the Universal Player down over at Medium. I'd love it if you gave it a read.
I'm sorry this issue is so belated! I’ll have another one (June) very soon.
Ten Songs for May, 2 0 1 7
“From the Dining Table”, Harry Styles (Cymbal / YouTube) – Longtime readers of this newsletter know that Hazza has a free pass from me for almost everything. Though half of his debut sounded like the soundtrack for a Jack Daniel’s commercial, this song displayed much of the believable honesty he pledged to. He has further to go to find his sound.
“XO TOUR Llif3”, Lil’ Uzi Vert (Cymbal / YouTube) – (sic). I miss Vine a lot, not least because it was not only a powerful hub of social music discovery for me, but also a barometer for what the sound people actually love is. Though this song came out earlier this year, its May ubiquity on Instagram and YouTube speaks volumes.
“Static Somewhere”, Girlpool (Cymbal / YouTube) – An album that starts strong and then ends even better, this is the second best classic-style indie rock record of the year after Jay Som's "Everybody Works". All restraint and sotto voce, Cleo and Harmony build to peaks and skate in valleys.
“Like a Star”, Lil Yachty (Cymbal / YouTube) – For all his faux pas and ire drawn, Yachty forges forward with a tremendous smile and fantastical jubilation. This synthetic beat recalls Thugger’s “Constantly Hating” – It’s almost unreal. But so is Boat’s undaunted positivity.
“Cool”, Zack Villere (Cymbal / YouTube) – Thanks Amadou for this one. Simple: One verse, two choruses, one easy, relatable message of acceptance. I love the lyric, “I get dressed, look at myself in the mirror, and say, ‘Oh no. Is that what I really look like?” But guess what? It’s cool in the end!
“Cut to the Feeling”, Carly Rae Jepsen (Cymbal / YouTube) – CRJ’s recent outings seemed split between Radio Disney earworms and sophisti-pop deep cuts. Finally, she seems to have reconciled the two, without losing any of her sunny appeal or curious indie credibility.
“Big Scheme”, Office Culture (Cymbal / YouTube) – This was one of the first songs Winston played me when he started to assemble the band, and it remains one of my favorites. Come see us July 11th!
“Close But Not Quite”, Everything is Recorded and Sampha (Cymbal / YouTube) – Sampha has an incredible ability for drama: He shows up and you feel him immediately. This track, made by XL Recordings label head Richard Russell, brings him the perfect duet partner: Curtis Mayfield.
“Golden Cage”, Nilufer Yanya (Cymbal / YouTube) – I bet this song is great live: It grooves, but never sweats, really. Yanya, over horns and bass, locks into rhythm and takes you straight along with her. Clean guitar and rotating Rhodes guide the way, seemingly to anywhere.
“Big Fish”, Vince Staples (Cymbal / YouTube) – A friend caught me humming this bassline on the interstate the other day. “I was up late night ballin’...” I thought, as we zoomed home, Vince rapping in my head as smoothly as the gears in the car, skipping over asphalt.
One Album for May, 2 0 1 7
Listen to this album on Cymbal and YouTubeThis piece is being crossposted at the RS500, a blog I'm writing for occasionally. I wouldn't usually write about an album like this for the Retrographer – it's a bit too obvious – but I liked the opportunity to tell this perspective. Plus, I've always loved this record.
What’s a band without musicians?
That sounds like a paradox or a riddle. But by their sixth album, Steely Dan had fired everyone in the band, save the songwriter and producer. The whole album, running about 40 minutes, was just seven tracks, two of which ran over seven and a half minutes, largely made of unusual rhythms, dense chords, and uncommon narratives about drunk newscasters and orientalist wet dreams. A full LP of music for a band without a band.
It also went five-times platinum in the states. This landmark work of esoterica came to hold an unreachable standard for sonics; the only Grammy it won the year of its release in 1977 was for engineering. The impossible detail applied to Aja shimmered off the album’s intricate chordal and rhythmic superstructures, sparkled against the masterful and famously labored performances of the best musicians the day had to offer: Wayne Shorter, recently of the Miles Davis Quintet; Bernard “Pretty” Purdy and Steve Gadd; Larry Carlton, fresh off several years with Joni Mitchell on some of her best albums. Hired guns; mercenaries.
Aja is remembered, and often maligned, for its emphasis on the precision of its recording. Despite its commercial success, it’s often called niche, given the peculiarities of its style. Given the popularity of jazz and jazz fusion in its own right and in pop music, Aja can be called antiquarian or hidebound in its sound, or, alternatively, as Rolling Stone wrote, containing “some of the few important stylistic innovations in pop music in the past decade.”
That debate underway, it can regardless be argued that Aja is the weathervane for the most important change music ever underwent: Its industrialization. What makes Aja anathema to so many was the way it was led by engineering, facilitated by recording technology, and, most importantly, defined by production. Four decades on from this album, popular music is, too, largely defined by production, and myriad genres have come into being thanks to the possibilities it created. Considered an indulgence in its time, Aja indicated the future.
Recorded music itself is a creation of technological innovation, but it wasn’t until the massive boom in research, development, and productive capacity during the Second World War that instruments like the electric guitar, or the amplifier, could be mass produced at low enough cost to meet a consumer market newly enriched by the global growth following the war. Fender began selling guitars in 1946, which fueled a boom of guitar-centric bands in clubs for decades to come. Suddenly it was possible for more people to play to more people in more clubs, and make a very different noise while doing it. Combine this with the proliferation of mass media in radio, records, and television, and creating and consuming music was suddenly far cheaper and more widespread than before. This changed how music sounded.
The advent of radio, and, as a result, of mass-market popular music, had dramatic effects on music as a profession. This low bar to access effectively amateurized the job, and at the same time created an entirely new trade around its recording and delivery. Recording engineers, in their early incarnations, were more engineers than anything else: Paul McCartney recounts how, when creating the Beatles’ 1969 album Abbey Road at the studios of the same name, engineers employed at the site were required to wear white lab coats on the premises.
That juxtaposition, between four self-taught musicians, reared in clubs with electric instruments, with songs written and performed by themselves, and uniformed engineers working in an environment Winston Churchill said made him feel like he was in a hospital, describes the inexorable change music would undergo and never return from. In effect, because becoming a musical performer had become financially attainable for most individuals, but the costs to recording and distributing that music remained accessible to only those with requisite investment, music largely became professionalized around production. For all but the most successful songwriters and performers, the money wasn’t in making music, it was in making records.
The Beatles are celebrated for using the studio as an instrument, particularly after they stopped touring in 1966. Steely Dan took this idea that much further. After a number of years of commercial success, the band’s songwriter, Donald Fagen, and producer, Walter Becker, began to find the conventional ensemble context unnecessary. So, in 1974, they fired the other three members of the band and scaled their touring back significantly to focus on making records. With each album they made following – Katy Lied, then The Royal Scam – the “band” trended further toward the AM jazz of Fagen’s songwriting, and the flossed twinkle of Becker’s production. This focus on sound and style translated to a rigor for performance, which was borne out in the ablest hands music’s pool of session musicians had to offer, with unlimited takes at their disposal.
Which brings us to the legend and spectacle of Aja, which stands with Abbey Road on the famous end and perhaps Chinese Democracy on the more infamous end in music’s new lore of the studio. With endless time, limitless talent, and a new arsenal of recording tools, Steely Dan made it possible to make a record with impossible exactitude. "Up on the hill", Fagen sings on the title track, "They've got time to burn." That’s part of why so many people hated it: It was stylistically and performatively implausible, made in and for the recorded environment rather than the pub or rehearsal space, which, prior to that, was the only place music could have been made. It is the day of the expanding man.
This is to say nothing of the songwriting itself, which is wonderful. But it’s the jazz-heads and audiophiles who extol the drama of “Deacon Blues”, or the Odyssean “Home At Last”. To so many listeners, the ballistic upper partials that festoon Gadd’s fractalizing tumult on the album’s title track are just fake – unreal in the sense that they couldn’t have played to a club. And that’s the point, frankly: This is the beginning of what’s possible beyond the physical realities of music, music that is an abstraction of itself, primarily. It’s music like you’d imagine music if you weren’t really hearing it, but remember how good it might have been if your focus was only on it. And, in that way, you can hear it better than maybe you ever had before. "The essence of true romance", if you will.
The business of music continued to shift to its production and dissemination in the decades following, and that largely stands today. Max Martin, a producer, is among the most successful and influential songwriters in generations; Rihanna’s songwriting summits are storied; Some of the most celebrated music of our time is the realization of production; Rap and electronic music are defined by what an individual can do in the studio, not what happens beyond it.
This is, of course, a tragedy to those who believe music is pure in live performance and most honest when produced “organically”. The cool control of Aja seems an affront on music like it was. But music isn’t what it was, it has never been. The unreality of Steely Dan is like art to art: Tom Scott’s jubilant saxophone solo on “Black Cow”, Michael McDonald’s clarion background vocals on “Peg”, Chuck Rainey’s silvery bassline on “Josie”, each are perfect in their realization, as things never are. "When you smile for the camera," they sing. "I know I'll love you better."
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."