The Retrographer, Issue 71 (October, 2 0 2 0)

October 27, 2020

21 Savage, Metro Boomin, Ty Dolla $ign, Jhené Aiko, Mustard, Cut Worms, beabadoobee, Bruce Springsteen, Adrianne Lenker, Gia Margaret, Winston C.W., Alec Spiegelman, Sharon Van Etten, Common, and more

The Retrographer, Issue 71

Bulletins

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

“Said N Done”, 21 Savage and Metro Boomin (Spotify / YouTube) – A truly heartwarming beat with equally heartwarming sentiments: “I'll never fall off, I might take a break / You know either way it go, my family gonna be straight.” 21 sounds like he’s made it and can finally enjoy himself. 

“By Yourself”, Ty Dolla $ign, Jhené Aiko, Mustard (Spotify / YouTube) – An unmistakable Mustard production, dropping straight into your gut while moving you all the same. Ty has endless melodies, and Jhené floats in like a sea breeze, every word sounding like she’s “headed to the crib right by the ocean.”

“Let Go”, Sharon Van Etten (Spotify / YouTube) – It sounds like something Sharon has been working on getting right for a long time landed better here than it ever has before. A slow build, repetitions gaining emotional density, minute after minute, before finally exploding in release, propelled by driving drums and her powerful voice.

“The Real News”, Alec Spiegelman (Spotify / YouTube) – With Andrew Dimola and Robin MacMillan behind him on bass and drums, Alec lets his multiplicity of talents step in: His incredible guitar playing, funny, affecting lyrics, brilliant production. When his saxophone tumbles in in the song’s coda, it almost seems unfair.

“Care”, beabadoobee (Spotify / YouTube) – Beatrice Laus, like Thom Yorke, Sophia Allison, and Melina Duterte, can pair a divine, weightless verse with a chorus that arrives like an airplane crashing or an airbag punching you to survival.

“Janey Needs A Shooter”, Bruce Springsteen (Spotify / YouTube) – How was this one lost in Bruce’s sketchbooks for almost 50 years? It would have stood out on any of his best albums, but it’s just another song for him, maybe even more powerful now that his voice is weathered but as strong as it has ever been.

“Every One In A While”, Cut Worms (Spotify / YouTube) – Max Clarke yawls and yips like a country singer just before rock started really breaking the rules. Could you square dance to this song? Sure you could. But there’s something underneath – the song is a little too long, the wah guitar peeks out just a bit too much, the rasp in his voice tears just a touch too far.

“Zombie Girl”, Adrianne Lenker (Spotify / YouTube) – Lenker emits pathos with every breath, beautifully so on this track, where birds chirp and windchimes toll behind her quiet voice as she asks the world to explain itself: “Oh, emptiness, tell me about your nature, maybe I’ve been getting you wrong.”

“barely there”, Gia Margaret (Spotify / YouTube) – Like one of those long interludes on a 1975 album, except this one sounds just like the words being spoken: Swirling absent-mindedness where time disappears into an undertow of blank, feeling thought.

“Good Guess”, Winston C.W. (Spotify / YouTube) – With its absence of percussion or marked time, Winston’s ambling chords, accompanied by Scree’s Ryan Beckley and Carmen Rothwell, sound like an M.C. Escher in the sky, descending stairway of clouds that always leaves you higher than when you stepped down, its thermals of pianos here and there interrupted by Beckley’s torrential guitar and Carmen’s arco bass.

One Album for October, 2 0 2 0  

“Resurrection”, Common Sense (Relativity, 1994) (Spotify / YouTube) 

Before Logic or Reason (or Logic or Reason), there was Common Sense. Before Chicago had Noname, Chance, or Kanye, it had Lonnie Lynn of Calumet Heights, son of a principal and a pro basketball player. Before he was Common, he was Common Sense. Before he had Kanye, J Dilla, or the Neptunes, Common had No I.D. Before he opened the All-Star Game in Chicago, he was a ball-boy with the Bulls. Before the Microsoft commercials, the spoken-word at Michelle Obama’s White House, the high art of the Soulquarians, one of Chicago rap’s first icons made a landmark work for a local community, one of the best albums from rap’s best year: Resurrection.

Common Sense was 22 years old when he released Resurrection, two years off his underground debut Can I Borrow a Dollar? For a rapper who would become known for his maturity, he sounds burgeoning but young, still tied to the footprint of a hometown he’d soon expand beyond. It’s a concept album, but with no concept beyond place: The first half is called the “East Side of Stony”, the second “West Side of Stony”, referring to the street that bisects Chicago’s South Side, Stony Island Avenue. It’s a tour of his neighborhood – the streets, the voices of the people there at different times of day, the sound of the radio, the way people rapped.

Resurrection’s 15 tracks have producer NO I.D. to thank for their classic palette: Boom-bap beats, jazzy loops, the iconic sound of mid-90s rap. Common Sense brought a combination of heady concepts and playful one-liners. The album’s second track, “I Used to Love H.E.R.” is an extended metaphor, the personification of a larger concept like some of Nas’s mid-period work. For its heavy-handedness and misogyny, its classic Common, the inspiration for the Roots’ “Act Too (Love Of My Life)” on their iconic Things Fall Apart. This literal romanticization of hip-hop, early classicism in the genre determining what was real rap and what was just commercial, reflected a whole movement in independent rap. There was something essentially dignified about the genre that had to be respected, like the artists themselves.

Despite its pithy introduction, Resurrection is not overserious or heavy. In fact, it’s more often playful and fun than it is weighty; If anything, Common can verge on irreverent. On “Watermelon” he lets verses tumble out with playful calisthenics like “If I was Michelin I wouldn’t tire!”; on “In My Own World (Check The Method)”, No I.D. himself takes the mic, comfortable as he can be opening for the album’s lead artist (“No I.D. from the city with a beach on thirty-first!”); on “Nuthin’ To Do” has the patina of Ice Cube’s “It Was A Good Day”, a dreamlike nostalgia piece that describes the city and its diversions in gauzy hues:

“Whitney Young and Kenwood was said to have the best chicks

But mostly Hyde Park and V hoes is who I messed with

The best shit was troopin' to the loop in your precisions

Cut class to get ass, but still go to division”

Resurrection is full of such youthful indiscretion and gamesmanship, a pleasure for fans who know its narrator as one of his generation’s ultimately more venerable and spiritual artists. “Communism” invokes Chance the Rapper’s “22 Offs”, pure wordplay, endless riffing on a core concept that might seem tiresome for a rapper who had more run behind him. He even has the juice to extend it into the next track, the sunny “Thisisme” – ”Good Morning Viet-Com, I'm back!” Corny, sure – but he was 22 and legitimately seemed happy to be announcing his return. “On the mic I be talkin' shit,” he admits, before winking, “but some say my talk don't make no Sense.”

The album’s best moments find commonality between the eagerness of this young man, and the innate interest in the world around him that would soon bloom to define his public personality. “Chapter 13 (Rich Man vs. Poor Man)” arrives in its last verse with an escalating allegory for racial segregation throughout Chicago. At its culmination, after naming a litany of indignities suffered by black Chicagoans, Com lands on an in-the-know joke about Leon’s BBQ on the South Side. It’s a little love letter to the city and its denizens, but it has a point to make too.

That point is perhaps most indelibly made by a final guest: Common’s father, who closes Resurrection in the first of what would become a tradition of last words for his son’s albums until 2011, the final album before the elder Lonnie Lynn’s death. His message is simple, and one that Common would need time to grow into: “We’re gonna work on something new, and I’m gonna call it ‘peace’. We’re gonna pretend like it's 6 years old and we’re gonna build it and mold it and nurture it and culture it and grow right into our society for all of us to have.” He leaves an aura on the album long after it’s finished: “Back in my day, they was showing up, now they finally woke up. I hear they’re leaving it alone, using words like 'truce', I love to hear that.”

It’s hard to listen to Common Sense’s second album without a sense of him, his city, the life he lived and loved in 1993 and ‘94. His thoughtfulness was set into his character, but so was his glinting charm, excitement and irreverence. These were the days before he had to be Common, when he could just assert “This is me.” “Probably in about seven years I won't have no hair,” he thought back then, before it was gone.

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