The Retrographer, Issue 54 (June, 2 0 1 8)

July 09, 2019

multisyllabicBruce Springsteen, Jay Som, Clairo, Jai Paul, (Sandy) Alex G, Thom Yorke, Denzel Curry, J Balvin, Bad Bunny, Ari Lennox, Big Punmultisyllabic

The Retrographer, Issue 54

Bulletins

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

“Drive Fast (The Stuntman)”, Bruce Springsteen (Spotify / YouTube) – Bruce almost died as a teenager in a motorcycle accident. Laying in his hospital bed, his vengeful father shaved his head, furious at his rebellious spirit. If death didn’t tame him, nothing would. Now he looks back at those thrills with a “steel rod in my leg – but it walks me home.” 

“Superbike”, Jay Som (Spotify / YouTube) – Jay’s last album seemed to paint in every color of indie rock; This song seems to endeavor to do all that in under four minutes. It even closes with a perfectly smeared My Bloody Valentine lead.

“Take It Or Leave It”, Ava Luna (Spotify / YouTube) – Ava Luna have been around for a long time now, and that’s no small feat for a band with a lot of strong voices. And yet, they still sound as fresh as ever in these two minutes of interlocking parts, call-and-response, and dub bass.

“Bags”, Clairo (Spotify / YouTube) – Rostam’s effervescent staging fits her perfectly: fluttering hi-hats, chugging guitars, slightly fried synths, reverbed, a single-note piano line, and, in the middle, Clairo’s cool, pained voice. “Pardon my emotions, I should probably keep them all to myself.”

“Do You Love Her Now”, Jai Paul (Spotify / YouTube) – It was called “Track 2” when it made my best of 2013 list, but now “Str8 Outta Mumbai” is available everywhere, for everyone. And with it, this heavy, yet faded song, a wavering stage for Jai’s gorgeous falsetto. 

“Gretel”, (Sandy) Alex G (Spotify / YouTube) – Giannascoli has a unique ability to plunge into dark, forbidden, unspeakable corners of the human soul. Something about his songs leave you soaked in feeling, still dripping as you go about your day. 

“I Am a Very Rude Person”, Thom Yorke (Spotify / YouTube) – Only Thom Yorke sounds like Thom Yorke, yet he somehow stays new, inventive, changeable. “I have to hope this spell’s gonna break / I have to destroy to create / I have to be rude to your face / I’m breaking up the turntables, now I’m going to watch your party die.”

“RICKY”, Denzel Curry (Spotify / YouTube) – Curry knows how to win. Appealing to the young acolytes of Florida mumble rap and antiquarian N.W.A. fans at the same time isn’t easy, but his seismic ZUU is as much west coast as it is peninsular.

“YO LE LLEGO”, J Balvin and Bad Bunny (Spotify / YouTube) – A consummate slow-motion rolling-up-to-the-party song for a summer confusingly light on certified jams. It won’t endeavor to topple “Old Town Road”, but it should accompany a volume boost when it comes on at any party after 1 AM this July.

“I Been”, Ari Lennox (Spotify / YouTube) – A lyricist who can perfectly describe a feeling in just a few words: “I’ve been smoking purple haze to forget about you / And I try and I try and I try and I try / but I’m having the worst luck on Tinder / you have to be a big pretender.”

One Album for June, 2 0 1 8 

Big Pun, “Capital Punishment” (Loud Records / Terror Squad, 1998) (Spotify / YouTube) 

“I wasn’t always Big Pun / it wasn’t always this fun.”

First he was Christopher Rios of the Bronx, a kid who loved boxing and basketball. But in his late teens, something changed: He moved out of his mother’s house and plunged into a deep depression. His weight ballooned from 180 lbs to well over 300. The aggression, focus, and ability that drove him as a child were obscured as he sought to find himself again.

“I’ll make them all believers once I let the Tyson out”

What – or who – he found was Big Pun, a persona built on Frank Castle’s Punisher, the tortured comic book vigilante whose psychological scars drove him to a life of insatiable retribution. Pun’s debut album, 1998’s Capital Punishment, opens with two young boys playing with their toys. One introduces superhero after superhero – Spiderman, Daredevil, X-Men, Terminator – to battle, but the other is immovable. “All their powers ain’t shit. Punisher the real dope, homie.” With fiery focus, he channels the original Punisher’s righteous rage to level all competition.

Capital Punishment’s first song is “Beware”, and it makes an immediate, indelible impression. Pun’s heavy, percussive voice is guttural but nimble, his long, multisyllabic lines punctuated by violent inhalations. Labor won’t stand in the way of his force. Like the kid on the intro, he possesses an unshakable focus, and a fantasizing rage easy to mistake for the then-ascendant horrorcore rap (“All of us die, some of us killed – even massacred”). He’s not light on boxing metaphors, either (“We can go blow-for-blow like Evander and Bowe”). Christopher Rios found a new pair of gloves to lace up.

“Grew from a fool to a scholar”

Pun’s reputation is, for many, summarized by Capital Punishment’s third track: Super lyrical. Kids learning about the exquisite, intricate rhyming style of rap’s 1990s golden age recognize Pun’s tongue-twisting constructions as its pinnacle. Pun’s duet with his discoverer Fat Joe “Twinz (Deep Cover 98)” is marked for a timeless lyric (”Dead in the middle of Little Italy; Little did we know that we riddled some middlemen who didn’t do diddly”) which became as memorized a rap nursery rhyme as a skit elaborately culminating in the opportunity to rhyme “packing the mack in the back of the ‘ac.” Pun’s ear-bending ability helped to define the byzantine brinksmanship of 90s rhyme schemes.

Part of Pun’s rise was his ability to place himself among or above the most iconic statements in rap of the day. He name-drops the recently deceased Notorious B.I.G. in a skit with kingmaker Funkmaster Flex, in no part to suggest the ways he’s followed in his footsteps. “Biggie gave me a couple of pointers,” Pun says, albeit on an, um, much different topic. “he said, ‘You’ve got to use that.’” And use that he did. The beat “Twinz” used was made iconic years before by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, and Pun’s desire to associate himself with their brilliance spoke to his aspirations for rap royalty. Pun had a simple ability to see the whole of rap, with its divisions and complications, as one phenomenon. “Won’t even talk that east or west crap, from the Bronx to Left Rack,” he said on “You Ain’t a Killer”, tying the picture of rap together into a gory oneness.  “It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where’s your gat?”

“Latin going platinum was destined to come”

“I’m Still Not a Player” stands today as one of the great rap singles of its decade: Pun’s “Juicy”. But hindsight has served it well, it never rose past #24 on Billboard’s charts. But the movement behind the album was undeniable: Capital Punishment reached #5 on the album charts and held #1 on its rap charts for weeks. It’s in no small part because Pun saw his dream as destiny. He had an incredible ability to illustrate reality with fantasy (“Hit you with 1000lbs of pressure per-slap”, “I’m the master at all sex positions”, and infamously, “You couldn’t measure my dick with six rulers”), and this applied even to his own career. On “You Came Up”, Noreaga’s hook was excited and tentative: “From rapping on the corner to possibly going platinum”. Pun soon followed him with certainty: “Latin going platinum was destined to come.” This line, laid on the record that would eventually become the first rap album by a latino artist to go platinum, is some mix of aspiration and, as Pun asserted, destiny. That it eventuated was a tribute to Pun’s unshakeable focus. 

“Try to remember me for my aggressive will”

Pun’s untimely death in 2000 at 28 lacked the Shakespearean drama of Biggie and Tupac Shakur’s. But it left a similarly painful hole in the rapidly-expanding world of rap. Pun became one of many impossibly talented what-ifs, brilliant artists whose first works would have to stand as hard evidence of the further greatness they never had the chance to pursue. He had more than just the skills and style to stand at the center of rap’s next decade; he had ambition and vision, too. He had reinvented himself before and his tragedy is that he wouldn’t have the chance to do it again. “21st century”, he said in an offhand moment on the album’s title track. “It’s ours for the taking.”

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#54 June, 2019 | Big Pun, “Capital Punishment”

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