The Retrographer, Issue 68 (July, 2 0 2 0)

Lianne La Havas, Taylor Swift, Ian Wayne, Tara Clerkin Trio, Breadwinner, Freddie Gibbs, the Alchemist, Tyler, the Creator, Jessie Ware, Terrace Martin, 9th Wonder, Robert Glasper, Kamasi Washington, Lomelda, Caitlin Pashko, Cam’ron

The Retrographer, Issue 68

Bulletins

• Black lives matter.

Ten Songs for July, 2 0 2 0 | Listen to these songs on Spotify and YouTube

“Green Papaya”, Lianne La Havas (Spotify / YouTube) – When she sings with her chest, La Havas’s alto evokes Beyonce’s; her fingerpicked chorus guitar is like Thundercat’s bass. This simple arrangement, guitar, then bass, then electric piano, then acoustic piano, then rich, layered backup vocals sums up so much great music and lands all by itself.

“Mirrorball”, Taylor Swift (Spotify / YouTube) – This title is such an odd synonym for “disco ball”, Swift’s metaphor for distortive fame in her first-ever shoegaze track, that I can’t help hear it as a soundalike for “miserable” – the feeling she’s always had for how fame has warped her precious romantic life – that I almost wonder if it was the first lyric.

“Baby”, Ian Wayne (Spotify / YouTube) – After this song burst into flames two minutes in, following IW’s long melody recapitulation, he sings, “Here we find ourselves in another chapter” as the song returns to the careful pace it started with.

“In the Room”, Tara Clerkin Trio (Spotify / YouTube) – This song stretches, over a loop of what sounds like oboes, drum parts that sound real and fake, intermittent synth drones and plinking keys, the scratch of what sounds like a pick down a guitar string, and Tara Clerkin’s slowly echoing vocals, into an open, arid landscape.

“Money”, Breadwinner (Spotify / YouTube) – Karl Marx described the alienation of labor, the complete separation of an individual from the product of their work, which transforms effort into a flat commodity that can be exchanged independent from a worker’s humanity. “A person buys and a person sells.”

“Something to Rap About”, Freddie Gibbs, the Alchemist, and Tyler, the Creator (Spotify / YouTube) – Returning one of Loiter Squad’s greatest cameos, Tyler visits Gibbs on an albatross beat from Al. It’s beautiful and melancholy: “This lake water better than the faucet I grew up with.”

“Step Into My Life”, Jessie Ware (Spotify / YouTube) – Many have swung for mirrorball verisimilitude; some have tried to update it, others have attempted to perfect a known sound. Ware figured out how to do both; a  song that could sit in the past or the present. 

“First Responders”, Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, 9th Wonder, and Kamasi Washington (Spotify / YouTube) – No stranger to supergroups, Kamasi takes center stage on this gauzy 9th Wonder beat, adorned with Martin’s coos and Glasper’s starry, looping keys. It’s a love song in a way, a beautiful piece of skywriting to the women and men pulling us through this dark moment.

“Wonder”, Lomelda (Spotify / YouTube) – The verses have 11 beats a measure, the verses have 7. A complex metre, but a simple sentiment from Hannah Read: “You got a lot, give it your all.”

“To the Leaves”, Caitlin Pasko (Spotify / YouTube) – The last show I saw before COVID robbed us of live music let me hear Caitlin perform this song at Pete’s Candy Store. It was the only time I’d heard it. When I finally heard it again after release this month I felt like I knew every moment, every turn, every crack in its heart.

One Album for July, 2 0 2 0  

Cam’ron, “Purple Haze” (Diplomat Records, 2004) (Spotify / YouTube) 

One day, when he was laid up with a broken leg, the Notorious B.I.G. received a new visitor to his bedroom. Ma$e brought a young Cameron Giles to give an impromptu audition. Cam remembered it to XXL:

Biggie didn’t live to see Cam put out his debut album Confessions of Fire in 1998. The Cam’ron at the foot of his bed was a member of a grimy uptown supergroup called Children of the Corn that included Big L, Ma$e, Herb McGruff, and Cam’s cousin Bloodshed. Back then, rappers from New York went hard and fast over bleak beats to solidify their realness. They focused on the immediate: Who was getting paid, who was getting robbed, what would happen to anyone who stood in the way. Cam would never dive into triplets like Big L, but he fit the mold well enough then to hang with the icons in his midst. Biggie could see that. But there was something different about him, and even though it was different he must have also seen the future in Cam’ron. Cam was playful in an era that took itself incredibly seriously. He made up words, toyed with internal rhymes, and seemed ready to have fun without sweating that it might look like weakness to some:

Six years after Biggie’s death, Cam’ron was a national star and regional phenomenon. Propelled by an enormous hit in “Hey Ma”, his cultural influence was coming into focus and it looked quite different from the rap that had come before it. Biggie once rapped, “I like black Timbs and black hoodies.” Cam’ron not only rolled in pink minks, but had a Range Rover in the same color. Airbrushed pastel t-shirts swept the New York tri-state area with Cam’s face and his Dipset crew’s name in script. His personality cracked open the bleakness of the rap scene he grew from to expose the vibrancy of Harlem, and hit his greatest peak on 2004’s Purple Haze.

If you loved rap in 2004, the first thing that would stick from Purple Haze would be Cam’s wordplay. It really felt like play. It bloomed with proximal soundalikes that revealed rewarding layers at closer investigation. He wouldn’t enjoy a conventional lyrical path to his point, that would be too easy, too dry: In “Soap Opera”, he wanted to describe himself as grumpy and well dressed, so he formed the brief couplet “Karl Lagerfeld / acting like Gargamel”; A girlfriend was his “co-ed from Kosovo”; his vacations sound like “Drinking sake on a Suzuki; we in Osaka Bay” or “playin' golf in the Gulf of New Mexico”. Never mind that it’s actually the Gulf of Mexico. Part of being a fan of Cam is breaking through the idea that he’s not a good rapper, just because of his doofy vocal tone, leftfield thinking, and schoolyard sense of humor. A lyric had to be as fun to pick apart as it was to say and listen to: “My team is the Goonies, we were seen with buffoonies / Toonies, best dressed, stay up in Neiman's and Bloomies.” He contextualized an ear-catching, would-be mistake with something hilarious or brilliant. A bit like ODB’s common beautiful trip-and-recovery punchlines (“For any MC in the 52(sic) states / I go Psycho killer, Norman Bates”), Cam’ron opened “Get ‘Em Girls” by claiming he got “computers 'puting”. That might sound ridiculous at first, but of course he means “computing”, a double entendre to Putin, as in the richest gangster in the world.

Cam loved to poke the bear – like the goofball way he describes his expansive wardrobe:

He couldn’t resist pissing people off to get a laugh. In 2003, a year before Purple Haze, Cam’ron went on Bill O’Reilly’s now-defunct The O’Reilly Factor with his label head and childhood friend Dame Dash. O’Reilly had booked an elementary principal from Florida and was prepared to “moderate” a conversation about the impact of “gangsta” rap on young children. It was a typically bad-faith topic, designed to push the blame for black Americans’ condition on them by taking issue with their loudest voice in pop culture, rap – and, as such, was stultifyingly standard fare for the Fox channel. Dame does most of the talking early on, defending Cam and rap overall as the show’s host attempts to pen him into guilt with leading questions and interruptions. As O’Reilly starts to lose his cool, Cam breaks into playground mockery: “You mad! You mad!” A true outsider to the senseless moral relativism of the “No Spin Zone”, Cam was one of the few guests on Bill’s show who made his speciousness look as contrived as it really was – a taunt as garish and funny as “Kill you, shoot the funeral up and Harlem Shake at your wake.” He may have meant it when he said, “Fuck Kerry and Bush, you should vote for me / On the real the last hope is me.”

The beginning of the millennium was in many ways a revolutionary time for rap. Cam’s featured producers on Purple Haze included Kanye West, whose The College Dropout had come out the same year and permanently bent the trajectory of rap to come. Like Kanye’s debut, Purple Haze glowed with humor; Kanye’s album was narrated by a type-A, by-the-book student whose life is ruined by his commitment to the conventional path of education; Purple Haze is narrated by “Mizzle” a drug fiend who extols Cam for teaching him the game. They’re both some of the only funny comedic interludes in rap history, and spoke to a larger development: Artists stopped taking themselves so seriously and leaned into the playfulness of their music. They were ready to toy with everything: how they looked and dressed, the stories they told and how they told them, how their music sounded and how their topics unfolded.

Cam’ron colorfully led this pack, a new generation moving beyond the austerity of their predecessors. Could he be goonish? Sure. Sophomoric? Yep. One of the best and most influential rappers of his time? Undoubtedly.

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MONTHLY

#68 July, 2020 | Cam’ron, “Purple Haze”

#67 June, 2020 | Jorge Ben, “A Tabua de Esmeralda”

#66 May, 2020 | The Meters, “Rejuvenation”

#65 April, 2020 | Eddie Kendricks, “People… Hold On”

#64 March, 2020 | Thelonious Monk, “Solo Monk”

#63 February, 2020 | Cat Power, “Moon Pix”

#62 January, 2020 | Yusef Lateef, “Eastern Sounds”

#59 November, 2019 | Frank Sinatra, “In The Wee Small Hours”

#58 October, 2019 | Steely Dan, “Gaucho”

#57 September, 2019 | Bonnie Raitt, “Streetlights”

#56 August, 2019 | Daft Punk, “Alive 2007”

#55 July, 2019 | John Coltrane, “Interstellar Space”

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

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

#52 April, 2019 | Dirty Projectors, “Rise Above”

#51 March, 2019 | Kate Bush, “The Sensual World”

#50 February, 2019 | Sonny Rollins, “Next Album”

#49 January, 2019 | Sade, “Diamond Life”

#47 November, 2018 | Curtis Mayfield, “There’s No Place Like America Today”

#46 October, 2018 | The Blue Nile, “Hats”

#45 September, 2018 | Lucinda Williams, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road”

#44 August, 2018 | Aretha Franklin, “Amazing Grace”

#43 July, 2018 | Teddy Pendergrass, “TP”

#42 June, 2018 | Dennis Wilson, “Pacific Ocean Blue”

#41 May, 2018 | Bobby Brown, “Don’t Be Cruel”

#40 April, 2018 | Amy Winehouse, “Back to Black”

#39 March, 2018 | Q-Tip, “Kamaal the Abstract”

#38 February, 2018 | Miles Davis, “In a Silent Way”

#37 January, 2018 | Beck, “Sea Change”

#35 November, 2017 | Slum Village, “Fan-tas-tic Vol. 1”

#34 October, 2017 | Steely Dan, “Two Against Nature”

#33 September, 2017 | Baaba Maal and Mansour Seck, “Djam Leeli”

#32 August, 2017 | Billy Joel, “The Stranger”

#31 July, 2017 | Big Daddy Kane, “Long Live the Kane”

#30 June, 2017 | Janet Jackson, “Control”

#29 May, 2017 | Steely Dan, “Aja”

#28 April, 2017 | The O’Jays, “Back Stabbers”

#27 March, 2017 | Wire, “154”

#26 February, 2017 | Professor Longhair, “New Orleans Piano”

#25 January, 2017 | Elvis Costello, “Live at the El Mocambo”

#23 November, 2016 | Erykah Badu, “Mama’s Gun”

#22 October, 2016 | Donald Fagan, “The Nightfly”

#21 September, 2016 | Aretha Franklin, “Young, Gifted, and Black”

#20 August, 2016 | The Dave Matthews Band, “Under the Table and Dreaming”

#19 July, 2016 | Clams Casino, “Instrumental Mixtape II”

#18 June, 2016 | James Brown, “Love, Power, Peace”

#17 May, 2016 | Ali Farka Toure & Ry Cooder, “Talking Timbuktu”

#16 April, 2016 | RIP PRINCE

#15 March, 2016 | Prince, “Prince”

#14 February, 2016 | Big L, “Lifestyles Ov Da Poor & Dangerous”

#13 January, 2016 | Bill Evans, “Live at the Village Vanguard”

#11 November, 2015 | Donny Hathaway, “Live”

#10 October, 2015 | Paul McCartney, “McCartney”

#9 September, 2015 | Talk Talk, “Laughing Stock”

#8 August, 2015 | B.B. King, “Live at Cook County Jail”

#7 July, 2015 | Miles Davis, “Filles de Kilimanjaro”

#6 June, 2015 | Joni Mitchell, “Hejira”

#5 May, 2015 | Kanye West, “The College Dropout”

#4 April, 2015 | MF DOOM, “Operation: Doomsday”

#3 March, 2015 | Bruce Springsteen, “The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle”

#2 February, 2015 | Eric B. and Rakim, “Paid in Full”

#1 January, 2015 | Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, “L.A.M.F.”

ANNUAL

#61 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 9

#48 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 8

#36 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 7

#24 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 6

#12 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 5

1 0 0 2 0 1 4 (+ Honorable Mentions)

1 0 0 2 0 1 3 (+ Honorable Mentions)

1 0 0 2 0 1 2

1 0 0 2 0 1 1

DECENNIAL

#60 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 X

THEMED

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