The Retrographer, Issue 34 (October, 2 0 1 7)

November 12, 2017

Hiss Golden Messenger, Jessie Ware, Little Dragon, Faith Evans, Four Tet, Kelela, 21 Savage, Offset, Metro Boomin, St. Vincent, Nilüfer Yanya, Twain, Porches, Steely Dan.

The Retrographer, Issue 34 (October, 2 0 1 7)

Bulletins

Mailbag

#1: “Here's some real conversation for your ass: What's the last release date that had as many quality albums piled up as today (October 13) with Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile, King Krule, St. Vincent, and Beck all dropping on the same day?” – Edward Gottfried

Edward, this is a great question, but I think there’s only one real answer: November 9th, 1993. On this day, both A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders and the Wu Tang Clan’s 36 Chambers came out. It was also the day Snoop Dogg put out “Who Am I (What’s My Name?)”, his last single to drop before Doggystyle came out a few weeks later. These three records, exemplifying the East Coast, West Coast, and Alternative streams in rap, would be totally instrumental in defining the genre for years, until, depending on your perspective, the emergence of Kanye or Eminem. November 9th should be a national holiday, schools closed and all.

#2: “Are there any songs or albums that you love, but you will only listen to on special occasions or under specific circumstances? I see this as a musical power-preserving measure, so that the song is extra impactful when you need it or when you've earned it. For example, one of my favorite OutKast songs is "Elevators," but I don't listen to it often. Instead, I save it for times of change, when I feel like I'm moving up in the world (new job, new apartment, etc). I'm curious if others do this with certain songs/situations too, or whether they even agree with it philosophically. Should "It Was a Good Day" be saved for the really good days?” – Frank Matt

Absolutely, some songs are “In Case Of Emergency Break Glass”. Maybe they’re too loaded, too powerful, too silly. Here are three of mine:

  • “New Sensation”, INXS (Cymbal / YouTube) – I got into college off the waitlist, so rather than getting a formal acceptance letter, the Dean of Admissions just called my cell phone and told me I was in. I felt like a thermonuclear reaction was happening in my chest, like my heart was a rising sun. I blasted “New Sensation”, Michael Hutchence’s bodybuilder vocals tearing apart Tim Farriss’ Princely guitar part like Hulk Hogan ripping his shirt up. That one only comes out on the really good days.

  • “A Real Hero”, College & Electric Youth (Cymbal / YouTube) – A fair amount of the work I do on Cymbal is trying to get people on board with the vision, which goes a little something like this: Socializing is only possible if you share a language, so in order for social music to be possible, there has to be a single way to exchange songs that works. Seems simple, but I need to get the gumption flowing to bring the Good Word to the unwashed masses of the music industry. And there are plenty of days where I don’t exactly know where that Coach Taylor speech is going to come from. On those days, when the juice won’t flow itself, I plug in the old earbuds and put this rather cliché Drive-soundtrack standout on repeat and start spinning tales. It’s frankly pathetic and I can’t believe I’m freely admitting to it now, but it works and you asked, man.

  • “On My Block”, Scarface (Cymbal / YouTube) – This one gets busted out very, very rarely, because it speaks to an emotion I don’t have all that often: “Shit, it worked out”. This song is just wholesome and uncomplicated, and once in a blue moon, when a project ends or I move on to something new, or I just see the sun coming out and realize it’s going to be alright, so I hear this beautiful, simple piano loop.

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Ten Songs for October, 2 0 1 7

Listen to this playlist on Spotify and YouTube

“Lost Out in the Darkness”, Hiss Golden Messenger (Cymbal / YouTube) – Brad Cook, HGM’s producer, acknowledges it was a risky move to put out another album so soon after the last one. But great music has to come when it does, and MC Taylor’s harmonica puts you squarely in the moment.

“Til The End”, Jessie Ware (Cymbal / YouTube) – An alternate name for Ware’s latest album could’ve been Marital Bliss, so much of it is about her recent nuptials. This one is the record’s glinting, bashful highlight: So much in tune with an Eddie Kendricks song, romance and privacy.

“Peace Of Mind”, Little Dragon and Faith Evans (Cymbal / YouTube) – Faith Evans’ voice has aged beautifully, grown into the presence and wisdom that has always set it apart. Little Dragon’s accompaniment and production highlights it beautifully without overburdening her visit.

“Two Thousand and Seventeen”, Four Tet (Cymbal / YouTube) – This year isn’t done, and yet it’s hard to remember one as saturated with division and consternation; anxiety and near misses; shame and self-examination. Kieran Hebden’s composition has no answers but commiseration.

“Frontline”, Kelela (Cymbal / YouTube) – Kelela Mizanekristos has a penchant for mystery and drama. Her music, shadowed and clubby, is like a sightline into a nighttime alleyway from a passing car. As on 2015’s Hallucinogen, Take Me Apart is sexy and guarded.

“Ric Flair Drip”, Offset and Metro Boomin (Cymbal / YouTube) – Metro Boomin is an auteur, and his quality control, especially on the surprise-released Without Warning, only grows his legend. 21 Savage, the album’s third headliner, might have contributed here, but three minutes of uncut Offset, scrambling over every angle of this ominous beat, is more than we deserve.

“Hang On Me”, St Vincent (Cymbal / YouTube) – Annie Clark is obsessed with artifice. It used to be the glossy production on her first two albums; then it was her blank mien on her self-titled album. Once every so often we get her in her full glory, honest and imperfect, sad and exultant.

“Baby Luv”, Nilüfer Yanya (Cymbal / YouTube) – It’s not an Elliott Smith song, but Yanya’s “Baby Luv” feels almost demo-like. I heard once that music is phenomena: The things that make it magical never appear in the sheet music. That’s the power here, a song at once possible and beyond.

“The Sorcerer”, Twain (Cymbal / YouTube) – Being in love is finding the manifold secrets of the universe in an otherwise ordinary moment of reverie. Mat Davidson keeps it all inside his head as he sits across his beloved, taken by somebody else. “Every minute I spend with you is like eternity, so why should I get jealous about your boyfriend?”

“Country”, Porches (Cymbal / YouTube) – Aaron Maine has his own gravity. His music is much different now than when I first heard him, singing “I give you head before you head to therapy”, but in some ways it’s just the same. As small as two people, as big as the world.

One Album for October, 2 0 1 7

Steely Dan, “Two Against Nature” (Giant, 2000) (Cymbal / YouTube)

In 1966, “Eleanor Rigby” squared off against “Good Vibrations” for Best Rock & Roll Recording at the Grammys. This was an impossible choice to make, so the Recording Academy made an even more impossible choice: “Winchester Cathedral”, by the New Vaudeville Band. In 1985, Lionel Richie’s Can’t Slow Down beat a slate of instant future classics: Born In The USA, Let’s Dance, She’s So Unusual, and Private Dancer. Worse, possibly, was Tony Bennett’s MTV: Unplugged release toppling both Ready to Die by the Notorious B.I.G. and Illmatic by Nas. Kanye West stormed the stage in 2015 to protest Beck’s Morning Phase beating out Beyonce’s monumental eponymous album. “That institution certainly has nostalgic importance,” Frank Ocean once noted, coyly. After years of slights, artists are increasingly likely to skip it outright.

In 2000, a similar historical blunder was ostensibly made: With Eminem’s landmark Marshall Mathers LP up against Radiohead’s transcendent Kid A, the Academy chose Steely Dan’s reunion album, Two Against Nature, their first in 20 years since 1980’s Gaucho. The award seemed to spit in the face of a new, ascendant wave of musicians in order to bestow an honorific on a band whose expired sense of coolness had only continued to rot under the hot lights of classic radio circulation and independent publication trashings.

Two Against Nature was not the best album to come out in 2000, by virtually any measure. The practice, too, of appearing to honor artists for past achievements at the expense of art and culture being served hot is a total waste of any viewer’s time (though it should be said, this kind of behavior isn’t limited to the Grammys).

But the pomp and pageantry of the awards still carries with it outsized power, and this power can provide a highly visible target for marginalized, emerging, and alternative listeners to pin their ire to a name. In a lot of cases, this is more than warranted: The Grammys has a conspicuous and ugly relationship with race. But it’s maybe too easy to conclude that just because the white fogies at the Recording Academy are out-of-step chauvinists, that the honorees who do end up on stage pawing gold victrolas are themselves as illegitimate as the body that awarded them. Despite the optics, this isn’t true of Two Against Nature.

It’s already uncool to advocate for Steely Dan; to do it for their late-period material, with both bandmembers balding and slightly rotund. It didn’t help that the late Walter Becker prefaced his acceptance speech by waiting for Stevie Wonder to shake his hand, and that Donald Fagen finished the proceedings with a halfhearted “‘Preciate it.” None of these things make this album easy to defend.

Two Against Nature opens with a sound that is unmistakably Steely Dan. A quartet of airtight, German-engineered funk snaps into place as if Gaucho had never ended. It sounds, today as did in 2000, to be of a build quality prohibitively high for its younger counterparts in the best album category: Facile studio musicians, ringing out in intimate clarity, like from a Bose showroom. This only exacerbates the contrast. But the tightness of the music is intentionally transgressive, and exists, as Steely Dan’s music increasingly had as Becker and Fagen transformed the group to be a two-man production house, to be uncomfortably smooth. “When she speaks, it’s like the slickest song I’ve ever heard,” Fagen sings on “Almost Gothic”, describing a partner he describes as a “wife-child.” The sung relationships, between seedy and clean, straight and slick, old and young – they’ve always given the band a risky edge.

The characters in Fagen’s songwriting in particular often lean heavily into lecherous, sometimes predatory narratives. “Janie Runaway” concerns the whistling bliss of an urban Humbert Humbert who takes in a vagrant teen to be his fussed-over lover – “The wonder-waif of Gramercy Park.” In “Cousin Dupree”, a sort of alternative-reality Fagen comes home from a struggling music career to crash on his Aunt Faye’s couch, before he’s knocked dead, Pepe Le Pew-style, by his comely cousin Janine. So it doesn’t seem like an endorsement of incest, Dupree’s idiocy is put right on display. He makes his move, and "Maybe it’s the skeevy look in your eyes, or that your mind has turned to applesauce. The dreary architecture of your soul..." before he interrupts, "but what is it exactly turns you off?”

What right do Fagen and Becker have to explore such taboo subject matter? Pointedly, the skeeviness of the music manages to look pretty good while violating norms of coolness. In the odd moment when Steely Dan write themselves feeling out of place – “What a Shame About Me” – they’re still somehow the object of someone’s desire, even if it leaves them feeling terribly out of place. But they’re of course not: The group’s playing and lyricism is as naturally complex as an exotic plant: “Brother Lou Garue and the Jerry Garry / Sprinkling chicken water gonna hush all three.”

For a band always comfortable with being slightly uncomfortable, and finding new sounds and directions by going far off from where everyone else was, it’s still incredible that Steely Dan made this album, so in step with the path only they’d walked, even 20 years after their breakup. Something about them denying worthwhile upstarts, with their form-busting sounds, makes it all too fitting. As always, they put it best:

Two against nature don't you know

Who's gonna grok the shape of things to go?

Two against nature make them groan

Who's gonna break the shape of things unknown?

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."