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- The Retrographer, Issue 31 (July, 2 0 1 7)
The Retrographer, Issue 31 (July, 2 0 1 7)
Big Daddy Kane, Knox Fortune, Branchez, Big Wet, Washed Out, Charli XCX, 21 Savage, Ski Mask the Slump God, Clams Casino, Florist, the War on Drugs, Ian Wayne.
The Retrographer, July, 2 0 1 7
Bulletins
Can I ask four favors?
Would you share The Retrographer with a friend or post it on your socials? You can use this link: www.tinyletter.com/ciwk.
Would you try out Cymbal’s Chrome extension? It turns every Spotify, Apple Music, and Deezer player into our Universal Player, that way you never encounter a song you can’t listen to.
Would you give Ian Wayne’s new EP a listen? I love it.
Next month I’ll be doing a mailbag. Would you send me a question? Just reply to this email.
Ten songs for July, 2 0 1 7
Listen to this playlist on Spotify and YouTube.“Lil Thing”, Knox Fortune (Cymbal / YouTube) – I run a music social network, but I’ve got to admit: Nothing drives music discovery for me like the soundtrack for skateboarder and sartorial Easter basket Roy Purdy’s Instagram. This one begins with a declaration of his ethos: “It’s summer, and I’m at it again…”
“Turn Up On the Weekend”, Branchez and Big Wet (Cymbal / YouTube) – Three things: 1. I hope the first time you hear this song is while viewing its surrealistic video 2. Post Malone lowkey created a whole new genre, call it purple country 3. Jake “Big Wet” Smith is from the Upper West Side and plays softball.
“Floating By”, Washed Out (Cymbal / YouTube) – The auteur of chillwave, once pigeonholed, now finds British psychedelica, or a form of electric lounge, on its other side. A woozy, golden light at the end of the tunnel.
“Boys”, Charli XCX (Cymbal / YouTube) – Sploosh. Like “Turn Up On the Weekend,” another fantastical (and fantastic) music video, this one a wet dream for anyone melted by its titular subject. Charli coos over the sound of Mario grabbing coins, but this time Peach is the hero.
“Thug Life”, 21 Savage (Cymbal / YouTube) – Loverboy rages with a broken heart. For however bilious twinnywun sounds here, keep in mind he’s essentially detailing a glow up now that he’s found a companion, one, mind you, whose own ex invented this beat’s sound.
“BabyWipe”, Ski Mask the Slump God (Cymbal / YouTube) – Thanks to AJ for putting me on to the vro, a facile jokester who skates through this short track with boozy hubris. Whatever you say about SoundCloud’s near-death experience, don’t forget the great music it’s produced.
“Say Your Prayers”, Clams Casino (Cymbal / YouTube) – Like “Palace”, Clams sets a chilling, suspended scene. He must be a fan of horror films, this beat fits no rapper so much as Michael Myers, with snares snapping like an axe rapping on a doorframe.
“What I Wanted to Hold”, Florist (Cymbal) – Thanks to Justin Vernon and the placid way time flows like a river in his music. “I have always wanted you”, Emily Sprague sings, like it’s just as simple as singing it.
“Strangest Thing”, The War On Drugs (Cymbal / YouTube) – TWOD often gets compared to 80s Springsteen, rightly. But their ascendance is an opportunity to revisit the work of another redolence, Mark Knopfler’s Dire Straits. With that big guitar outro, remember Guitar George.
“Curious Thing”, Ian Wayne (SoundCloud) – I love the brief melody in the words of this song’s title, but it should be listened in the context of its quiet EP, with its title taken literally, like a passing afternoon daydream that feels like an hour and turns out to just be a moment.
One Album for July, 2 0 1 7
Hip-hop’s earliest moments were indistinguishable from the block parties it was born in. The original (and enduring) job descriptions for the genre were Master of Ceremonies (MC) and Disc Jockey (DJ) – the two roles for making sure the dancers were having a good time. Fitfully, by creativity and charisma, officials of these designations became artists themselves, the way they got and kept the party live became an art form unto itself.
As it found popularity, increased appeal, and fledgling commercial viability, rapping evolved from heaping kindling onto a barnburner party, with endless dance loops and entreatments to get the party live, into an end unto itself. The seminal moment breaking from its infancy was the simultaneous emergence of two aberrant, blinding talents: Rakim and Big Daddy Kane. In destroying one another, they would create the genre.
Rakim boiled MCing down to an essential resin: His rhymes were cold, tuneless, delivered with maximum focus and impact. In performance and imagery, Rakim was without expression, but never without power: “Hyper as a heart attack, nobody’s smiling.”
But where Rakim identified rap through refinement, his rival Big Daddy Kane described it as a colorful universe. Rakim modeled the hardcore, underground rapper with a commitment to the form; Kane, the mainstream entertainer, the crossover artist, the video star, the sex symbol.
Kane got his start ghostwriting for Biz Markie, powering his undeniable, goofy charm with songs like “Pickin’ Boogers” and “Nobody Beats the Biz”. He got a break of his own in 1988 with the release of Long Live the Kane, and album widely remembered as one of the highlights of rap’s golden era. But more so than how the album sounded, Kane’s power was in how he seemed, how he controlled the audience and how they thought, his infectious personality.
To illustrate: Let’s visit Kane almost a decade and a half after his debut was released, in concert in 2002. It’s a bit after 1 AM and he’s ending his set with a final medley. Resplendent in mink and furs, he hands a golden chalice to a dapper sideman and starts to wrap up. The beat for Ludacris’ “Rollout (My Business)” comes on and Kane launches into a clean 30-second barrage that puts any standing rapper to shame, but cuts out before the audience can recover from their shock. The next beat comes on and Kane works the crowd, and then starts in. “That Bed-Stuy bully coming from the Brook-hood --” and just then, he fumbles and drops the mic. The audience is stunned. The beat cuts out, and you can hear someone in the crowd go, “Oh shit!” They shuffle a bit – has their hero confirmed claims he’s washed out? Boos begin to rain in – as Kane leans over, rattled, and picks up the mic to dust it off. The audience tensely awaits some explanation, and then it comes in, rapped perfectly in time --
The audience explodes with jubilation. Was it a trick or just an impossibly smooth recovery? The performance was too believable to say for sure. Either way, Kane’s power is in his ability to take the risks associated with controlling attention, which is the absolute center of Long Live the Kane’s enduring power.
To view Kane in his heydey was frankly intoxicating. “Six-foot one and dark and lovely”, rocking fat dookie ropes and a flat-top torn from the pages of Architectural Digest, Kane was a new mold, the kind who could rock a stage and grace the pages of Playgirl. Onstage he was an unstoppable dancer, especially when flanked by his two backups Scoob and Scrap. In his music was a certain kind of fitful sexual liberation that is rarely celebrated – He asked, “Whoever said you had to be one-hundred percent masculine in order to be ‘in’?”
But Kane was here for a very specific reason: To take rap from its place in the corner of the record store to the center of American conversation. Take his incredible appearance on The Arsenio Hall show. Arsenio, prior to Kane’s appearance, commissioned a graffiti artist make a beautiful set, one that harkened to Kane’s Brooklyn roots. When Kane arrived, he told Arsenio to tear it down. “To me it symbolizes, ‘That’s what rap is. Here’s this place for rap: Put it over here with the graffiti, this dancing, the violence.’ I feel that rap is music: I should be on the same set Quincy [Jones] was on when he was here.” He then breaks into a synchronized performance to see that dream into existence.
Kane’s dream for Long Live the Kane wasn’t just to break into the mainstream, it was to break rap into its unrealized possibilities. On “Raw”, “Ain’t No Half Steppin’”, and above all “Set It Off”, Kane introduced velocity and rhyme scheme that’s as compelling as it is hard to match. In “On the Bugged Tip” and “Just Rhymin’ With Biz”, it’s humor and playfulness (Classic Biz – “Once knew a girl by the name of Rhoda / I watched Star Wars just to see Yoda / Or R2-D2 driving down the BQ / When I buy franks, I make sure they're Hebrew”). Not every attempt is equally appealing: “Word to the Mother(Land)” hasn’t aged quite well, and “The Day You’re Mine” needs some voice training – but all are admirable in their ambition. Kane had vision.
The Kane vs. Rakim rivalry would’ve meant nothing if Kane were just an angular showboat; Rakim seems to enjoy better ranking in GOAT conversations now, but Kane mastered the art to a virtual stalemate. And for every unforgettable lyric (“So full of action, my name should be a verb”, or an underrated one: “I can sneeze, sniffle and cough / E-e-e-even if I stutter I'mma still come off” – with mock-stutter delivered in perfect rhythm. Maybe that mic fumble was staged after all), there was an equally unforgettable ad-lib. Take his “I’m ready” into on “Ain’t No Half-Steppin’”, later famously sampled on the title track from the Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die, or the a capella conclusion to “On the Bugged Tip”, with the immortal lyric “If rap was a game, I’d be MVP”, later made into Big L’s best hook.
The combined imprint Kane and Rakim left on the culture is enduring and indelible, yet their peaks matched in height and descent. The coming generation of rappers – Nas, Biggie, Lauryn Hill, Big L, Jay-Z, Wu Tang – built on their stylistic and lyrical principles, but relegated them to obsolescence, too. Kane’s records never went more than gold after 1990, and neither did Eric B. & Rakim’s. But their fingerprints would live on in the artists they influenced, their words a codex for the state of rap to come.
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."