The Retrographer, Issue 77 (April, 2 0 2 1)

May 16, 2021

Dry Cleaning, SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, Vijay Iyer, Linda Oh, Tyshawn Sorey, Cardi B, Young Thug, Lil Uzi Vert, Yung Kayo, Brent Faiyaz, Flying Lotus, Burial, Jessie Ware, St. Vincent, Bob Dylan, and more

The Retrographer, Issue 77

Bulletins

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

“Unsmart Lady”, Dry Cleaning (Spotify / YouTube) – Dry Cleaning smash and stomp and wreck and tear like the world is ending behind vocals that seem to be lost in nonlinear thought or just one side of a phone call. These are lyrics: “Call Ronny. What've you been up to? Cool. Yeah”. (See also, Wire, “The Other Window”). 

“GIVE UP YOUR LIFE”, SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (Spotify / YouTube) – Everything feels like it’s melting. Pieces don’t really match. This part shouldn’t go into that part. Why did that stutter? Is this sound in a small space or a huge one? Maybe I took too much of this stuff.

“Survivors”, Flying Lotus (Spotify / YouTube) – Steven Ellison soundtracked and directed Kuso, and now Yasuke, Netflix’s anime about the man of African origin who served in a 16th-century Japanese daimyō. This track simmers and flickers, like a story that sounds like a dream.

“Show U Off”, Brent Faiyaz (Spotify / YouTube) – To be simply seen; The feeling of finally, after being disregarded and written off, acknowledged, even celebrated. Loved. Is that too much to ask? After everything you’ve been through, can’t you just deserve this? Never forget your worth.

“Dark Gethsemane”, Burial (Spotify / YouTube) – Ten minutes even of tumbling, racing dubstep, swelling and intensifying, with squalls of synthesizers and sudden drops into street sounds and a capella. A preacher demands, “We must shock this nation with the power of love.”

“Drummer’s Song”, Vijay Iyer, Linda Oh, and Tyshawn Sorey (Spotify) – This trio found a profound collective understanding beyond rehearsal or familiarity with the material. Seeing them live felt like seeing a single musician articulate a perfectly clear improvised idea.

“Up”, Cardi B (Spotify / YouTube) – Like Young Thug said, big b’s: “Big bag bussin' out the Bentley Bentayga Man, Balenciaga Bardi back and all these bitches fucked It's big bags bussin' out the Bentley Bentayga, man Birkin bag, Bardi back and all you bitches fucked!”

“Proud Of You”, Young Thug, Lil Uzi Vert, and Yung Kayo (Spotify / YouTube) – Speaking of Thugger: He brought everyone to the table on Slime Language 2, and the vibes are all good. Everyone is in it together: “Yes, my Rollie face is green, Slime, his Rollie face is red, Gunna Rollie face is blue!”

“Please”, Jessie Ware (Spotify / YouTube) – Ware’s new groove is disco, and she should never get off the floor. Following last year’s superb What’s Your Pleasure?, this banger makes the club into a church like only the best DJs and bands could.

“The Melting Of The Sun”, St. Vincent (Spotify / YouTube) – The sound of the 70s: A little Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Mark Bolan, “St. Joni”, a clavinet, gospel backup singers, an electric sitar guitar, Fender Rhodes, a warping slide guitar, lyrics that sound like children’s rhymes.

One Album for April, 2 0 2 1  

“New Morning”, Bob Dylan (Columbia, 1970) (Spotify / YouTube)

Starting in 1962, Bob Dylan released an album or two every year. Like the Beatles, consumers became accustomed to a torrent of challenging, progressive work, at once melodious and intellectual. Dylan could be fierce and funny, folksy and innovative, lovable and a bit of a dick song to song. Fans, press, and especially critics barely sought to appraise his work: They treated him like Shakespeare or literally like a god. When an audience member accosted the curly-haired Bard from Hibbing, Minnesota while he played his electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, they called him “Judas”, as if he had become the betrayer to his own divine legacy.

Then in July, 1966, Dylan crashed his motorcycle, broke his back, and headed home without visiting the hospital. The whirlwind four years that had lifted him from a baby-faced bohemian to the poet laureate of the baby boom ended abruptly, as did the suffocating pressure to stare back into its gaze until it flinched. Dylan didn’t stop making music; he simply ducked down an alleyway away from the deafening expectations that rendered an electric amplifier into some kind of audio pentagram into an apocrypha of esoterica, songs that couldn’t be placed as original or folk tunes, jocular or earnest, loving or incisive. A hundred of these songs were recorded in upstate New York at a big pink house affectionately and obviously named “Big Pink” and furiously bootlegged until their official release almost a decade later. The next year, he reemerged with John Wesley Harding, twelve songs of wild stories that sound plucked from Alan Lomax’s dustiest bins; Veering even further away was 1969’s Nashville Skyline, where Dylan changed his singing voice entirely into a country croon sounding nothing like the disaffected sneer of Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde. Then, in 1970, the impossible: Planet Waves, which critics and listeners alike just didn’t like; a first for Dylan.

America followed Bob Dylan as he carved a path from its folk roots into an intersection of pop and poetry, and then, when the weight of its expectations piled up just high enough, he drove it again out into what Greil Marcus named “The old, weird America,” a place that, to Dylan’s observation, existed in every state, county, and town in the nation. And while America so often looked to Dylan’s adventures on the road to explain it to itself, Dylan considered briefly, on 1970’s New Morning, what life would be like if he hung it all up.

About half of New Morning asks the humble question: What if this is enough? Forget the endless ramble, the hot, bright lights of cameras and stages, the crushing expectations of a public who look to you to reveal impossible truths. What about a love that can hold you? A family? A home? As he asked on “Sign On The Window”:

“Build me a cabin in Utah

Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout

Have a bunch of kids who call me "pa"

That must be what it's all about”

Dylan expresses gratitude and even satisfaction with a modest life: “If Not For You” simply extols a partner for deliverance from the unthinkable: “If not for you, my sky would fall; Rain would gather too.” A similar sentiment and imagery appear on “The Man In Me”: “Stormclouds were raging all around my door – I think to myself, I might not take it anymore.” “Winterlude”’s waltz paints a quaint picture of love in the country: “Winterlude, let's go down to the chapel, then come back and cook up a meal.” The title track states his lack of want, the quelling of his wandering heart, clear as day: “So happy just to see you smile underneath the sky of blue on this new morning with you.”

“Day Of The Locusts” recalls the day Dylan was granted an honorary degree from Princeton. The straightness of the experience was another blazing spotlight (“The weather was hot, a nearly 90 degrees / The man standing next to me, his head was exploding”) he preferred to escape back into the bosom of a domestic life (“I put down my robe, I picked up my diploma, took hold of my sweetheart and away we did drive straight for the hills, the black hills of Dakota. Sure was glad to get out of there alive!”) Those hills may well be the same hills on “Time Passes Slowly”: “Time passes slowly up here in the mountains. We sit beside bridges and walk beside fountains. Catch the wild fishes that float through the stream. Time passes slowly when you're lost in a dream.” A quiet idyll hangs over the album like a lazy sun, warm and radiant.

The other half of the album gives color to the setting of all this contentment, and its oddity clarifies Dylan’s satisfaction isn’t complacency. This here is America’s ubiquitous backwood, strangeness that can live on country corners or busy city streets. “Three Angels” sets an incongruous, surrealistic diorama from around the nation: “The wildest cat from Montana passes by in a flash, then a lady in a bright orange dress, one U-Haul trailer, a truck with no wheels, the Tenth Avenue bus goin' west.” “If Dogs Run Free” sounds like the sort of song Bob Dylan was always cooler than, tracing back to the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village. He must have been surrounded by self-referential beats like the character he plays on this song – and Maeretha Stewart’s interruptive scat singer – another loose character in his rolodex. Album closer “Father Of Night” seems to complete Dylan’s transformation into knotty country pine, a preacherly hymnal over rolling piano and gospel backing vocals. At 91 seconds, it ends abruptly and early, leaving more questions than answers for a listener having met a new Bob Dylan. Is this it? Has the caravan docked in its final destination? Is the savior poet of a generation now a proud preacherly papa parked in “someplace unknown” as he sang on “One More Weekend”?

The answer came five years later, when the Rolling Thunder Revue began. That tour started, and kept going, and going, and going. And Dylan kept changing, from country bumpkin, to outlaw, to stadium rock star, to Christian, to Jew, over and over again, new faces and characters, pins on the neural map of America from meridian to meridian, coast to coast, person to person. Turns out this was just another stop, one that looked like the final one, but was revealed to be yet another flashing reflection.

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