The Retrographer, Issue 49 (January, 2 0 1 9)

January 31, 2019

Sade, Sharon Van Etten, James Blake, Deerhunter, Campire Weekend, Sun Parade, Noname, Phoelix, Take A Daytrip, Octavian, Weval, KALLITECHNIS, Maky Lavender, Intalekt, City Girls, Cardi B

The Retrographer 49 (January, 2 0 1 9)

Bulletins

Ten Songs for January, 2 0 1 9 | Listen to this playlist on Spotify and YouTube

Listen to this playlist on Spotify and YouTube 

“Stay”, Sharon Van Etten (Spotify / YouTube) – One of the first times we heard SVE, she sighed, “One day I’ll be fine with that.” Many people my age have hoped the same: It’ll get better… right? “Don’t want to hurt you, don’t want to run away from myself”, she says today. “You won’t let me go astray, you will let me find my way.” Is today the day?

“Assume Form”, James Blake (Spotify / YouTube) – Thinking of Grimes’ lyric, “Biology is superficial / Intelligence is artificial”. But where Grimes’ AI was a malicious slaver, Blake’s discovered love and it broke it just as it breaks us. “I hope this is the first day I connect motion to feeling,” he / it wonders, strings billowing over motorik drums like feelings over synapses.

“Plains”, Deerhunter (Spotify / YouTube) – Once upon a time, Bradford Cox took a trip as Atlas Sound: Animal Collectivist hipster lysergic. Now, he bops poolside – slick burnout, he – to a coconut rhythm, writing a letter home to “James”, who, back among the “barren and hateful plains,” is flooded here and there by synthesizer flashbacks to another time.

“Harmony Hall”, Vampire Weekend (Spotify / YouTube) – It means something when a writer reuses a line. In Ezra Koenig’s case, “I don’t want to live like this, but I don’t want to die”; Or, change is unbearable and it’s the only way. Naturally, this is a love song.

“Young Adult”, Sun Parade (Spotify / YouTube) – They may look cool, but: “Hanging around in the outer space / it’s looking up, you’re in tip-top shape / you’re young and dumb, a big American baby / you don’t like the things you don’t understand / meet me at noon at the practice space / forgot your guitar at your girlfriend’s place / you’re young and dumb, the biggest joke in town.”

“Song 31”, Noname and Phoelix (Spotify / YouTube) – One of the best one-two punches in music today, taking listeners back to the moody, yet optimistic tones of Noname’s towering 2016 Telefone. “I sell pain for profit,” she says proudly. “The only reason I’m steady flaming and still independent.”

“Stressed”, Take A Daytrip and Octavian (Spotify / YouTube) – Known for “Mo Bamba”, you’d pick Take A Daytrip’s serpentine basslines anywhere by now. Octavian is the best working grime artist, too, only occasionally reflecting the stress and vexation he sees on your face.

“Heaven, Listen”, Weval (Spotify / YouTube) – What about Weval’s AI? Judging from the cover and its sound, it’s more like Terminator 2; An inhuman, shapeshifting killing machine, furious to bring God to detente or else become it. Hell of a drop, too.

“DIAMOND BABY”, KALLITECHNIS, Maky Lavender + Intalekt (Spotify / YouTube) – This is what you’d like your last dance to be, what the mountaintop to reveal. “As long as I’m dreaming, I’ll take you there.” This sense of completion, resolution – what else is worth seeking?

“Twerk”, City Girls and Cardi B (Spotify / YouTube) – Cardi says, “It says to women that I can wear and not wear what ever I want. do w.e I want and that NO still means NO. So Stephanie chime in..If I twerk and be half naked does that mean I deserve to get raped and molested ? I want to know what a conservative woman like you thinks 🤔”

One Album for January, 2 0 1 9

Sade, “Diamond Life” (Epic, 1984) (Spotify / YouTube)

Helen Folasade Adu, model and designer, was as broke as an artist. She had been broke her whole life. She picked her clothes up from the cleaners one day and, on the bus home, wrote a song called “When Am I Going To Make a Living” on the back of the ticket.

Later when the singer – who, along with her band, came to be known mononymously as Sade – recorded the song, it evoked something much different than the desperation of its inspiration. It was slick; sophisticated; urbane; sexy; rich. The music writer Greil Marcus once said that lyrics are felt before they’re understood, but he was wrong about Adu. Her hunger was sumptuous, well-fed.

This is partly for reasons she beyond her control. Adu’s voice is thick and deep. It was like honey – as melliferous as mellifluous – even at age 24 when she released her band’s debut album Diamond Life. But the Adu on record was partly who she decided to be, too. “I look at music more as a consumer than as a musician,” she told the New York Times in 1985. She studied fashion at St. Martin’s School for Art and adorned her subtly libidinous music with slick guitar and broad saxophones. She evoked class like the finest, most aspirational brands do; Her album’s black-white-and-blue cover is a portrait of the singer as both Marilyn and Jackie O.

Adu’s Nigerian father and British mother broke up when she was very young. Her mother moved her across the world soon after, to the English countryside, where she raised her daughter alone. As a student, Adu found her way to the clubs, first as a designer for the band Spandau Ballet, then singing backup in the band Pride, then fronting her own eponymous group. She was striking at every step: Beautifully dressed, hair tightly pulled back, with a sonorous, dulcet voice and a tight band whose jazzy style somehow broke with and completed the moody sensuality of the day’s ascendant Linn drums and synthesizers.

Sade recorded 14 tracks for Diamond Life and canned the five fastest ones. Left behind were patient, seductive songs like “Cherry Pie” and “Your Love Is King”, featuring funky basslines, palm-muted guitar lines, electric piano, sixteenth-note hi-hat parts. The pain in her music is somehow romantic, too. The cruel lotharios and addicts of “Smooth Operator” and “Frankie’s First Affair” keep their victim’s hearts even despite their wiles. It’s pain is pleasure, too, and vice versa.

The album evokes something distinctive for many listeners. It might derisively be called lounge. But it’s hard to overstate how different this sound was for its moment. Again, a combination of what Adu could and couldn’t control. Take her closing cover of “Why Can’t We Live Together”. Consider Timmy Thomas’ original (long before the hotline blinged for another Sade obsessive...), then Sade’s rendition. She brought so much that only she could. Consider, too, her stated inspirations for the album: Al Green, Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone. She sounds, fabulously, like none of those singers.

Diamond Life‘s luxury is aspirational, something smelled but never tasted. Even its title is its striving creator’s fantasy. “We’re hungry for a life we can’t afford,” she sings. But she wasn’t frustrated by her state; Not even particularly waylaid. Adu didn’t forget where she came from, or the path that led her out of it; on an album about class in both senses of the word, the squalid “Sally” is about the Salvation Army. Her answer for when she would make a living was just as aspirational: “There’s no end to what you can do if you give yourself a chance.”

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."

MONTHLY

#49 January, 2019 | Sade, “Diamond Life”

ANNUAL