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- The Retrographer, Issue 39 (March, 2 0 1 8)
The Retrographer, Issue 39 (March, 2 0 1 8)
Soccer Mommy, Buck Meek, Helena Deland, Sade, Jpegmafia, Lorde, Run the Jewels, El-P, Let’s Eat Grandma, Tyler, the Creator, Courtney Barnett, Ezra Koenig, Q-Tip
The Retrographer 39 (March, 2018)
Bulletins: Cymbal will be shutting down on June 1st, 2018.
This is one of the toughest decisions I’ve had to make, ever. For almost three years, Cymbal has been my life. Making it was a dream come true, and shutting it down… not so much.
I remember getting an email in late 2016 from one of our users, telling us about how this app had changed her life. At the bottom was a screenshot of her with two others from the app, both of whom lived in different cities, video chatting and laughing. Their friendship started because of the music they shared, but it became something much more. After we announced our shutdown, literally scores of people came out of the woodwork to tell us how much this thing has meant to them, how nothing else has ever been quite like it. Somebody wrote to tell us it had helped her meet the love of her life – that wasn’t even the first time I’d heard that.
Cymbal won’t exist in a few months, but I know that the moments that were made here will reverberate into the future, farther than I can see. I don’t know what I’m going to work on next, but I’m so proud to have been a part of this, and so grateful to Amadou, Mario, Gabe, and Sam.
Thank you, above all, to the community. It changed my life. I’m remembering now what one of my idols, Rich Conaty, used to say at the close of every episode of his show: “Live fast and dye your hair, but always remember that rhythm saved the world.”
Ten Songs for March, 2018
“Wildflowers”, Soccer Mommy (Cymbal / YouTube) – Early frontrunner for Album of the Year for me here. Reminds me of recent Pinegrove or Jay Som: a perfect indie record, as easy as it sounds, yet filled with humanity and longing. Just wish she recorded under her own name.
“Cannonball!”, Buck Meek (Cymbal / YouTube) – I first saw Buck with my friend Andrew, where he was supporting Big Thief. By himself, he’s hokey and personal, and a little rakish, able to put together a short song like this one that feels big like a western sky.
“Body Language”, Helena Deland (Cymbal / YouTube) – Sexy and sultry, this one is either about busting through the friend zone or reneging on a breakup for one night. Either way, “I can’t read your mind / Body language gets old with time” says the whole thing. “Something happens when I try to…”
“Flower of the Universe”, Sade (Cymbal / YouTube) – Sounding more like Soldier of Love than Diamond Life, and for the best. There’s really no Drake without the latter album, but the former still has generations of listeners to influence.
“1539 N. Calvert”, jpegmafia (Cymbal / YouTube) – Every individual sound on this recording makes me nuts. I love the rumbling bass, the seismic 808 bass drum, the sublimating electric piano pads, the way Barrington DeVaughn Hendricks’ memetic rhyme schemes sound like they’re mixed just a bit out of sight.
“Supercut”, Lorde, El-P, and Run the Jewels (Cymbal / YouTube) – In honor of their tour together, Lorde lent Run the Jewels’ El-P the unforgettable centerpiece from last year’s AOTY Melodrama, and, in exchange, he exercised his superpower ability to make any song sound like it’s coming through a floating whip system, in a futuristic city at night.
“Okra”, Tyler, the Creator (Cymbal / YouTube) – One thing I’ll miss terribly about Cymbal is the way our users flipped out immediately about new songs. Even in our waning light, Tyler’s intrigue-stoking Timothée Chalamet line did wonders. “Kissing white boys” for real.
“Need A Little Time”, Courtney Barnett (Cymbal / YouTube) – It’s important to separate artist from art, but it’s hard to hear this song and not think Courtney is speaking about the alienating oddity of her rising fame. That this song is as good as it is only further proves she deserves to be where she is.
“I Promise You (Ezra’s Demo)”, Ezra Koenig (Cymbal / YouTube) – h/t PW. This will have to do until we get Mitsubishi Macchiato. I love the conflation between Peter Rabbit and Ezra’s own life; “French press and a plate of hay.” Who are the “carnivores” in the clear in his life?
One album for March, 2018
One of the strangest legacies from the waning century of record labels is the shelved album. It seems odd now, when artists can drop music the day it’s made to everyone who might care with a simple SoundCloud link, but there’s an entire shadow catalogue of albums from beloved artists that never made it to listeners, or at best gathered dust for years before achieving limited release on some smaller subsidiary label, simply because someone on the business team decided it wasn’t salable. Practical, maybe, but profoundly impractical too.
A Tribe Called Quest broke up following the group’s 1999 album The Love Movement. Soon after, Q-Tip, the group’s polymath producer, known for his blunted piccolo of a voice, released Amplified. Led by “Vivrant Thing”, Tip’s solo album suggested a fruitful solo career, tiptoeing between Tribe’s trailblazing sonics and a broader pop penetration his former group intermittently achieved.
But his follow-up, Kamaal the Abstract, was shelved by Arista Records in 2002 and didn’t see the light of day for years. Made during the legendary Soulquarian salon that birthed D’Angelo’s Voodoo, Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun, and The Roots’ Things Fall Apart, Kamaal the Abstract languished in obscurity, despite its illustrious parentage.
Tip’s label tried to keep a cap on this album, but the world was changing. Within just a few years, Kamaal the Abstract was on obscure MP3 blogs, and intrepid superfans, exploring the backwaters of the internet, were discovering the new, leftfield music it contained.
A Tribe Called Quest was always described with the somewhat diminutive term “jazzy”, as if the music was more like eau de jazz rather than jazz itself. Beginning on their first album, People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, Tribe expanded on the dominant, soul-based sampling of early rap with potent samples from electric jazz and fusion. Even very early tracks like “After Hours” and “Footprints” carried a transfixing harmonic perspective, lifted from Roy Ayers and Dr. Lonnie Smith, that suggested a different kind of ear.
By the time the group broke up, they’d permanently changed jazz and hip-hop alike, giving it room to grow both within the postmodernisms of sampling, and on its own terms, with new directions in rapping and by weaving the work of Tip and late-period collaborator J Dilla into the new tradition of jazz.
Yet, even as his collaborators and colleagues were following his lead to more expansive sounds that folded rap into more and more musical traditions – D’Angelo and Questlove famously formulated their approach to soul by approximating the “drunken” sound of a slowed down sample – Tip’s greatest foray into experimentalism was blockaded as unmarketable.
Kamaal the Abstract follows in Tip’s tradition of directly collaborating with jazz musicians, beginning with Ron Carter’s appearances on 1991’s The Low End Theory, and begins with a distorted downstroke from guitarist Kirk Rosenwinkel. While it’s hardly a familiar sonic for Tribe listeners (save a retrospectively hilarious Korn collaboration on Amplified), it reflects jazz’s emerging sounds. “Feelin’” opens the book for what the album would be, a drastic change somehow perfectly in line with Q-Tip’s earlier work: Full-band out soul, more singing than rapping, focused on instrumental explorations and the most formal songwriting of Tip’s career.
After the stormcloud of an opening chord, the album ominously begins, “Had this good feelin’ when I got up today…” and it’s clear things won’t work out as imagined. The following narrative, describing an invasive encounter with a police officer, should’ve entered the public consciousness as an acknowledgement of a truth not thrust into mainstream public discourse until over a decade later. So, too, should the dark harmonic colors of the record, later echoed in the Mingus-like pain of To Pimp A Butterfly.
Concluding with a motor-mouthed organ solo, “Feelin’” gives way to “Do You Dig You”, which dispels any doubt at the ambition or adventurousness of the record. At over seven minutes, and concluding with a rambling flute solo from Gary Thomas, “Do You Dig You” has no rapping at all, just extended riffing, melting vocal harmonies, and a screwed-out “Hey Bo Diddley” rhythm guitar part dressed up in cloudy electric piano. It would mirror Erykah Badu’s ”Cleva” in its devotion to jazz fusion as inspiration, and is murkily hard to categorize given its composer’s diverse history of influence. But it sounds just as he always does: Spiritual and daydreaming.
Kamaal the Abstract stays richly inventive, yet in dark tones, like “A Million Times” and “Barely In Love”, and in effervescence, like the ballad “Caring” and album standout “Even If It Is So”. It’s hard to see, from the outside, how this music didn’t fit in, albeit more obscurely, alongside platinum and gold contemporary albums like Mama’s Gun or Like Water for Chocolate. Yet, when it was finally belatedly released, it made no splash on the public consciousness. Maybe it wouldn’t ever have; Or maybe it was an album ahead of its time, yet released after its time. If so, it’s a lost chapter for one of rap’s most profoundly transformational artists, a potentially-revealing work unfortunately hidden from view.
Kamaal the Abstract’s foresight was truly decades ahead, and its difference from the state of music in the moment is articulated well by the critical backlash, even years later when it was belatedly released by Jive imprint Battery Records. When it was reviewed in Pitchfork in 2009, David Drake dismissed it, and in fact the entire enterprise of exploring jazz through hip-hop: “Incorporating jazz often felt like more of a stylistic affect than concrete engagement, just a couple of looped bars and a brief instrumental solo from a big name on a track outro.” He went on to suggest some sort of inherent incompatibility: “Rap music's complexity is tied up in language, the melodic and harmonic aspects stripped down so as to focus the listener on the verbal. Post-bebop jazz usually hinges on harmonic complexity.”
If Kamaal the Abstract wasn’t enough, then this feeling of certitude alone should’ve been a sign things were to change. The decade following that review yielded exactly the sort of harmonic complexity David Drake suggested Kamaal had reached too far for. Take Thundercat’s compositions for Kendrick Lamar, Earl Sweatshirt’s relationship with BADBADNOTGOOD, Tyler, the Creator’s fixation with Roy Ayers and chordal experimentation, Flying Lotus’ You’re Dead!, and, not least, A Tribe Called Quest’s own resurgence before Phife’s death. Rather than proving jazz’s insolubility in rap, the years have shown just how prescient Tip’s instincts were in 2001.
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."