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- The Retrographer, Issue 65 (April, 2 0 2 0)
The Retrographer, Issue 65 (April, 2 0 2 0)
The 1975, Hayley Williams, Blake Mills, Nick Hakim, Megan Thee Stallion, Beyoncé, Thundercat, Louis Cole, Fiona Apple, Yves Tumor, The Burnt Ends, Bob Dylan, Eddie Kendricks
The Retrographer, Issue 65
Bulletins
Please stay safe out there.
Randy Newman wrote the best song about the pandemic.
Thank you, Joey, for this.
You know I love this video of Thundercat talking about basslines.
“If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)”, The 1975 (Spotify / YouTube) – This song has been bubbling on YouTube for months, as fans grabbed glimpses at jubilant live shows of Matty & Co.’s best-crafted pop song yet, chock-full of all the skeezy good times the band specializes in.
“Why We Ever”, Hayley Williams (Spotify / YouTube) – Williams’ band Paramore comfortably dipped its toe into sophisticated 80s pop, but they had stadiums to satisfy. Alone, the singer can show her vulnerability, pain, and loneliness: “I just wanna talk about it, I know I freaked you out.”
“Summer All Over”, Blake Mills (Spotify / YouTube) – You may first know Blake Mills as a guitarist, maybe second as a producer. So this spare, piano-led piece elegy for climate change, sang closely and quietly, might remind how good a songwriter he is.
“QADIR”, Nick Hakim (Spotify / YouTube) – It’s been years since Hakim’s wrenching Green Twins, led by tender, moving music led by his gorgeous voice. Now he returns with a new kind mystical aching, this time for a friend who died too young.
“Savage (Remix)”, Megan Thee Stallion and Beyoncé (Spotify / YouTube) – Bey and Megan, in an act of love, completely reconstructed this song, riffing off it like the TikTokers who made it inescapable. Beyoncé’s melismatic exaltation at 2:05 is the best tribute imaginable for the moment this hit created.
“I Love Louis Cole”, Thundercat and Louis Cole (Spotify / YouTube) – Two of the biggest goofballs the Brainfeeder roster has to offer: A machine-gun drummer, towering over six feet tall, and his anime-cosplaying, 20-fingered bassist bandleader. What’s not to love?
“Under The Table”, Fiona Apple (Spotify / YouTube) – People have often responded to Apple’s intensity by worrying for her. Is she okay? Never really stopping to consider how in control she really is, or how funny she finds it all. “You can pout, but don’t you shush me.” Laugh along.
“Gospel For A New Century”, Yves Tumor (Spotify / YouTube) – This song has a distinct Terminator X-meets-Copland energy coming from it; like the sounds of history are tumbling upon one another in controlled detonation.
“Deep Water”, The Burnt Ends (Spotify / YouTube) – An instrumental Western music in our own backyard of Brooklyn; Country that sounds like it was recorded by Rudy Van Gelder. They really know how to do promo, too.
“Murder Most Foul”, Bob Dylan (Spotify / YouTube) – There are a lot of questions about this song: Why did Dylan put it out now? Is he a conspiracy theorist? What do all the referenced songs mean? “It was a matter of timing, and the timing was right.”
One Album for April, 2 0 2 0
In 1972, Motown moved from Detroit to LA. The change capped off a decade that redefined popular music in the 20th century: Berry Gordy’s label desegregated the airwaves. Before Motown, “you could be singing ‘Tiddlywinks’ and it was still a black record,” Smokey Robinson remembered. Robinson, Steve Wonder, The Supremes, and countless other groups – local to Michigan and Detroit proper – wrote the songbook that would define pop on airwaves, movie soundtracks, advertisements, wedding parties, and presidential runs for generations to come. Its crown jewel was a five-member singing group called the Temptations.
The end of Motown’s time in Detroit paralleled an end for the Temptations, too. David Ruffin, one of the group’s iconic founding lead singers, left by 1968; like so much great pop of the era, the group had become more politically and socially confrontational as the 60s wore on, summing the era as a “Ball of Confusion” by 1970. Money, as it often does, got in the way, and in 1971 the Temptations’ iconic, falsetto-voiced founding member Eddie Kendricks followed his ex-bandmate Ruffin’s advice and quit the group to start a solo career.
Motown’s stars wanted to change, they wanted more independence, they wanted their own identities. They wanted to be compensated fairly for the value they created, they wanted a voice that matched their real feelings about society, race, sex, and politics. For many of Motown’s solo artists, however, it wasn’t clear at first that this reinvention to individuality is what their audience wanted.
Kendricks’ first solo album All By Myself was a commercial flop paralleled by his old group’s continued commercial ascendance, it was full of soulful, stretched-out songs like “This Used To Be The Home of Johnnie Mae” and “Can I” that suggested the primacy and solitude indicated by its title would be rich soil to grow a solo career in.
He gave it a second try. To introduce the world to Eddie Kendricks the solo artist, Kendricks needed a band that could make his perspective undeniable. He found the Young Senators, an early go-go ensemble from D.C. He needed a slate of songs from some of Motown’s top songwriters. Above all, he embraced a strong, pro-black perspective, ready to celebrate his culture and urge racial unity. For its cover, Kendricks referenced an indelible image of Huey P. Newton sitting, armed, on a throne, emblazoned with his message: People... Hold on.
People… Hold On is ambitious, yet tight; Individual, yet one of the best band performances of the 1970s; Funky, yet heavy on its message. When it opens, on the slow, simmering groove of “If You Let Me”, the characters that would come to define the album creep in one-by-one: Punchy bass, reverbed drums, roomy piano, Eddie "Bongo" Brown’s coasting percussion, and the unforgettable upper range of the frontman, the voice of the preceding decade’s biggest pop hits, finally on his own.
Kendricks’ material lets him stretch into the acid funk blooming in 1972: “Let Me Run Into Your Lonely Heart”, with its wah guitar and distorted clavinet, would fit right after “Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk” on Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome five years later. “Date With The Rain” stands beside Aretha Franklin’s Young, Gifted, and Black explorations like “April Fools”. “Just Memories” is almost Zappa-like in its punchy, meandering intro.
Some of these experimentations imprinted themselves permanently on music history: the title track became the foundation of J Dilla’s swampiest, most mysterious beat; “Day By Day” became Lil Wayne’s unforgettable “Let The Beat Build”. There’s even more to be mined here, it’ll be a long time before People… Hold On is exhausted as inspiration for other artists. But above them all was Kendricks’ opus, the funk masterpiece “Girl You Need A Change Of Mind”.
“Girl You Need a Change of Mind”’s arrangement is full of choices that deserve admiration: The way it demands attention with its first hi-hat hit, tightening into a shared piano-and-bass pocket over snare drum, shaker, and bongos; The organ that shines light around the prechorus; the failing connection to the bass that doesn’t slow down the groove at all; the bongo pan at the head of the instrumental breakdown, showing the song is just getting started; the unstoppable tambourine in the left headphone. The sexual politics of the song are misguided at best, but Kendricks sings them like they’re the call for togetherness the album begs for.
Eddie Kendricks arrived at People… Hold On from disunity, and used it to preach unification. He sought universal themes, and in doing so found his own sound. He became a solo artist on the back of an unmissable band. He waded through an album of misses to begin a decade of hits. Kendricks’ manifold contradictions created his most solid album, helping introduce a new voice to Motown and, inevitably, American popular music.
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