The Retrographer, Issue 76 (March, 2 0 2 1)

April 13, 2021

Arooj Aftab, Ben Seretan, Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, the London Symphony Orchestra, Eyedress, King Krule, Buz, IAN SWEET, Lana Del Rey, Zella Day, Weyes Blood, Saba, Olivia Rodrigo, Benny The Butcher, Harry Fraud, Chinx, Ty Dolla $ign, and more

The Retrographer, Issue 76

Bulletins

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

“Mohabbat”, Arooj Aftab (Spotify / YouTube) – Aftab’s rendition of this timeless song stretches almost eight minutes, reaching deep into a horizon of serene sadness and longing. At almost three minutes in, a yawning chord change seems to appear, but then it dissipates again, a ghost in an infinity of memory. 

“Fog Rolls Out Rabun Gap”, Ben Seretan (Spotify / YouTube) – Ben decamped from New York when COVID started and found himself in an inversion: Instead of oppressive information, he had no internet; instead of his screaming electric guitar, a placid acoustic piano; instead of the tension of teeming humanity, he had the thrum of living nature. All that is in this recording.

“Movement 8”, Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra (Spotify / YouTube) – Separated by decades, bound together by spirit, a jazz legend and an electronic cosmonaut join one of the world’s most venerable orchestras to make a work that is at once unchanging and submersively fascinating. In this movement, the core, questioning motif become slowly inundated by a church organ, a sunken cathedral.

“Jealous (King Krule Nothing Remix)”, Eyedress and King Krule (Spotify / YouTube) – More soncially true to the despondency of its lyrics than its original, Archy primarily opts for spectral synths and rain sounds to festoon Eyedress’s self-sabotaging rejection. When the skittering beat drops in and the vocals chip into inhuman timbres, its easy to hear the message as it feels to the singer.

“Ceiling”, Buz (Spotify / YouTube) – Over an instrumental that ticks and clicks like a wall clock, an ancient caculation takes place: “Loves me, loves me not?” And from a lonely room, “the ceiling I must break.” It disappears unceremoniously, as if another thought has mercifully arrived to distract.

“For Free”, Lana Del Rey, Zella Day, and Weyes Blood (Spotify / YouTube) – A faithful reproduction of Joni Mitchell’s second track from Ladies of the Canyon, but the simple refraction of its narrative into three characters turns this song, originally a contemplation of a street performer, into a new kind of colloquy on the randomness of notoriety and fortune.

“Dumb Driver”, IAN SWEET (Spotify / YouTube) – Taylor Swift once sang, “Almost ran a red light because you were looking at me”; A universal enough sentiment to start this song the same way. A cloud of love potion perfume swirls, wrought in the gauzy pinks and hazy blues of dream pop.

“Ziplock”, Saba (Spotify / YouTube) – Moody, bassy, stylish; Saba’s return after 2018’s heartbreaking CARE FOR ME develops, rather than reinvents, his sound. He remains one of Chicago’s most singular voices, an open book unafraid of his pain.

“Deja Vu”, Olivia Rodrigo (Spotify / YouTube) – Rodrigo is a known Swiftie, and she’s the best since Taylor at making “the narrative” hers. She’s shown, in just two singles, that it’s best to wait to hear her side of the story. And what could be more cutting than the evidence that everything special you give is just a regurgitation of what another lover gave you? Also: Swift wouldn’t make “I love you, ain’t that the worst thing you’ve ever heard” a single, so OR did it with “I know you get deja vu”. Homage!

“Overall”, Benny The Butcher, Harry Fraud, and Chinx (Spotify / YouTube) – Harry Fraud has been making “Scarface” music for a long time; If you want more music like this, check out his Cigarette Boats project wtih Curren$y. Chinx comes through, jaw locked like his partner French Montana, and Benny is “tipsy, riding shotgun in the Volvo.”

One Album for March, 2 0 2 1  

“Free TC”, Ty Dolla $ign (Atlantic, 2015) (Spotify / YouTube)

The memes would come in the ensuing years: Ty Dolla $ign on features vs. Ty Dolla $ign on his albums. Soon enough, he joined in on the joke. A victim of his own success, one might conclude. Ty became ubiquitous on hooks, verses, production, and instrumentation for artists from Megan Thee Stallion to Rihanna. It’s hard to feel bad for one of the most prolific artists of his cohort when their work with others outshines their own stories. But Ty understood the secret is to own the stories others are telling about you, so for his first album – and all following – he decided to make every track a Ty Dolla $ign feature.

Elevated by his famous friends, Ty make a message of emancipation the focus of his first official album after six mixtapes. 2015’s Free TC features the artist through the shatterproof glass of a prison visitation room, green eyes downcast, holding a phone receiver, his right hand up against the barrier revealing its title tattooed on his knuckles. Throughout the album, Ty drops recorded snippets of conversations with his brother Big TC – incarcerated for murder – as they discuss the changing, elevating world Ty inhabits as his brother is left behind. Ty asks, “What you on though?” on “Solid”, and TC replies with a familiar refrain: “I’m trying to hop on this album!”

While Ty’s stated message calls for his brother to be let out, his album is almost entirely unconcerned with life behind bars. Nor does it place his anguish and longing for his brother at the thematic core of his music. Rather, Ty’s album takes the form of his subsequent albums, and indeed the form of so much of his music overall: Sexy, earworm collaborations with your favorite artists.

There seems to be no artist Ty Dolla $ign can’t sit in with, no modality he can’t inhabit and improve. His rolodex for a first album is preposterous, featuring E-40, Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, Wiz Khalifa, Rae Sremmurd, Future, R. Kelly, Diddy, and even Fetty Wap (it was 2015). He can make a classic from thin air: His duet with Babyface doesn’t even have drums, instead sounding like a late night jam session with bass and acoustic guitar and, okay, eventually a string arrangement. He’s an old soul and he plays nice with old(er) heads: “Straight Up” is one of Jagged Edge’s best songs and while they don’t even take the lead vocal, Ty pays homage: “You can’t blame me, we had that Jagged Edge playing!”

Young old head that he is, Ty reaches for “real’ instruments; Free TC is as often skating on drum machines as it does over guitar and Ty’s primary tool, the bass guitar. The wet reverbed guitar on “Horses in the Stable”, the arpeggiated pizzicato of “Know Ya”, the ringing acoustic piano and trumpet of “Miracle / Wherever”, all point to Ty’s reverence for the music of the 70s and 80s, especially the proto-G-funk Ty’s father seeded as the bassist in Lakeside. Though Ty himself is an original, his writing and choices point to an informed palette equal parts R&B and LA rap. “Credit” is a soulful assertion of dignity in the tradition of the Isley Brothers’ “Work To Do” over flickering hi-hats. The gothic, monesterial background vocals on “Know Ya” invokes both Stevie Wonder’s “Pastime Paradise” and Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise”, a meeting of his father and his brother. The effect is ultimately that even when Ty sings about sex, or partying, or his neighborhood, he’s really singing about his family.

But that’s not to impute too much profundity into Free TC’s messages. He is a lothario, and almost no song focuses on an answer outside the bedroom. Where it does, however, the message is powerful. “Guard Down” credits divinity, encourages his beloved women and family, and gets momentarily confused about whether the message is to keep partying or protecting the people you love; Sure, Kanye phones in an off-key verse and Diddy extemporizes a vague motivational speech, but their hearts all seem in the right place. You can hear Big TC and his prisonmate D-Loc rapping and singing from their confinement on “Miracle”, their vocals echoing in their cell into a phone microphone. That expression of miraculous gratitude is touching and spiritual – and even that moves by way of medley to “Whenever”, another coital invitation. To Ty, that’s part of what it means to be free.

The second half of Free TC switches modes from randy album cuts to swings at singles, and has less success there. “When I See Ya” feels instantly dated and “Sitting Pretty” isn’t inspired by the presence of Ty’s label boss Wiz Khalifa. But Ty is a hitmaker, and his batting average is better than almost anyone in his league. “Blasé” makes good on the efforts, and Ty sounds just as comfortable with Future and Rae Sremmurd as he did with Babyface; “Only Right” assembles some of the LA names that made Ty, most importantly YG, whose “Toot It And Boot It” kicked off a shared trajectory into the upper stratosphere of rap and R&B. But this mixed bag of hits and misses speak to the album’s lofty aspirations. For every misstep (the clubby “Bring It Out of Me”, the irritating “Actress”), there are twice as many songs that reach into Ty’s deep bag of tricks and pulls out a song that demands replay after replay.

Free TC is a document of a budding phenomenon. He litters hooks left and right, full of more ideas than he knows what to do with. He was in the doorway of a career that would blossom to touch the biggest artists in the world for years to come. At this moment, he played every card he could: He didn’t flip the narrative on himself as a sideman, he didn’t free his brother (and might have made things worse, but never stopped trying to help him), but he took the cards he was dealt and made them his own.

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