The Retrographer, Issue 58 (October, 2 0 1 9)

October 31, 2019

Prince, Hiss Golden Messenger, Frank Ocean, Floating Points, Kim Petras, The Shadowboxers, Kim Gordon, Big Thief, Garcia Peoples, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Steely Dan

The Retrographer, Issue 58

Bulletins

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

“I Feel For You - Acoustic Demo”, Prince (Spotify / YouTube) – Was he really like that? Prince was never demystified, unveiled. Here, his early demo for a song Chaka Khan would later make famous, either proves he was who he was, or that he applied his makeup before even sketching out his ideas.

“I Need a Teacher”, Hiss Golden Messenger (Spotify / YouTube) – Veering closer and closer to a kind of mid-80s, big country, John Mellencamp approach to songwriting, HGM sounds a majestic echo of Americana, glowing like sunlight over endless amber waves of grain, and even having the audacity to deliver the line “Happiness ain’t free”. God bless.

“DHL”, Frank Ocean (Spotify / YouTube) – Immediately redolent of Kanye’s less-celebrated – but just as affecting – slowed-down loops (think “Bound 2”, not “Through the Wire”), as based as the pack he describes from DHL. He sounds like he’s freestyling, but everything is meticulous, everything has another angle to it: “Coming soon, coming soon, bro…”

“Bias”, Floating Points (Spotify / YouTube) – They can sound like Four Tet, or Pink Floyd, or, as they do, Aphex Twin. This mounting tumult of drum loops and arpeggiators ruptures 140 seconds in, suddenly a break-beat, skinned to synth bass and rattling tambourine, racing up to scintillation again.

“<demons>.”, Kim Petras (Spotify / YouTube) – JUSTICE resurfaced at a Frank Ocean party last month, and, in spirit, across Kim Petras’ TURN OFF THE LIGHT sequel, her second spooky concept album, the ideal soundtrack to your freaky lil Halloween party.

“In The Dark”, The Shadowboxers (Spotify / YouTube) – Just in time for Halloween, the Shadowboxers deliver a throbbing update to “Thriller”, all the way to stabbing strings and fluttering rhythm guitar. Its snowballing coda scales to an unholy peak.

“Murdered Out”, Kim Gordon (Spotify / YouTube) – Gordon’s voice, oscillating high over Bonham-like drums: “Turn me out, black matte spray.” Her fuzzed-out bassline climbs down, clattering percussion and stentorian guitars stand behind her. “What do you get in the parking lot? Murdered out of my heart.”

“Replaced”, Big Thief (Spotify / YouTube) – First album in 2016, second in 2017, Adrienne Lenker’s solo album in 2018, then two albums in 2019. This latest sounds the livest, like the group has made room for its prodigious productivity by stripping back on niceties to just get to the feeling. “What’s that you were about to say?” They ask. “Or have you forgotten?”

“One Step Behind”, Garcia Peoples (Spotify / YouTube) – Spoiler: This is over a half hour long. Garcia Peoples wrote the preponderance of their album into a single track, a sweltering fever dream of psychedelica that pulls endless riffs and licks out like it’ll never end (and almost doesn’t).

“Galleon Ship”, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (Spotify / YouTube) – Synths swirl like morning mist. Love and memory are like a murky dream, a foggy sea: “My galleon ship will fly and fall / Fall and fly and fly and fall / Deep into your loveliness.”

One Album for October, 2 0 1 9 

Steely Dan, “Gaucho” (MCA, 1980) (Spotify / YouTube)

“Living hard will take its toll,” the Greek Chorus warns. They’re talking to Hoops McCann, or maybe Magic Johnson – one basketball phenom or another, whose postgame fiending has him on the razor’s edge in all senses of the term. Or maybe to someone else; everything is hazy, obscured.

Before any listeners heard that admonition, Walter Becker was hit by a car. He had been strung out for months and wouldn’t be cleaning up anytime soon. He and Donald Fagen had gone from Brill Building also-rans, to Steely Dan’s louche Lennon-McCartney, to, by the late 70s, the co-directors of Steely Dan: Creative Agency. With Aja, they’d take the concept of a “rock band” to its third form: A conceit. Steely Dan used a rotating cast of session musicians to engineer a simulacrum of a band, one that did just what they imagined, even if it could never exist, really. No group had come to represent – and lead – studio supremacy like Becker and Fagen’s Steely Dan. That was about to come to an end.

“Illegal fun” was flinging Steely Dan over the brink, and so the group’s last album for decades – 1980’s Gaucho – finds it everywhere. “Cuervo Gold and find Colombian” elide their temptations and predations; It leaves the group fiending, for “tonight, when I chase the dragon” with people “rolling in the snow”. It led them to tragedy, when their manager Karen Roberta Stanley overdosed and died in Becker’s apartment. A wrongful death lawsuit followed, and did the Greek Chrous: “Son, you're playing with fire.”

Steely Dan made a business of rhapsodized dealers, customers, and thugs. 1976’s The Royal Scam memorably beatified the lysergic lab rats of the 60s on “Kid Charlemagne”. But Gaucho broke the band, and the locality of drugs are gritted into each song. Writers have long described Fagen and Becker’s work as polished works of studio perfectionism, and indeed the group was obsessional about takes, performances, and production (it took 55 takes to satisfactorily land the fade-out of Gaucho’s opener “Babylon Sisters”). Yet if the group seemed shiny and clean, it was only as shiny as a mirror lined with bumps of coke; it only gleamed like the razor that cut the lines; it hid the truth like Brut and charisma; it was only as shiny as the silver bowl local boys spend a quarter to shine; it was only as pure as the bundles from Jive Miguel from Bogota when he meets you at Mr. Chao’s for Szechuan dumplings. The sheen is that of something inadmissible done perfectly, so perfectly that it’ll never catch up to you.

Yet, it did. Gaucho chronicles the chances that finally did the group in, the risks that were just too high. As such, it is a collage of crevasses, filmic abscondances where malfeasance can be indulged in clandestine peace. Opener “Babylon Sisters” opens its curtains to an escape, a “drive west on Sunset to the sea”, a caper so risky even the jungle music on the radio needs to be dialed down to avoid drawing unwanted attention. Or is that just the coke talking? It’s followed by Steely Dan’s last hit, “Hey Nineteen”, one of Fagen’s many Humbert Humbert tales, a liason conducted outside the jurisdiction of good behavior. It sounds slick because only someone slick could pull off his antiheroes’ misdeeds.

Gaucho rises highest on its title track. Fagen relishes in singular, idiosyncratic subjects, but on “Gaucho” he steps out of the shoes of the escapee, the crook, the user, and into those rejecting them. Some authority figure – an agent? A parent? Or, say, a songwriting partner? – lays eyes on his charge, who enters a party with an interloper, a new boyfriend, dressed like a Gaucho – a South American cowboy – in a borrowed “spangled leather poncho”. A hysterical rejection ensues: the gaucho needs to be dropped off on the highway, anywhere but here. But the studs on that poncho “match your eyes”, romance is intoxicating.

Who is the Gaucho / amigo? Could it be Jive Miguel, the dealer from “Glamour Profession”? Doubtful; Fagen’s characters are rarely canonical across songs, more often gnomically literary metaphors. And who is Fagen singing to? Who could he be pleading, desperately but perhaps futilely, to reject the unacceptable, distasteful commitment they’ve made?

Bodacious cowboys Becker and Fagen indeed never felt welcome in the Custerdome, as “Gaucho” describes. They showed up there high, after all. The Custerdome, they once explained, “exists only in our collective imagination. In the Steely Dan lexicon it serves as an archetype of a building that houses great corporations.” It’s a metaphor for the dimension of straightness the rabble of Steely Dan’s lyrics were always scrambling to evade, and occasionally finding themselves blinking, bloodshot, in the middle of.

Becker eventually cleaned up, and got back in the saddle with Fagen in the 90s to tour, and then in 2000 for the band’s skeevy-smooth Two Against Nature. They were old weirdos by then, and didn’t need more than their own lasciviousness to offend the sensibilities of the counterparts they concocted for their songs. Had they kept at it, it might have killed them. Instead, they tripped back into the shadows for decades: Nasty schoolboys with nowhere to go.

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