The Retrographer, Issue 78 (May, 2 0 2 1)

June 01, 2021

Mr. Jukes, Barney Artist, Mach-Hommy, Keisha Plum, Westside Gunn, Leon Bridges, Japanese Breakfast, St. Vincent, Isaiah Rashad, Duke Deuce, Faye Webster, Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, Mdou Moctar, Ryan El-Solh, One Direction, and more

The Retrographer, Issue 78

Bulletins

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

“Blowin Steam (Open Up Your Mind)”, Mr. Jukes and Barney Artist (Spotify / YouTube) – h/t Ponte. Boom bap, standup bass, jazzy progressions; they were always fresh despite staying dusty as the vinyl they’re pulled from. 

“Folie Á Deux”, Mach-Hommy, Keisha Plum, and Westside Gunn (Spotify / YouTube) – Griselda is still the hardest thing going, in no small part because the yin and yang of Mach and Westside, who float over this beat like Mario in a secret cloud level awash in coins and power ups.

“Motorbike”, Leon Bridges (Spotify / YouTube) – Nate Mercereau made Leon this beat soon after the singer’s trip to Puerto Rico; He poured the sunlight and serenity from that trip into the song, which shimmers gold like a sunset over the water.

“Savage Good Boy”, Japanese Breakfast (Spotify / YouTube) – The drop comes early, on a low piano note abutted by palm-muted guitar and fuzzy, pulsing keyboard. Michelle Zauner is a master of melancholy melodies that stick to you like wet clothing.

“...At The Holiday Party”, St. Vincent (Spotify / YouTube) – This song opens delicately like a flower opening to the sun, and picks up speed like a whole field following suit. It offers a magnanimous hand to a lost person: “Hide behind these things / So no one sees you not getting not getting what you need.”

“Lay Wit Ya”, Isaiah Rashad and Duke Deuce (Spotify / YouTube) – It’s hard to believe you can mix bass this loud for headphones, so loud as to render the Three 6 Mafia sample an utterance beneath is; but no one is more deserving of it than Rashad’s feature Duke Deuce, who never goes if not hard.

“I Know I’m Funny haha”, Faye Webster (Spotify / YouTube) – Webster’s prosaic lovesong is carved into a tree lowercase, marked by the beauty she sees in her partner’s sisters, the bass she gifted, the little things she notices and looks forward to. That’s what it’s all about.

“Like I Used To”, Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen (Spotify / YouTube) – The two best voices in indie rock share a mic (and an amazing music video), belting over twinkling piano and shattering crash cymbals. There may not be many songs as huge as this in 2021!

“Tala Tannam”, Mdou Moctar (Spotify / YouTube) – Moctar’s virtuosic guitar is joined by not just his voice, but a chorus, carrying his winding melodies up through the air. He pulls the song’s harmony out of its expected orbit, stretching and bending it from its roots, where it bends back again.

“Bygones”, Ryan El-Solh (Spotify / YouTube) – Most of the songs on Ryan’s project are old jazz standards; but some are original songs he finished in college and only recorded now. The accompaniment for this song was recorded years ago, with just the lead recorded recently. 

One Album for May, 2 0 2 1  

“FOUR”, One Direction (SYCO/Columbia, 2014) (Spotify / YouTube) 

Boy bands never fail to follow an arc. Their first impression is simple and uniform; adorable and accessible: Think Paul McCartney wagging his head in a suit matching his bandmates on Ed Sullivan, or New Edition marching down the block in flying-v formation. This is the Jackson 5’s alphabet; One Direction lampooning choreography. Thematically, their early songs have to simulate romantic interest and adulation that their young audience might be beginning to find interest in, but perhaps doesn’t feel comfortable enough to explore yet. As Meghan Harper – later relayed by Lisa Philips – explained:

“...those big dumb crushes are what helps a teenage girl develop her sexuality in a safe environment that she can control. In her world, she can listen to One Direction and hear all these songs about how great she is, and how much these cute non-threatening boys want to make her feel special. Why is this so important? Because no one is pushing them. There’s no fourteen year old boy shoving his clammy hands down your shirt without your consent. These fantasy boys are not convincing a girl to send naked pictures, only to show all their friends and call her a slut. In the fantasy land of boy bands, the girl has all the power. And we need to stop judging them for wanting to escape into that.”

It’s not just about adolescent exploration; when Mitski covered One Direction’s “Fireproof”, she contextualized it with a long, involved fantasy about Harry Styles and who she imagined – hoped he was. “You’re sitting on the bus now, still talking with Harry, telling each other things about yourselves, but it’s as if you’re acting out a scene of getting to know each other,” she imagines. “And maybe you’re already aware that you’re talking to each others’ projections, yet it feels intimate just the same.” Boy bands let listeners play out a hard life in soft terms.

The arc curves, and, try as they might, much to the consternation of their fans, these idols can’t stay Peter Pans; nor do they want to. The next chapter is the turn, showing the world that their adorable advances carry a little danger and possibility and hoping that stokes renewed interest before their boyishness grows fetid. They start wearing sunglasses and talking about sex; BTS picks a black album cover. They need to seem now complex, concerned with real problems and desires. The Backstreet Boys are suddenly black and blue; NSYNC are cornered by fame. Then they go their separate ways; life happens and they individuate. Justin Timberlake puts on a suit and tie; Bobby Brown did too; so did Harry Styles. Until, that is, they run out of options, and decide to return to their warhorses and ride out their days in The Mirage.

The magic is in the moments it is working, before the shifts. These are the moments the band taps into during those long nights playing the hits, decades down the line in the medley revue. These are the moments that the legion of fans, who grew up privately exploring themselves, finding their own adulthoods in the band’s safe stories, return to for the rest of their lives. These are the songs that make listeners travel back to when the world seemed simpler; that’s what mints lifelong devotees and ever-warm memories. You only get one adolescence; you only find your own sexuality once; you only leave the garden once. The sounds of those moments live with you forever, tied permanently to your own, singular journey, your own stretching arc, pointed in just one direction, toward the future.

No boy band was so aware and thoughtful about not just these tropes, but the ephemerality of their experience, as One Direction. Assembled before the world by American Idol powerhouse Simon Cowell on the British competition show The X Factor in 2010, they quickly became the biggest band in the world, landing hit after hit, cresting with a documentary on their lives from Morgan Spurlock and their 2014 album, FOUR, which made them the first group in history whose first four albums all debuted at number one in the United States. But change was inevitable, and by 2015 a member had left, and in 2016 the band announced an indefinite hiatus.

FOUR was made entirely in hotel rooms and tour vans under the tutelage of songwriter Julian Bunetta. Sonically, it is largely tailored to meet the capacious stadiums the group had graduated to: on songs like “Fool’s Gold” and “Ready To Run: the guitars reference U2’s The Edge, and opener “Steal My Girl” builds on Journey's "Faithfully". Musically, Bunetta often led the group to blatant references to other work – compare the previous album’s “Best Song Ever” to The Who’s “Baba O’Reily” – but that hardly mattered to the group and their fans. Everyone feels that rush first just once, it may as well be 1D delivering it.

But in the shadow of FOUR’s skyscraping aspirations is a looming awareness: This moment will pass. The album’s quieter moments ask just how long things will be this way, and when the end will come. Take “18”, which stages the odd and evocative scene of these five young men, aged 20 to 23, marveling at a love that had lasted back to the irreverence of teen years that already seem long in the past. Or on album cut “Spaces”:

“Who's gonna be the first one to compromise?

Who's gonna be the first one to set it all on fire?

Who's gonna be the last one to drive away?

Forgetting every single promise we ever made?”

And then,

“Who's gonna be the first to say goodbye?”

One Direction were unafraid to risk ruining the mood or abandoning the moment by wondering what was next. It’s not standard fare for boy bands; not on the arc or in the script. It’s neither flirty cooing nor lascivious come-on; it’s a melancholy that considers youth itself, rather than simply inhabiting or performing it as so many other groups did. Rather than simply embodying teen marketing, the group asks who they – and we – are when this is all through and life advances along.

This is no Trojan Horse; the biggest hit from the album was “Night Changes”, a flickering slideshow of moments becoming memories before their very eyes. In this context, the group addresses fleeting time:

”We're only getting older, baby

And I've been thinking about it lately

Does it ever drive you crazy

Just how fast the night changes?

Everything that you've ever dreamed of

Disappearing when you wake up”

Those who one might imagine to be One Direction’s audience – girls the group’s age or younger – can certainly be given to contemplative nostalgia of the sort described here. But the group was acutely aware that their listenership included the orbits around those listeners, the family and adults, sometimes much older, who were themselves often moved – sometimes hilariously –  by their shimmering youth and thoughtful consideration. So the lyric continues: “Her mother doesn't like that kind of dress, reminds her of the missing piece of innocence she lost.” This canonical mother recognizes in a red dress a vision of her own past, and, in a way, her daughter’s future. Each is in flux, bound to flow forward indefinitely in time. But as long as life persists, the red dress, youth, endures.

FOUR’s release date on November 17th, 2014 was just weeks shy of the first anniversary of my father’s death. I was 25 years old, just a few years older than the band’s members, a little further down the arc from them. I felt, at the time, suddenly much, much older; the scintilla of youth and its crackling possibility seemed snuffed cold and wet into a dark night. For weeks over the holidays that year, I fell into the record, scanning the bittersweet nostalgia running through its tracks for some wisdom about life as it moves past. The group sang about blooming love, electric moments of fun and passion, hopeless devotion; they sang about the fleeting preciousness of these moments, not knowing a thing about when they’d pass other than the inevitability they would; they sang about the things worth living for, the lights that burn brightly and then cut out, finally and forever. The band soundtracked formative memories for so many, but for me, they simply indicated a consideration of the irreversible passage of time. The message they shared:

“Everything that you've ever dreamed of

Disappearing when you wake up

But there's nothing to be afraid of

Even when the night changes”

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