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- The Retrographer, Issue 44 (August, 2 0 1 8)
The Retrographer, Issue 44 (August, 2 0 1 8)
Aretha Franklin, Mac Miller, Ariana Grande, Travis Scott, Drake, Blood Orange, Diddy, Tei Shi, Louis Cole, Dennis Hamm, Denzel Curry, Nyyjerya, Foxing, Mitski, boygenius, Troye SivanThe Retrographer 44 (August, 2018)
Bulletins
An awful, awful month for music: Do not forget the gifts Aretha gave us, or how much was ahead for Mac.
Sorry for the delay on this issue! Been working on some crazy stuff, will explain later.
Cat Power is coming back! Let’s remember how great she is.
This issue includes Louis Cole – get into his band KNOWER.
As my friend Andrew said: I hope Ariana’s later career goes further in a direction she’s been pointing to for a while: Fusion.
Listen to this playlist on Spotify and YouTube“Come Back to Earth”, Mac Miller (Spotify / YouTube) – Mac didn’t mean to go, but at least he said goodbye: ”I just need a way out of my head / I'll do anything for a way out of my head. / In my own way, this feels like living / some alternate reality / And I was just drowning, but now I'm swimming.”“Get Well Soon”, Ariana Grande (Spotify / YouTube) – After a year and a half of tragedy, Sweetener did just what it should: Let Ariana focus on her music. With the best instrument in pop, Grande hurdles a battery of tasteful challenges to remind us that heartbreaks – public and private – are just a moment in time. “Unfollow fear and just say, ‘You are blocked’”“SICKO MODE”, Travis Scott and Drake (Spotify / YouTube) – I haven’t been in a Lyft without hearing this song since it came out. ASTROWORLD is full of two-tone beats, smoothed by Drake (who packed his own “amens”) extolling the virtues of passing out on a plane.“Hope”, Blood Orange, Diddy, and Tei Shi (Spotify / YouTube) – Diddy is one of history’s greatest celebrators, which makes his occasional moments of introspection that much more affecting. Here he monologizes nakedly – ”Sometimes I ask myself, ‘What is going to take for me not to be afraid to be loved like I really want to be loved?” Just that admission makes room for hope.“Trying Not To Die”, Louis Cole (Spotify / YouTube) – Cole is funny and odd, which lets his unbelievable musicianship as a drummer and arranger sneak up on you. His fills sound like a file cabinet exquisitely falling down the stairs, but even so the spotlight is stolen by his collaborator Thundercat’s touring pianist Dennis Hamm, who jumps in with a solo as simple and unforgettable as the ABCs.“CASH MANIAC | CAZH MAN1AC”, Denzel Curry and NYYJERYA (Spotify / YouTube) – Denzel doesn’t rap like others who given the “SoundCloud Rapper” label, or like his dominating contemporaries from Florida. But these 808s and Miami Vice synth stabs take you right back to where he came from just the same. Great driving through the city on a Saturday late afternoon music.“Lich Prince”, Foxing (Spotify / YouTube) – Conor Murphy’s voice sounds like it’s being squeezed from a toothpaste tube, but all that repression explodes, first in a twisting, towering guitar part, thundering drums, and, finally, an immolating tapping guitar solo.“Lonesome Love”, Mitski (Spotify / YouTube) – After listening to this album almost every day for a month, it’s hard to pick one song out. Each is a little snow globe, a world with its own victories and defeats. But here, Mitski’s uniquely cutting humanity comes through in just a few words – “Alone in a taxi that I’m so very paying for” – tells its own story.“Me & My Dog”, boygenius (Spotify / YouTube) – Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, three young artists just beginning to make the world aware of their power, decide to band together with songs as good as any of theirs individually, lifted aloft with their CSNY / Indigo Girls-like gorgeous harmonies.“The Good Side”, Troye Sivan (Spotify / YouTube) – A lovely, pitying mea culpa from Troye, who sings and seems as heavenly as the lost love he embodies in this sweet, unadorned song. If you got a letter like this, you might just feel worse, knowing how good the one who left you was.
One Album for August, 2018
The story of soul music is the story of gospel music. For every soul singer there was a child in a church, a reverend, a band and a choir, a book of stories and songs that told them. For every soul song, there was a hymnal, a tune, a child walking home from services still humming them.The division between the spiritual world of the church, and the temporal plane and with its earthly temptations and popular music, was a point of conflict for generations of talented young artists whose music took them away to bright lights, tours, record deals, the enticement of record contracts and an ungodly way of living. So many were children of the reverends: Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, and greatest of all, Aretha Franklin.
Speaking of his daughter, Reverend C.L. Franklin reminisced: “[Reverend] James [Cleveland] came to prepare our choir for a gospel broadcast – which is still in existence – and he and Aretha used to go in the living room and spend hours in there, singing different songs.” And then, to put a fine point on it, “If you want to know the truth, she has never left the church.”
By 1972, Aretha Franklin was among the biggest pop stars in the world, a name in lights far from the steeple. Her marquee song, “Respect”, had been a #1 single, and she ruled the US R&B charts with sometimes two #1 albums a year starting in 1967. The world was in awe of her; Marianne Faithfull once said, “The voice of God, if you must know, is Aretha Franklin’s.”
In her early days, Aretha toured with gospel groups, and her talent rose above all others – she even toured with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But soon her talent caught ears beyond the church, and Sam Cooke convinced her of the world that awaited her in popular music. Through the 60s she rose from a teenage phenom to a true icon, whose power, principles, ear, and towering voice defined the era.
None of that would have been the same – not the music, not the message, not the moral license – if Aretha had not brought with her the church that her father implied others thought she had abandoned. Aretha Franklin – who sung at Martin Luther King’s funeral and Barack Obama’s inauguration – forged fearlessly into an impossible night and came out having brought the day with her. How?
The highest-selling live gospel album of all time with two million albums sold, Amazing Grace is an ineffable document of two days in Los Angeles’ New Temple Missionary Baptist Church. Aretha leads her classic Atlantic Records band – Chuck Rainey, Bernard Purdie, Cornell Dupree – the best musicians in this sphere. Behind them, her father conducts the Southern California Community Choir, the spirit incarnate.
This summit of heaven and earth meets in the music. Aretha was Carole King’s muse, and the world knows their convergence in “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”. But just two songs into Amazing Grace, Franklin invites her in again, melding King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” with a traditional Aretha once sung on her gospel circuit dates as a girl: “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”. King’s expression of devotion is transformed into a devotional, even somehow deepened by its new context. The terror and awesomeness of the choir is blinding and real as they sing, “I'm tired, I'm weak, I'm lone.” Soon Aretha introduces her deliverance: “All you’ve got to do is call, and he’ll be there.”
At over 80 minutes, Amazing Grace does feel like a church service, albeit without a spoken sermon or recited verses. But in its folds, Aretha shows again and again how popular music is godly, not a corruption of godliness. She renders Marvin Gaye’s “Wholy Holy”, and the song is never quite the same. The modern production and songwriting flourishes that made What’s Going On such a landmark – iridescent harp, a glinting chord progression – slip naturally into the album’s worship.
But it’s centerpiece, it’s namesake, it’s thesis, is “Amazing Grace”. It is her greatest vocal performance, one that sweeps up the album’s live audience like a squall on a rowboat at sea. For over eight minutes, she simply sings with no band, only accompanied by her father on piano, just as she had with Reverend Cleveland three decades before, and the rapture of congregants. It is a song about redemption, “being saved” as a literal act, gratitude, and faith that it is possible to keep going – even to arrive – if you just believe.
And believe she did. Aretha towered over the powers that blew back lesser artists. She poured the blood into songs of feminists, civil rights activists, the meek and the brave and the hopelessly outmatched. She did it with faith and a talent like no one had ever heard, that could lift a room full of strangers into shouting assent: “Right on! Right on! Right on!”
That’s how.
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."