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- The Retrographer, Issue 32 (August, 2 0 1 7)
The Retrographer, Issue 32 (August, 2 0 1 7)
Billy Joel, Lil B, Grizzly Bear, Rae Sremmurd, Frank Ocean, Lil B, BROCKHAMPTON, Taylor Swift, Action Bronson, Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile, Wiki, Brand New
The Retrographer #32 (August, 2 0 1 7)
Bulletin
Pat Kelly’s great and lyrical new album, Planet X, is out.
About 90% of the music I listened to this month came out in the last week. If things seem a bit under-chewed, hey.
What else do you need to know than Nardwuar vs. DRAM?
Mailbag
Q: “Chris Rock, The Rock, and Barack Obama are at a party that you’re DJ’ing. All three are standing to the side, arms crossed. What song do you play to get them dancing? Explain your choice. Explain this party.” – David Mauskop
A: Hey Mau, great question.
First off: I’m not sure that Obama and the Rock aren’t the same person, so your assumption that all “three” would be there has to be challenged outright. I, for one, have never seen them in the same place. My educated guess is Barack is the Bruce Banner to the Rock’s Hulk, which would also explain their suspicious resemblance. If we could find some proof of the Rock introducing Trump to the People’s Elbow, this case would be pretty much closed. Chris Rock is clearly the mad scientist behind whatever experiment created TheRock Obama as he called Obama’s election with the classic film “Head of State” (2003).
This is all to say: It has to be something presidential, to satisfy both presidents, and just live enough to agitate Barack into transforming to the Rock, completing the appearance of all three. The party also has to take place in a padded replica of the Oval Office. Hype, yet dignified. Has to be something from Mac Dre, aka Ronald Dregan: “Thizz Dance”. Bonus points for bipartisanship.
Q: “Are you in Maine? How is it going????” – Amy Arnsten
A: Hey Amy! I did just get back from Maine. It’s going pretty well, how are you?
To submit questions of any kind to next month’s issue, simply respond to this email.
10 Songs for August, 2 0 1 7
Listen to this playlist on Spotify and YouTube
“Glass Hillside”, Grizzly Bear (Cymbal / YouTube) – Echoing a certain sound on 2007’s Friend EP, Grizzly Bear reveal new possibilities: Shining, loping, cartoonish. “The only ride in town”, Daniel Rossen sings, over a jalopy synthesizer, en route to a carnival of lights.
“Perplexing Pegasus”, Rae Sremmurd (Cymbal / YouTube) – 2017’s ATLiens land their UFO and emerge to sing its praises. Swae Lee handles the hook, with Jxm on the first verse, over an apparating Mike Will beat. We should be lucky if all of Sremmlife 3’s forays are this unusual.
“Provider”, Frank Ocean (Cymbal / YouTube) – It's muted, dulcet tones make a gentle diversion from this song’s mumbled witticisms. “Are you a natural Blonde like Goku?” and “Stiff smile like I’m Aphex Twin”. Brilliant and subdued, quiet as a thought in the back of your mind.
“Wasup JoJo”, Lil B (Cymbal / YouTube) – The 21st century’s most accomplished performance artist shows his hand, revealing what we already know: He loves rap, and is amazing at it. Brandon McCartney, on the beats and the mic, revitalizes the Bay while giving love to everyone from Ice Cube to Run-DMC.
“SUMMER”, Brockhampton (Cymbal / YouTube) – The new Odd Future they’re not, but that may be for the best: They’re more polished, more ready for the spotlight. Where Tyler fawned over Roy Ayers, Kevin Abstract’s dreams may sound a bit more like Don Henley.
“Look What You Made Me Do”, Taylor Swift (Cymbal / YouTube) – Fuck all the playbooking; Swift got people talking, that doesn’t mean the music is good or bad. The internet’s collective gag doesn’t make it bad; Its ascendance on charts doesn’t make it good. It's self-obsession is unseemly and out of tune; fine. Buried in all that shit is Swift’s twitchy paranoia: The lunchroom anxiety, the insatiable revenge fantasies, and, the resignation to the gilded cage: “I don’t trust nobody and nobody trusts me.”
“La Luna”, Action Bronson (Cymbal / YouTube) – I’m old enough to remember when Action Bronson sounded like the courtyard’s funniest truant, the kid who put goonishness into focus. Turning cab service call-waiting music into a superb beat – what could be more like him?
“Over Everything”, Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile (Cymbal / YouTube) – A perfect partnership: Vile could use Barnett’s “Depreston” focus, Barnett could use Vile’s “Goldtone” dreaminess. Together, neither have found soaring heights like the one reached here. Amazing video, too.
“Mayor”, Wiki (Cymbal / YouTube) – The gap-toothed Albert E. Newman of RATKING, halfway to Shane MacGowan, glows in his arrival among rap’s rising elite. “Soul made of gold, know that we major,” he grins over a valedictory beat. There’s something Chance-like about Wiki – both in his civic stature, and the soulfulness of his hooks. “There’s some shit that I gotta say!“
“Can’t Get it Out”, Brand New (Cymbal / YouTube) – “Not just a manic depressive / Toting around my own cloud / I've got a positive message / Sometimes I can't get it out”. Find me, apostles of emo and detractors alike, a more self-aware, bulletproof meta-commentary on the movement. “My Body is a Cage”, but more knowingly.
One Album for August, 2 0 1 7
In April of last year, Donald Trump held a rally in Bethpage, Long Island, attended by over 10,000 people. Just days earlier, the rally had been relocated from nearby Patchogue, after local pastors protested that the event was too close to the place where Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorian immigrant, was beaten to death by seven white teenagers in 2008. Outside of the rally, the then-candidate Trump’s supporters shouted down protesters, chanting in concert with their unmistakable cawfee brogue, “Build the wall! Build the wall!”
Build the wall… where? Long Island only comes close to meeting land once it turns into Queens and Brooklyn, where it peers into the Emerald City. Not coincidentally, Queens is where the then-soon-to-be president was born, the son of a real estate magnate excoriated by New York’s revolutionary troubadour, in an outer-borough house now rented out on AirBnB. From Queens, the scion Trump came to brand buildings, hoping to scale into the city’s social elite. But the garishness of his qualifications – gilded, leggy, bolded – betrayed his efforts.
Even so, the rest of the world took notice. Behind him, back on Long Island, Trump was a hometown hero, an icon. As he gained awareness in a nation kept awake at night with economic anxiety, living in folks’ homes as a reality host, he became an avatar for success, the artificial flavor for class. In 2008, the country’s economy split open to expose its rot, and its subsequent recovery was uneven; More people laid claim to a pie that seemed to be shrinking; A new generation, the first to expect to live worse than their parents, were being strangled by a disease of society’s making in startling numbers. The future wasn't what it used to be.
Forty years ago, Billy Joel of Oyster Bay, Long Island, son of a Jewish Holocaust refugee, released a song called “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”. It’s a theatrical suite set in a certain kind of heaven, the proud dream of an immigrant: A small business. “It's something that a lot of Long Islanders do, kind of reminisce over Italian food,” Joel explains. “And everybody's got their Italian restaurant." A chance encounter with an old friend triggers a rush of memories, and suddenly the narrator is back in his youth: The village green, the Parkway Diner, engineer boots, and prom king and queen, Brenda and Eddie, flush in the flower of youth, drunk on possibility and slurring decisions accordingly. It's 1975.
Rushing into marriage, passion making them invincible, Brenda and Eddie spent their money to buy the dream – “An apartment with deep pile carpet / And a couple of paintings from Sears / A big waterbed that they bought with the bread / They had saved for a couple of years.” But, as things sometimes go, the money tore them apart, and the dream wasn’t enough to sustain. Joel, the omniscient rememberer, sings, “Everyone said they were crazy / ‘Brenda you know you're much too lazy / And Eddie could never afford to live that kind of life.’” By then, they’d left Eden.
Today, the Parkway Diner is a Mobil Station. It’s gone, like much of the golden architecture of Joel’s memory, just as he’d predicted, just as he knew there was no stopping it. But, even so, “there we were, waving Brenda and Eddie goodbye.”
The title of The Stranger, Joel’s fifth album, refers to many things at many times (most provocatively, fetish, fellatio, and masturbation on the album’s titular track), but none more than the sense, articulated in Georg Simmel’s 1908 essay of the same name, that the place, the people, the things that made you aren’t as they were: “You can never go home again.” In its tender moments, like in “Just the Way You Are”, The Stranger is consumed with closeness, intimacy, a desperation to preserve the moment – “Don't imagine you're too familiar / And I don't see you anymore.”
In its harshest moments, it shows our foibles to become something else than we are, with all the distance of a court jester. Its tragic hero is “Movin’ Out”’s Sergeant O'Leary, toiling his whole life to buy a car he’s too broken to even drive. And, of course, Brenda and Eddie, who Joel’s Greek Chorus knowingly remarks, the way your grandmother might, “We never knew we could want more than that out of life. Surely Brenda and Eddie would always know how to survive.”
Survive, yes. Joel’s Burkean vision that nothing green can stay and pride always cometh before the fall, guarantees that survival is all that awaits the ambition that drives us beyond the garden. You can’t be too familiar; You can hardly be familiar at all.
But if it were only finger-wagging and admonishments, The Stranger would be no fun. Instead, it’s imbued with the randiness that makes its characters, even when told fatalistically, sympathetic. “Only the Good Die Young” seems sprung from Eddie’s teenage loins. It's endurance, in classic rock radio and wedding band setlists well into the time that prom king’s progeny would be making hubristic nuptial mistakes themselves, is a testament to the song’s radiant youthfulness. Same on “Get It Right the First Time” (a perfect sample of the album’s undersold funk), with its urgent, “Got to make the move right now / Got to meet that girl somehow”. Even inadmissible shlock like “She’s Always a Woman” – an amalgamated pastiche to Greenwich Village coffeehouses without any of the depth – carries within it a heedless romance that flourishes in high school hallways.
It’s the dichotomy, between this explosive desire, and the trappings of its pursuit, that hangs over even the purest moments of The Stranger’s romance. Joel sings as much for Brenda and Eddie as he accepts their shared fate. It's ambitions and fears, possibilities and inevitabilities, are all as local as they are universal.
And yet, beyond Long Island, Billy Joel is viewed as provincial, blue-collar, but not in the same way as Bruce Springsteen, his counterpart across the bight. He doesn’t hold the workingman’s mandate, was never offered the ecumenism conferred from Guthrie to Dylan to Springsteen to Win Butler, even as he sung for ostensibly the same strivers, even as he profiled the ways their dreams would be dashed, their homes made alien to them.
Something lingers, excluding Joel – or, perhaps, the people he sings about, empathizes with, worries for, writes songs for first dances and anniversaries for – from the neat, palatable narratives about making it.
One might simply be what Joel himself couldn’t have foreseen: That the futures of the people he sang for might not be saved simply by staying their course. The narrator of “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” had presumably followed the conservative course Brenda and Eddie had bailed on, and that had led him to a mundane but pleasant pasture: “Things are okay with me these days,” he sings, in homage to the song’s (and Joel’s) Beatles inspiration. “Got a good job, got a good office.” But how guaranteed is that good job, that good office today?
More plausible, however, is that Joel saw the stranger coming. Forty years later, the Italian restaurant of memory, Fontana di Trevi, is closed. Bethpage, Long Island, is still overwhelmingly white, but its surroundings have changed, its cultural identity has shifted. Brenda, Eddie, and the ten thousand chanters on Long Island might feel, now more than ever, what was sang first when they left home for the mirage all those years ago: “You can never go back there again.”
After Donald Trump’s white nationalism went from gaslighting to official stance following Charlottesville, Billy Joel performed at Madison Square Garden wearing a Star of David, like those worn by victims of the Holocaust his father escaped. After a lifetime straying from his family identity, the time had come to embrace the stranger in his midst. Everyone has their Italian restaurant.
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."