The Retrographer, Issue 53 (May, 2 0 1 9)

June 02, 2019

Jamila Woods, Saba, Big Thief, Vampire Weekend, Local Natives, ScHoolboy Q, 21 Savage, Pivot Gang, Jamilla Woods, Tyler, the Creator, Carly Rae Jepsen, Mac DeMarco, Aldous Harding, Paul Simon

The Retrographer, Issue 53

Bulletins

Ten Songs for May, 2 0 1 9 | Listen to these songs on Spotify and YouTube

“How Long?”, Vampire Weekend (Spotify / YouTube) – Ezra Koenig’s first solo record hardly evades detection under the Vampire Weekend moniker. His bandmates have never felt less relevant; The songs are all written by him, the producer is a hired gun, Baio and Tomson don’t even play all the bass and drum parts on the record. He flaunts it here, where each successive verse dispatches with the arrangement of the prior. He wields his hegemony to considered and playful results. 

“Someday Now”, Local Natives (Spotify / YouTube) – The high percussion sounds like wind chimes somehow awoke from chaos into a funky order. That exertion of control over wild nature spans the song: “You’ve already waited so long; You want someday, someday now.”

“BASQUIAT”, Jamila Woods and Saba (Spotify / YouTube) – ”Are you mad?” “Yes I’m mad.” It’s a simple exchange, yet so liberating, and especially how Woods says it: Not angrily, because that would sell her out (“they want to see me angry; They want to see me bare my teeth.”) Rather, resignedly, wisely controlled. Not disappointed, mad. Bonus: Saba with the coda.

“GONE, GONE / THANK YOU”, Tyler, the Creator (Spotify / YouTube) – A sweeping, colorful Stevie Wonder-like suite. To Tyler, like many who struggle with darkness, a sunny sentiment like “Feels like summer!” can only exist as a counterweight to something: “...to my December!”

“No Drug Like Me”, Carly Rae Jepsen (Spotify / YouTube) – The singer of “Call Me Maybe” and “I Really Really Really Really Like You” used to embody a sort of “adult cast as a teenager in a CW drama” ersatz naifishness; ingenuity’s ingenue. But now she’s found adult desire: mature, sexy, and still just as flush.

“Colbert”, Pivot Gang (Spotify / YouTube) – Saba’s footsteps tread hallowed ground as far as this email is concerned. His coterie complement him nicely on a decidedly lower-stakes affair than last year’s incredible CARE FOR ME. Here they’re just grooving, enjoying the love.

“Floating”, ScHoolboy Q and 21 Savage (Spotify / YouTube) – His brilliant ear for beats, flows, and styles is intact. The subtly memorable way he varies the enunciation of the title throughout the chorus pins in your ear like a thorn. 21 is his perfect counterpart; monotone but riveting all the same.

“Baby Bye Bye”, Mac DeMarco (Spotify / YouTube) – His “You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)”. It’s really got everything you need to know about Mac: Stylistically curious, romantic, terminally goofy, abidingly sad and exhausted with said goofiness. With the high gang vocals, big piano chord interlude, low voice character interjections, he recalls the Beatles in many ways here, except one: he’s alone.

“Fixture Picture”, Aldous Harding (Spotify / YouTube) – Rather stoned. More fixated than fixed (or affixed, for that matter). Harding is stuck in her own head, maybe talking to an artist, or maybe imagining a conversation with the stately subject of their signed painting: “I’ve never burned bright, and how’s the wine where you live? I’ll bet it’s expensive. One day we’ll share a glass together and ride the dunes.”

“Betsy”, Big Thief (Spotify) – Adrienne Lenker has used more or less the same singing voice throughout her short career with Big Thief and as a solo artist. But, for just a moment, the Adrienne of forty years into the future, of her “Both Sides Now” phase, appears on this song: Weathered, knowing, wise, torn from a future where her brilliance is as known as it is today evident.

One Album for May, 2 0 1 8

Paul Simon, The Rhythm of the Saints (Warner Bros. Records, 1990) (Spotify / YouTube) 

Paul Simon’s career is marked by his openness to collaboration. His boundaries are clearly marked: He writes the songs. But where he can, he invites in counterparts. He had Art Garfunkel sing what still may be his most iconic composition in “Bridge over Troubled Water”; he had the Dixie Hummingbirds to the table for “She Loves Me Like a Rock”; He let Steve Gadd guide “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”. His writing is the bones – if you will, the hearts and bones – of his work, but never felt the need to be the flesh that filled it or the blood it pumped.

It wasn’t until 1986’s Graceland that this openness expanded to the length of a record. It’s almost a concept album: It’s got everything but a throughline story. Simon’s collaborators – mostly South African, with a detour to New Orleans – give the album its character and singularity, but they’re hardly introduced or explained. Alluded to, sure; “Under African Skies” states the obvious. But why had he taken a highlife angle on the couple sleeping in a doorway on Broadway, or on a trip to visit Elvis’ home in Tennessee? Were Boyoyo Boys or Ladysmith Black Mambazo even characters in this story? Or, instead, just too evocative to be denied in the spirit of Simon’s soulful self-examination?

“Worldbeat” was a genre that found an internal logic through the 1980s with albums like Graceland and it’s successor, The Rhythm of the Saints. The idea was, generously described, a sort of fusion music that found commonalities among mostly South American and African traditional styles. At its best, it followed Simon’s example on Graceland, allowing collaborators in with creative latitude. Less charitably, it glossed across very different cultures, primarily finding coherence among artists and listeners who it didn’t know deeply: Such tokenism could be empty and exploitative.

The Rhythm of the Saints abandoned its predecessor’s African locus for a more encompassing concept. Sort of Brazilian, sometimes Cuban, occasionally African – Simon’s influence seemed to be little more than the African diaspora. To make that make sense, particularly given the lyrical focus on what reads as Simon’s struggles with midlife stasis and angst, was a tightrope walk – One that, while less undeniable than its predecessor, completed Simon’s renaissance.

“The Obvious Child” is, as a composition alone, a kind of successor to Graceland’s “You Can Call Me Al”: Simon’s narrator laments his shortcomings and the small scale of modern life (“I don’t expect to be a fool anymore, I don’t expect to sleep through the night” continues from “Short little span of attention, my nights are so long”). Like “You Can Call Me Al”, it is its album’s biggest play for grandness and scale. And like that song, it does so by dissolving the folk roots of Simon’s songwriting into an arrangement that is by no mistake foreign to the pop radio it endeavored to enter. It begins and ends with Grupo Cultural Olodum’s thunderous drums, strikingly framing the span of a lifetime, passing from generation to generation.

But where Graceland continued with sunlight flecked with features from his collaborators, The Rhythm of the Saints finds a cloud darkening it. “Can’t Run But”, the album’s second song, paints the Chernobyl disaster from the ground-level view. “Further to Fly” contemplates growth and aging together, but seems to come to no conclusions about it: “A recent loss of memory, a shadow in the family, a baby waves ‘bye-bye’.” “The Cool, Cool River”’s 9/8 metre vacillates between this darkness and a peeking hope: “I believe in the future.” These songs seem to see a world darkening, without Simon’s handy sense of humor and irony. They are raw and a bit less friendly, but a clearer view into what bothers him. The end of that song explodes with clarion horns: “These streets, quiet as a sleeping army, send their battered dreams to heaven.” But it’s true revelation plunges it back into the shroud: “Sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears”.

The Rhythm of the Saints reads as less of a collaboration between Simon and the musicians he teams with, and more like his work. In this way, it’s a less generous album. But their voices are still strongly heard. “Spirit Voices”, light and loping over a gorgeous lead guitar line, is one of Simon’s few shared vocal performances on the album.Its muted, eponymous closer speaks to the spirit of the album’s collaboration. “If I have weaknesses, don’t let them blind me.” Instead, he finished this moment of his career like he started: Making his music as open as those tears.. So, too, does the start of The Rhythm of the Saints tell the circularity of its closing: “These songs are true, these days are ours, these tears are free.”

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#53 May, 2019 | Paul Simon, “Rhythm of the Saints”

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