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- The Retrographer, Issue 67 (June, 2 0 2 0)
The Retrographer, Issue 67 (June, 2 0 2 0)
–Lil Baby, Johnniqua Charles, DJ Suede the Remix God, iMarkkeyz, Run the Jewels, Key Glock, Tion Wayne, Dutchavelli, Stormzy, the Shadowboxers, Haim, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Phoebe Bridgers, Jorge Ben, and more.
The Retrographer, Issue 67
Bulletins
“The Bigger Picture”, Lil Baby (Spotify / YouTube) – Four years ago, the late Nipsey Hussle predicted, “You build walls, we gon prolly dig holes”, and now look at us. Lil Baby brings this story into the present: “It's too many mothers that's grieving / They killing us for no reason.”
“Lose Yo Job”, Johnniqua Charles, DJ Suede the Remix God, and iMarkkeyz (Spotify / YouTube) – Very simply: This was an amazing Twitter video that became a song, and then that song became a chant protesters shouted at the very police forces they’re marching to defund. Folk music, folks.
“never look back”, Run the Jewels (Spotify / YouTube) – El-P once recommended you pump his music “In your floating whip system / In the bread line, the prison / From the chip under your wrist skin.” This paranoiac’s dystopia gets darker by the day as the real world gets more and more similar to his lyrics.
“Son of a Gun”, Key Glock (Spotify / YouTube) – Markeyvius Cathey explodes to open the similarly-named album, his flow as baroque as the strings her raps over. “She raised a don, shout out to my mama, I'm a son of a gun.”
“I Dunno”, Tion Wayne, Dutchavelli, and Stormzy (Spotify / YouTube) – Just watch how Stormzy steals the show in this music video. Just like his flow, he’s always moving, always sending you in the direction he wants. The Dutchavelli jokes in the comments alone make the click worth it.
“Won’t Ever Say Goodbye”, the Shadowboxers (Spotify / YouTube) – If you weren’t looking at the tracklist, you might think this song’s predecessor and album namesake “The Slow March Of Time Flies By” was its ender. But that wistful rumination snaps into this perfect closer, shouting that no matter what happens, this isn’t over.
“Gasoline”, Haim (Spotify / YouTube) – There’s another recent Haim song called “Summer Girl”, but this song is a paragon of the summer jams the band has perfected. It’s sexy as hell, too: “We're watching the sunrise from the kitchen counter / When you lie in between my legs, it doesn't matter / You say you wanna go slower but I wanna go faster.”
“My Own Version Of You”, Bob Dylan (Spotify / YouTube) – My dad used to howl with laughter when Dylan sang “You may call me Terry, you may call me Timmy / You may call me Bobby, you may call me Zimmy” (called him a “crazy old coot”, even back then). He would have loved to hear an even crazier, older, cootier Zimmy sing, “I'll take the Scarface Pacino and The Godfather Brando / Mix it up in a tank and get a robot commando”.
“Vacancy”, Neil Young (Spotify / YouTube) – This is the kind of thing people legitimately fantasize about. What if a brilliant artist canned a brilliant album right at the height of their powers? Neil is ripping here, passing through section after section, on fire and alive.
“Halloween”, Phoebe Bridgers (Spotify / YouTube) – Simply trying to break through a broken relationship, stuck in bad communication and bad feelings. “I can count on you to tell me the truth / When you've been drinking and you're wearing a mask.”
One Album for June, 2 0 2 0
Jorge Duilio Lima Menezes started out playing the pandeiro – a kind of Brazilian tambourine – at 11. Years later his mother gave him a guitar, and the light, wrist-driven movement he had learned to make his first instrument shimmer in rhythm (the chaos of the jingling patinelas amid the grounding, slapped drumhead) became his strum.
His mother also gave him a door to a new identity. Silvia Saint Ben Lima was born in Brazil, but her roots traced back to Ethiopia. So Jorge took her name and became Jorge Ben when he went out to the clubs in Rio de Janeiro as an 18-year-old.
One chance club performance in front of a record executive led to a record contract to make Samba Esquema Novo. Its opening song – “Mas Que Nada” – elevated Ben to the highest echelon of Brazilian pop stardom. Within a decade, it was covered by Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, Dizzy Gillespie, Sergio Mendes, and more – more than a hit, a standard. That a figure as elegant and august as Ella Fitzgerald sang a Rio busker’s song – roughly translating to a sardonic “Yeah, right!” – revealed a trait that endured throughout Ben’s career: His timeless melodies carry playful, imaginative stories, and never really feel in conflict with themselves even when they perhaps should.
Ben spent the 1960s releasing album after album of brilliant, propulsive samba, his yelping, yodeling voice winding around bass, percussion, strings, and his unmistakable, tambourine-like acoustic guitar jangle. But even before he exploded into international stardom, Ben had another attraction: alchemy.
As a young man he followed a group led by a São Paolan university professor who claimed to have witnessed transmutation, the magical transformation of metal into gold. He became a devotee to São Tomás de Aquino - known in English as Thomas Aquinas - the 13th century friar who endeavored to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with Christian principle. Aquinas’s legend is part theology and part mysticism; he was purported to be able to levitate, and, according to Ben, “he made art with alchemy.”
The swirl of influences on Ben – his African matrilineage became his stage identity, the dancing samba of his music, the magical pseudoscience of his alchemy – began to heat up and condense, like loose matter gravitating to form a star, in 1974 with the release of A Tabúa de Esmerelda, a staggering, vivid, bright-burning work of psychedelic samba.
The album’s title refers to the Emerald Tablet, a philosopher's-stone-like alchemal talisman with instructions for how to transform metal to gold. It’s cover is an illustration from the 14th-century purported alchemist Nicholas Flamel. Someone browsing albums might guess this one to be some kind of Gregorian Chant; they might not be disabused of this thought if they heard about its subject matter. But the sound of A Tabúa is revolutionary, forward-thinking, and as magically transformational as its topics - another consonant contradiction.
It opens with this characteristic juxtaposition: the joyous with the austere, the occult with the prosaic: “Alchemists are coming - They are discreet and silent, live well away from men,” Ben sings over opener “Os Alquimistas Estão Chegando”’s carnival arrangement. “Avoid any relationship with people, sordid-tempered,” he sings over what sounds like a party in the heart of Rio.
Like the Beatles, Jorge Ben knew that the essence of psychedelia is the discovery of surrealism in the ordinary (think of McCartney singing “And then the fireman rushes in from the pouring rain, very strange”). “O Homem da Gravata Florida”, Ben’s ode to a floral tie, blooms from observation to magical realism before his very eyes. “This is not just a tie - This tie is the report of harmony, of beautiful things. It is a hanging garden hanging from the neck, a nice and happy man.” A kind of transmutation - if not of metal to gold, but of regular life to magic - happens before him. “ Happy, happy because any ugly man with that tie, any ugly man becomes a prince… Wherever he passes, flowers and loves are born. With a flowery tie, simple as that, beautiful to live.”
Ben’s ponderings span the local to the stellar; astronauts on “Errare Humanum Est”; Transmutation, on “Hermes Trismegisto e sua Celeste Tábua de Esmeralda”; Jesus on “Brother”. But at the core of the prosaic for a Brazilian street musician who took his name from his Ethiopian mother is the legacy of slavery, and this begat the album’s pinnacle, “Zumbi”. Like the album’s opener, it seems to take place in the crowded marketplace of Rio, as locals witness the apparition of some European mystery. Zumbi, a freed slave who might break up an auction; a great leader, who the assembled believe can challenge this wretched institution: “When Zumbi arrives, Zumbi is the boss.”
Zumbi – the real-life Zumbi dos Palmares – led a revolution to liberate enslaved Africans in Brazil with his wife, the warrior-queen Dandara. Zumbi’s heroic rebellion was cut short when the Portuguese killed and decapitated him, putting his head on a spike to try to crush his legend, but his memory endured for centuries. As the song ends, Ben and backup singers chant the regions the slaves were stolen from: “Angola, Congo, Benguela, Monjolo, Cabinda, Mina, Quiloa, Rebolla”. Suddenly, beneath them, the chord progression reharmonizes, from the cheerful Bb - Eb progression to something more dominant, dramatic, Gm to C to Eb, a change happening just underfoot.
That change happened over centuries, all the way up and through Ben’s career. From Menezes to Ben; from Ethiopia to Brazil; from the pantinelas to the drumhead; from metal to gold. His music found the exceptional in the ordinary. He made art with alchemy.
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