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- The Retrographer, Issue 40 (April, 2 0 1 8)
The Retrographer, Issue 40 (April, 2 0 1 8)
Amy Winehouse, Drake, Big Freedia, Cardi B, Bad Bunny, J Balvin, Ariana Grande, A$AP Rocky, Moby, Curren$y, E-40, Ty Dolla $ign, Rich The Kid, Hop Along, Kacey Musgraves, Saba, Prince(!)
The Retrographer 40 (April, 2018)
Bulletins
Jay-Z once said “40 is the new 30” – best evinced by February’s Issue 38 of the Retrographer, which I accidentally called Issue 28. Oh well. Thank you for reading this not-so-tiny TinyLetter for these last 40 months. As always: Respond to this email with requests, ideas, questions, or recommendations. I love hearing from you.
“Nice For What”, Drake and Big Freedia (Cymbal / YouTube) – Drake Inc. barrels forward to yet another blockbuster quarter, signaling to shareholders that an acquisition of Song of the Summer ($SOTS) may be imminent, in part thanks to strategic partnerships with Hill Corp and Freedia Enterprises.
“I Like It”, Cardi B, Bad Bunny, and J Balvin (Cymbal / YouTube) – With all due respect: Cardi’s greatest medium is the Instagram video. Her personality shines when she can let fly with no strictures. This is as close as she’s gotten to that on a record, talking shit over a July block party beat.
“No Tears Left To Cry”, Ariana Grande (Cymbal / YouTube) – A dark, unconventional first single, befitting the rattled psyche of a young woman, entrusted with the love of untold numbers of young fans, and who watched them senselessly murdered in her presence. That she gave them a song to move on by is a blessing unto itself.
“A$AP Forever”, A$AP Rocky and Moby (Cymbal / YouTube) – Rakim Mayers doused the world purple in 2011, coasting down 116th street over based Clams Casino samples; Don’t ding him for the fact it took him until 2018 to pull downtempo samples into his passenger seat.
“Slide”, Curren$y, E-40, and Ty Dolla $ign (Cymbal / YouTube) – Like the underrated Cigarette Boats, Curren$y’s latest project slinks into your headphones like a lolo. E-40 is the perfect counterbalance: Bouncily spouting facts and figures about edibles and prison cells.
“Plug Walk”, Rich the Kid (Cymbal / YouTube) – I loved my friend Frankie’s frank review of this album. Some albums are better as singles, and this is the single for this one. Rich leaves plenty room for Lab Cook’s starry beat, which sounds like the lullabye the ISS wrote for itself.
“Slow Burn”, Kacey Musgraves (Cymbal / YouTube) – Many outside country music heard about Musgraves for the first time when they caught an odd whiff of smelling salts administered to critics after hearing her Golden Hour. It’s full of gems, but opens with this quiet, celestial beckoning.
“HEAVEN ALL AROUND ME”, Saba (Cymbal / YouTube) – Like Noname’s 2016 Telefone, Tahj Chandler’s incredible CARE FOR ME frames a painful youth in sonics of improbable youthful nostalgia. The gauzy imminence of the title suggests its undergirding drama.
“Somewhere a Judge”, Hop Along (Cymbal / YouTube) – Philly’s finest continue the city’s best stretch in decades with trickling hi-hat, transforming guitar lines, and, most importantly, Frances Quinlan’s unmatched voice. This album may not have come far from 2015’s Painted Shut, but it can be more than forgiven for that.
“Nothing Compares 2 U”, Prince (Cymbal / YouTube) – Internet pioneer Prince vaulted his work away with the hypocrisy of Mark Zuckerberg taping his laptop camera. In the wake of his tragic death, that vault has been opened to reveal the brilliance of his work, including this, his rendition of perhaps his greatest song.
“All I could ever be to you / is the darkness that we knew.”
Amy Winehouse’s second and last album seems, in so many ways, to be sung to the black cloud that would finally envelop her. Before its release, she’d started showing up in tabloids looking haggard and lost but somehow captivating, such that when her first single, “Rehab”, came out the following year, she appeared to be winking knowingly from the end of the bar.
Winehouse underwent two notable, simultaneous transformations in the lead up to 2006’s Back to Black: First, the aforementioned decline into alcohol and drug use, batted cruelly around by British gossip rags and repetitious late night hosts alike. The tabloid industry’s evolution, from tawdry rumor-milling in glossies and newsprint to surreptitiously obtained clips pushed to the TMZ site, happened in Winehouse’s silhouette as much as it did Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian’s. She made writing snarky ledes easy: The “Rehab” puns, the “Wino Winehouse” quips – it all quickly felt as stale as it did sad.
The second transformation is what makes Back to Black one of the great feats of its decade: Winehouse’s change from simply being a promising R&B singer to a magnificently destroyed monument to midcentury songwriting and everything that came after, rising above pastiche to somehow reinvent the soul music of the 1950s and 60s to become something relevant and profoundly personal, singular, while summing up so much of what it birthed too.
Winehouse’s lower-middle class Jewish London family had a rapt, one-girl audience to the Sarah Vaughan, the Ronettes, Dinah Washington, and Frank Sinatra played around the house. After expulsion from an arts secondary school, Winehouse was connected to Salaam Remi, who produced her first album, named for Sinatra. It’s a promising, if uneven display of her burgeoning songwriting gifts and beautiful, languid voice.
In the next two years, however, Winehouse began to change. She leaned into the roadhouse soul of her childhood living room and turned her spiraling addiction, mental illness, and publicly tortuous romance. Drama darkened her lyrics as much as smoking coarsened her voice. And, crowning it all, a Ronnie Spector beehive rose on her pate, frequently mussed and unkempt, like a mitre lost to the coatroom of CBGB.
Employing the late Sharon Jones’ Dap Tones band and the ascendant Mark Ronson, Back to Black interprets period performance befitting the old RCA studio bands of the 60s. But just as Winehouse’s cat-eye makeup was tinged by her sleeve of tattoos, so to did her lyricism let the listener in on the thrilling ways the Wall of Sound was being satirized, updated, parodied, invigorated, collagued, done justice.
Take “Me & Mr Jones”. After its melismatic intro, Winehouse winds into a story about how her deadbeat boyfriend made her miss a Slick Rick show – Rick being a rapper who sampled the era of music Winehouse now inhabited more than once. This recursive, kaleidoscopic referencing, at once form-switching between the past and present, and sweetened when she forgives the bum, is succinctly established in just the first line: “What kind of fuckery is this?”
For its charms, Back to Black’s neat 34 minutes’ highs are often its lows, the vulnerable moments of fate or desperation. Its perfect middle triptych begins with the title track, dedicated to an unfaithful lover, but tells about the cycle of addiction tightening their orbit in paraphanaelic imagery: “I love you much / It's not enough you love blow and I love puff / And life is like a pipe, and I'm a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside.” It’s followed and continued by “Love Is a Losing Game”, a concise and poetic expression of resignation with some of the album’s best writing. Finishing is “Tears Dry on Their Own”, an Ashford & Simpson contrafact, that doesn’t so much redeem Winehouse as it pulls her up and pushes her to her next misadventure.
Whatever her foibles and charms, addiction haunts the album at its every turn, always seeming as inevitable as the title suggests. On “Just Friends” Winehouse sings, “It's never safe for us, not even in the evening, cus I've been drinking”, and then, just a few songs later on “Wake Up Alone”, she’s fighting valiantly again: “I stay up, clean the house. At least I'm not drinking…” Her dependencies take the form of real demons, and it is often hard to tell if her heartbreak is a metaphor for addiction, or if both are circling an inescapable, constitutional drain of pain and self-hatred. No matter: They kept pulling her further and further down.
That the album begins with “Rehab” and ends regressively with the dark trifle “Addicted” is yet another wink from Winehouse – “It’s got me addicted, more than any dick did!” – that retains its bewitching tragedy. She’s brilliant and charming and doomed. And knowing this, she left us with some insight and advice that she couldn’t take herself: “I played myself again. I should be my own best friend, instead of fucking myself in the head with stupid men.” Beset by fate, she sang anyhow, just to let you know the darkness she knew.
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."