The Retrographer, Issue 74 (January, 2 0 2 1)

February 08, 2021

Pino Palladino, Blake Mills, Cassandra Jenkins, The Weather Station, Adeline Hotel, Eric Church, Jazmine Sullivan, Saweetie, Doja Cat, Fat Joe, DJ Khaled, Amorphous, Yella Beezy, Erica Banks, Clark, Nathaniel Timoney, Kieran Brunt, Minnie Riperton

The Retrographer, Issue 74

Thanks for continuing to read and listen with me! 

Bulletins

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

“Just Wrong”, Pino Palladino and Blake Mills (Spotify / YouTube) – Mills discretely announced this by simply tweeting “Pino Palladino” on January 4th. Credited with “semi-acoustic bass” and “bass harmonics”, Palladino is joined by Chris Dave, his bandmate from D’Angelo’s touring band, for the song’s final mutation. Hear the ensemble play it, with Pino playing Jaco-style on fretless. 

“Hard Drive”, Cassandra Jenkins (Spotify / YouTube) – It’s good to hear this for the first time watching the video, which is not unlike Porches’ gorgeous “Country”. Jenkins places her hardship in the sweep of history, asking philosophical, existential, unanswerable questions, yet somehow promising, through the voices of her advisors, that things will get better.

“Atlantic”, The Weather Station (Spotify / YouTube) – Like The War On Drugs’ “An Ocean Between The Waves”, Tamara Lindeman finds vastness and divinity in sound. But she finds it to escape her dread: “Thinking I should get all this dying off of my mind, I should really know better than to read the headlines…”

Adeline Hotel, “I Have Found It” (Spotify / YouTube) – If you know Dan Knishkowy’s music from this newsletter, you know him as a songwriter. His superpower, however, is his fingerpicking, something he will sometimes casually gift the world on his Twitter. Now he’s gifting the world a full album of his effortless, airy, naturalistic playing, guitars on guitars on guitars.

“Heart On Fire”, Eric Church (Spotify / YouTube) – Eric Church loves music. He loves songwriters. He names his songs after them and plays covers nearly as often as he plays his own music. You can hear his devotion to songwriters all over this exuberant new one.

“Put It Down”, Jazmine Sullivan (Spotify / YouTube) – Church joined Jazmine Sullivan to sing the National Anthem at the Super Bowl. America likely didn’t know the soaring vocalist wrote the freak’s national anthem too, a canticle for an event horizon of libido.

“Best Friend”, Saweetie and Doja Cat (Spotify / YouTube) – Everyone loves a buddy comedy. A big fat hit with 52 million views on YouTube in a month, Doja and Saweetie make it hard not to join in on their mutual admiration society.

“Sunshine (The Light)”, Fat Joe, DJ Khaled, and Amorphous (Spotify / YouTube) – … and Teddy Pendergrass and Rihanna. This beat first went viral when Amorphous tweeted himself mixing the tracks over Thanksgiving, and here we are, some two months later with Joe Crack sunbathing in it.

“STAR”, Yella Beezy and Erica Banks (Spotify / YouTube) – A quick message from Dallas. Something about this song makes me feel like it could have come out in 2004 on Swishahouse with a Paul Wall feature. Erica Banks is the highlight, jumping all over the beat for a quick verse then out.

“Small”, Clark, Nathaniel Timoney, Kieran Brunt (Spotify / YouTube) – Clark can make a song explode; this one seems to approach combustion but never arrives. It rises and rises, synths piling on synths, but the drums never arrive, the drop never drops. The drama is for you to hold. 

One Album for January, 2 0 2 1  

“Minnie”, Minnie Riperton (Capitol, 1979) (Spotify / YouTube) 

Minnie Riperton sings the line again: “The way you held me, no one could tell me...” But this time, her voice disappears from its octave, reappearing high above in the stratosphere, streaking like a contrail, finishing the line, “...that love would die.” With a heave, it cuts impossibly higher, then breaks into a vibrato, trembling with the perturbations of heavenly air patterns, before diving, hawklike, into the bridge.

Riperton was gone two months after her fifth album, Minnie, was released in May 1979. On its cover, she stares unsmiling at the viewer, in funereal black attire, like a memorial portrait. Minnie capped off a five-year stretch in the public eye, starting from her iconic Perfect Angel in 1974, 1975’s number-one single “Lovin’ You”, her cancer diagnosis in 1976, two more fiery, funky albums, an award for courage in the face of illness from President Jimmy Carter in 1978, and then the end. She was 31 years old and became, for lovers of soul music and witnesses to her singular talent, a wonder and a symbolic loss.

This daughter of Chicago found her way to the record industry young, singing backup on Fontella Bass’s “Rescue Me” as a teenager in 1965 and lead in Chess Records’ funky hippie ensemble Rotary Connection by 1967. Hear her grooving in a lush, apocalyptic, psychedelic chorale on “I Am The Black Gold Of The Sun”. At 23 she had a solo album, Come Into My Garden, a beautiful, baroque compilation of orchestral soul in the vein of the Beatles, The Five Stairsteps, or Marlena Shaw’s “California Soul”: Listen to the “Dear Prudence”-like “Les Fleurs”. As the song reaches its apex, you can hear her inimitable whistle singing for the first time in her solo career, subtly hidden in the background like an ondes Martenot. In front, she sings as a flower herself: “Will somebody wear me to the fair? Will a lady pin me in her hair? Will a child find me by a stream? Kiss my petals and weave me through a dream.”  Years later, at award shows and late-night TV interviews, she would wear flowers in her hair herself.

Come Into My Garden was a commercial failure and Riperton followed her husband, record producer Dick Rudolph, to Gainesville, Florida, where she retired to housewifery and gave birth to two children, Marc and Maya. She may have stayed in tropical obscurity if an intern at Epic Records hadn’t chased her down to find she was still writing music. She was. The label gave her a deal, she moved to Los Angeles to make Perfect Angel, linked up with Stevie Wonder, and, on the back of “Lovin’ You”, went gold, selling more than half a million copies in a year. That track could’ve sat on her previous album with its chirping birds, plucked guitar, and pulsing Rhodes. It was sexier than anything she had released before, a song for how much deeper sex can make love and vice versa. Riperton ends by singing her daughter’s name again and again: The love she made made more love, and on and on.

When she was in the studio recording Minnie from March to September 1978, Riperton was a year and a half past her prognosis, living on borrowed time. While it’s impossible to hear her music without remembering the imminence of her untimely demise, the music addresses it with a rainbow of musical perspectives. “Memory Lane” begs to stay; “Return To Forever” attempts to comprehend the end; Wonder leads a loving farewell to Rudolph (“We're gonna have a happy ending / We started our with such a great beginning”) on “Lover and Friend”. When the album steps back down to concerns of the earthly temporal plane, as on “I’m A Woman” or “Love Hurts”, Riperton still seems to be taking a picture of life on Earth she can bring with her. “Dancing and Acting Crazy” grooves away the premonition in a deeply 1978 way (it even has a Bootsy Collins-like “Welcome to my party, baby!”). The album’s closer, a duet cover of The Doors’ “Light My Fire” with José Feliciano, is blithe and unbothered. It sounds like she’s ready to keep living.

The tragedy of Riperton’s early death was manifold: She was 31, far too young; She had young children and a husband she adored; she made her adoration the soul of her music, and every song seems to be written in devotion to them. Her coloratura soprano voice was an aberrant marvel in pop music; She was growing into a musical moment – exemplified by Teddy Pendergrass, Philadelphia International Records, and Luther Vandross – that she would have thrived in. 

But music wouldn’t let Riperton go. The next generation of artists were just the age of her children when she died, but they grew up to carry her into rap, a genre of music barely born in her lifetime, and modern R&B and pop. Jay-Z and Pharrell used “Memory Lane” for “So Ambitious”; Erykah Badu took “Lovin’ You” for her “Honey”; Ariana Grande and Mariah Carey brought her whistle to pop music’s greatest heights. A Tribe Called Quest made her music shine the best, claiming Adventures In Paradise’s “Inside My Love” for “Lyrics to Go” and “Baby, This Love I Have” for “Check The Rhime”.  Phife asserted, “Minnie Riperton probably had the greatest voice that ever lived”. She lived on.

Riperton returns from the bridge in “Memory Lane” like she’s appearing back from behind a cloud, still flying high, almost out of sight in her whistle register. The song gets a full two more minutes, showing more range, more interpretation, more voice to its inevitable close. The backup vocalists continue to punctuate with “back down memory lane”, but Minnie seems to change the subject. “I don’t want to go,” she pleads. “Save me.” She moans and wails; she doesn’t mention memories or photographs again. Knowing what would befall her, these last minutes are heartbreaking. But they are also brilliant, arresting, undeniable. Her voice, her strength, her imprint endures.

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