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- The Retrographer, Issue 41 (May, 2 0 1 8)
The Retrographer, Issue 41 (May, 2 0 1 8)
Bobby Brown, Andre 3000, Pusha T, A$AP Rocky, Frank Ocean, Lauryn Hill, Anderson .Paak, Playboi Carti, Bryson Tiller, Diplo, Trippie Redd, Childish Gambino, Arctic Monkeys, Jon Hopkins, Deafheaven
The Retrographer 41 (May, 2 0 1 8)
Bulletins
As you may / may not know, my startup Cymbal just shut down. It was powering the albums and songs in this newsletter, and allowed me to share a single link for every song. Now that it’s gone I don’t have a reliable unified option, so I have to go back to picking one paid provider. I’m going with Spotify. I hope listening isn’t too much of an inconvenience for people outside that universe! I’ll still be making YouTube playlists for every edition so you can listen easily without Spotify.
“Me&My (To Bury Your Parents)”, André 3000 (SoundCloud / YouTube) – André Benjamin lost both of his parents just a year apart from one another. So he’s poured his grief into this Stevie Wonder-like elegy, and his newly-mastered bass clarinet, which he may have been playing for less than a year. Few songs understand loss as this one does.
“Come Back Baby”, Pusha T (Spotify / YouTube) – The same brilliance of “Numbers on the Boards”, the same soul of “Otis”. Push called it the new G.O.O.D. Fridays – and if you think that makes him seem formulaic, then maybe he’s as unevolved as a diamond. “All that came from pressure.”
“Purity”, A$AP Rocky, Frank Ocean, Lauryn Hill (Spotify / YouTube) – I just finished reading Angels in America for the first time, but Frank summed it up in just one line: “Spending time spinning out toward a desire that wasn't pure / Born before the virus was cured, pitch perfect, violins on the floor.” And then Lauryn: “I’m undone because…”
“Fell In Luv”, Playboi Carti, Bryson Tiller (Spotify) – Pi'erre Bourne with a bang-up Clams Casino impression, reminding us of the lineage back to his big brother Rocky’s relationship with the Rhode Islander. Carti’s hiccuping, slick flow hasn’t changed much since the eponymous album, but it remains fresh.
“Wish”, Diplo and Trippie Redd (Spotify / YouTube) – Diplo can cover a sea of revelers in neon glee, but his impressionistic backdrop to Redd’s emo rap indicates there are new colors he – and we – haven’t heard yet.
“This Is America”, Childish Gambino (Spotify / YouTube) – There’s been a lot of talk about its video, directed by his Atlanta accomplice Hiro Murai. But that candy-coated assault only gives visuals to the dark duality of the song itself, splitting between revelry and pitched-down police sirens. “Get your money (Black man)! Get your money (BLACK MAN)!”
“Bubblin”, Anderson .Paak (Spotify / YouTube) – .Paak is back with what he calls a 007 song – If Bond Inc. picked this as its next theme, we’d be headed someplace we’ve never gone, plus an amazing video from Calmatic.
“Star Treatment”, Arctic Monkeys (Spotify / YouTube) – Once upon a time, Alex Turner’s quartet quaked like a transatlantic analogue to Julian Casablancas’ Strokes; Now he’s achieved a new kind of brilliance, satirizing that bygone time in an absurdist fantasy of a lounge lizard on a retrofuturistic Moon base. He croons to any detractors, “Who you gonna call, the martini police?”
“Luminous Beings”, Jon Hopkins (Spotify / YouTube) – Hopkins’ compositions unfold like epic novels of magical realism, iridescent under the light of discovery each new moment sheds. While Singularity doesn’t have the drama of its predecessor Immunity, it retains its essential grandeur.
“Honeycomb”, Deafheaven (Spotify / YouTube) – The imminence of Deafheaven’s music is deepened – articulated, even – by the band’s ear for melody. Black metal can often be about transcendence, but Deafheaven is the rare group that gives a glimpse of the destination.
One Album for May, 2018
The irony, intentional and not, of this album title: One of the cruelest men in the history of pop music admonishing you, especially on his album’s titular song, to open up to him.
“Don’t be cruel / because I would never be that cruel to you.”
Brown beat his wife, repeatedly, over years and years of tumultuous marriage, even as he denied the evidence and resisted being labeled an abuser. The limp complaint sung then, delivered decades before the world would see who he really was, was that he was somehow the victim to a woman who wouldn’t capitulate to his advances.
Brown’s 1986 album, Don’t Be Cruel, is often compared to Janet Jackson’s 1987 landmark Control. Like that album, Don’t Be Cruel was an artificial toughening, a last-ditch attempt at a rebrand for a former child star. Like Jackson, Brown’s solo breakthrough made a sacrificial lamb of the kiddie charm he cultivated as one of the 1980s biggest names, in Brown’s case as a member of New Edition, a true boy band best known for hits like “Cool It Now”. But like Janet Jackson before him, and Zayn Malik after him, Brown’s escape from the fetishized boyishness of the group that made him big involved a new, performative villainization: To be adult, he had to look tough, even cruel.
He was just 19 when he released Don’t Be Cruel, two years after a flop of a first album, King of Stage. Everything had to change. King of Stage’s friendly, smiling Brown had to turn into the marble-framed, stone-faced, double-breasted, turtlenecked figure on Don’t Be Cruel. Just as Jackson had drafted New Jack Swing masterminds Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Brown employed budding New Jack super-producers L.A. Reid and Babyface. And, just like Jackson, the reinvention of Brown transformed his career, yielding the highest-selling album of 1989, a septuple-platinum wrecking ball with five top-ten singles, one #1, and a Grammy for “Every Little Step”.
To this day, Don’t Be Cruel is among the most vivid and cutting realizations of New Jack Swing, the style that dominated R&B in the late 1980s and early 90s. It’s unmistakable in a car radio or in the background at a bar. Reid and Babyface relied on a toolbox of synthetic sounds, facsimile drums, ersatz horns, and slap bass, all programmed in a way that mimicked the new, thrillingly motorik feel of rap loops. It was a stark break from the live instrumentation soul music had relied on as recently as Michael Jackson’s seminal realization of disco on Thriller at the middle of the decade, but its deviation made it seem youthful and promising, at least until it became a fixture of electric piano presets. Above the driving production sat Brown’s vocal performance, which varied often between his high, nasal singing voice, to intimated spoken world, to the occasional, Kurtis Blow-style raps.
The album has moments that don’t stray far from New Edition’s work – Brown was still a kid, despite the turtleneck – especially on the slow jam “Roni”, but on the whole assumes one of two characters: The miffed, ascendant post-adolescent on the album’s massive one-two punch “Don’t Be Cruel” and “My Prerogative”, or the fledgling loverman of “All Day All Night”, the funky “Rock Wit’cha”, or “Take It Slow”. But despite its innovative execution, this is where Don’t Be Cruel differs from Control: Its narrative of liberation serves no higher purpose. It’s a narrow perspective on growing up, and that’s intentional: Brown’s objective was for you to take his libido seriously. This stance worked so well Brown never felt the need to grow past it, or avert from its path.
What to do with the beloved work of reprehensible people? What do we do with the work of fellow wife-beaters Miles Davis and John Lennon? Or sexual miscreants like Woody Allen and James Brown? What about the insulated and cruelly unempathetic, like late-period Kanye West? Bobby Brown’s work didn’t warp the artistic universe of the 20th century like those violent or thoughtless men did; But should their influence absolve their transgressions more than his?
“My Prerogative” is a staple at weddings and karaoke bars, and likely will be until the people who grew up with New Edition stop going to such places, or until his impressionists move on. But as long as the memory of the striking young figure of Bobby Brown coexists with dastardly, bloated figure he mutated into, an iniquity is tolerated. The greatest irony – even greater than the album title itself – is that Brown’s redemption could’ve been found looking back, not forward, to his days in New Edition:
“If she feels the same, she'll let you know
Just prepare yourself, or be ready to go”
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."