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- The Retrographer, Issue 86 (January 2 0 2 2)
The Retrographer, Issue 86 (January 2 0 2 2)
Saba, Krayzie Bone, Earl Sweatshirt, Gunna, The Weeknd, Years & Years, Maia Friedman, Good Looks, Jana Hron, Elvis Costello and the Imposters, The Weather Station, Nas, and more
The Retrographer, Issue 86 (January, 2 0 2 2)
Announcement
I’m playing my first full-band show on March 9th at the Sultan Room! I’ll be joined by Ben Seretan and Andy Cush’s new band Domestic Drafts.
Get tickets here!
Bulletins
Saba and Krayzie Bone, “Come My Way”, (Spotify / YouTube) – Krayzie Bone is Saba’s hero; With the younger rapper ascendant and preparing to follow up 2018’s tragic, classic CARE FOR ME, he can finally share three transcendent minutes of cloudlike beats with the OG.
Earl Sweatshirt, “Fire in the Hole”, (Spotify / YouTube) – Thebe loves rap, so he namechecks AKAI SOLO, Outkast, and the godfather Bootsy Collins, before his beats and rhymes evaporate into a gorgeous piano outro.
Gunna, “livin wild”, (Spotify / YouTube) – When he says he’s living wild, Gunna means wild. His kidneys and liver are messed up, he’s doing whippets, he’s checking out of the hospital, “The doc didn't care who the richest, I need to be admitted.”
The Weeknd, “Is There Someone Else?”, (Spotify / YouTube) – Abel Tesfaye has played the Super Bowl, sold millions of records, dated half of Hollywood, but he knows he’s still doing wrong so he’ll continue to feel karma’s boomerang: “I don't deserve someone loyal to me, don't you think I see? And I don't want to be a prisoner to who I used to be…”
Years & Years, “Night Call”, (Spotify / YouTube) – Isn’t it wonderful when you can hear a melody outline the color of the chords behind it? Notes that show you what’s different about each evolving harmony as they pass, a lightshow of sound.
Maia Friedman, “Where The Rocks Are”, (Spotify / YouTube) – After her gorgeous work with last year’s Coco, and lovely contributions to Dirty Projectors, Friedman continues her blitz by just taking her time at 66 beats per minute.
Good Looks, “Almost Automatic”, (Spotify / YouTube) – These Texans are enjoying themselves under that big open sky, worshiping the expanse like Wild Pink before them. After the verses ruminate, the chorus opens up with a passionate exhortation for change.
Jana Horn, “Driving”, (Spotify / YouTube) – These beautiful lyrics slowly unfold, almost like a self-soothing exercise, leaving worry behind as the miles unfold ahead. Nothing rises above a lull, yet the song swells and expands, opens and rolls, infinitely approaches an endless horizon.
The Weather Station, “Endless Time”, (Spotify / YouTube) – A quarantune no doubt, but also a paean to love and loss, golden times that should never have passed yet are suddenly irretrievable, prosaic and common yet permanent and obliterating.
Elvis Costello and the Imposters, “What If I Can’t Give You Anything But Love?”, (Spotify / YouTube) – This is easily one of the best ensembles in the world and Declan MacManus is still among the best lyricist-melodian-guitarists alive. No one rocks this hard at almost 70 without sounding like their back hurts, and yet here we are.
One Album for January, 2 0 2 2
Fannie Anne Little went by Anne; she had two sons with a jazz trumpeter named Olu Dara: Nasir, in 1973, and Jabari, in 1979. Anne and Olu divorced in 1985, and she set out to raise her sons on a postal worker’s salary in the Queensbridge Houses projects of Queens, New York. In April 2002, when Nasir learned that Anne’s cancer was out of control, he rushed home to be with her as she passed. “Wish you'd appear just for a second from, heaven my tears would be gone,” Nasir would lament soon thereafter. “I wouldn't be rapping this song, I'd be happy driving up to your 8 bedroom mansion.”
By 2002, Nasir Jones had established himself as one of the most talented, wildly creative and experimental, and poetic figures in rap’s first few decades. To hear him tell it, “Back in '83, I was an MC sparking, but I was too scared to grab the mics in the park.” That didn’t last long; his lyrical talent was too strong, his voice too compelling for New York’s legendary block parties, gestational jubilees for the birth of the genre. First he caught the attention of the producer Large Professor, hopped on more records, and built his name. His first tape came out in 1991; he got representation from MC Serch and a record deal from Columbia the same year. Archeologists will hear nascent bars on this tape later used on 1994’s Illmatic, the rapper’s debut album (“Just Another Day In The Projects” presages “N.Y. State of Mind”, etc.). Years of tinkering over the same lyrics, finding and refining ideas – and abandoning the ones that didn’t – paid off incalculably; Illmatic is still a shoe-in candidate in any debate about the genre’s greatest works, and Nas as “God MC”. “Now in every jam I'm the fucking man,” he recalled.
The 1990s were a Cambrian explosion for rap, and the proliferation of artists created intense competition among the many singular talents that emerged. Making claims to not just primacy but GOAT status were table stakes. Nas was a locus to all of them. The Notorious B.I.G., accompanied by Puff Daddy, shared the stage to freestyle with Nas in 1994; A Tribe Called Quest and their rapper-producer leader Q-Tip made some of the beats on Illmatic; Queens neighbors Mobb Deep were among Nas’s closest affiliates and collaborators; Big Pun of the Bronx shared tracks and mutual respect with Nas; 2Pac and Nas nursed a simmering beef; Big L signed his deal the same day as Nas; and of course Shawn Carter – calling himself Jay-Z, or Hova, from Jay-hova, a play on Jehova, God – who arrived, after sitting on the margins with features on Big L and Big Daddy Kane records, with 1996’s iconic Reasonable Doubt, a record he invited Nas to feature on, but was stood up.
That year, 2Pac was murdered, then Biggie was killed the next; by 1999, Big L was dead, and by by 2000, Pun was gone too. As the ranks thinned, Jay’s star rose while Nas’s appeared to falter; the former stacked hits, where the latter struggled to match the impossible heights of his debut. Nas’s post-Illmatic albums were seen by many fans as both confusingly conceptual and also too brazenly commercial; they neither played to his philosophical strengths as a lyricist nor his innate coolness. The stage was set for a confrontation between the two biggest stars in rap’s biggest arena, and after a sequence of escalations, it did: Jay-Z’s “The Takeover'' landed a hard punch in 2001, which was met with Nas’s equally brutal “Ether” the same year. Jay’s “Supa Ugly” rebuttal revealed a multi-year affair with Nas’s daughter Destiny’s mother. Amid this firestorm, Nas was watching over his own mother’s failing health, trying to defend himself, forward his career, stay on top, and project strength.
Parenthood, greatness, paranoia. These were the topics swirling when, in December 2002, Nas delivered his sixth album, God’s Son. It went platinum in a month and earned Nas his most glowing critical acclaim since his debut. He allowed himself to be an open book, laying his ideals, ordeals, animosities, and aspirations out plainly. Backed by a sterling team of producers including Salaam Remi, Eminem, and the Alchemist, it’s an album like none other in his career, one that shook off his cold spell after Illmatic and introduced a new side of him to listeners, one he has been developing for a generation since.
God’s Son opens with “Get Down”, a shockingly clear and gripping narrative, as slick and hair-raising as the best action movies. It starts with a simple roll call, naming names – Pistol Pete, Pappy Mason, Gerald “Prince” Miller, Richard “Fritz” Simmons, the infamous Nicky Barnes – of the dealers whose names rung out in the streets of his youth, whose “drugs kept the hood from starving.” In the ensuing verses, Nas’s tales of cutthroat competition and deceit span the nation, and each time he transits, producer Salaam Remi molds the beat to his story. In the second verse, as Nas scraps with dealers in Tennessee, Remi flips “Rock Creek Park”; As he strides into a Crenshaw funeral, Remi hits a twisty, G-Funk synthesizer right out of a Dre beat. As an opener, there are few like it: Lean, cold, hard, propulsive, as entrancing as any thriller.
Similarly transfixing is “Made You Look”, so packed with iconic lines that “don't say my car's topless” and “do the Smurf, do the Wop, Baseball Bat / Rooftop like we bringin' '88 back” are still regularly referenced in new music over two decades later. He closes a capella, suddenly speaking just to you, explicitly grabbing your attention. Nas is dialed in on scene-setting and storytelling throughout the album. “The Last Real Nigga Alive”, the final chapter in his beef with Jay-Z (they reconciled in 2005), doesn’t fire any further shots so much as share’s Nas’s definitive and complete testimony of their history together. It’s so full of information that it feels like reading a gossip rag; Nas confirms the tawdry details of Jay’s affair with the mother of his daughter, and paints the picture of Puffy beating record executive Steve Stoute with a champagne bottle in the Def Jam office, its contents spilling across the floor.
No Nas album would be complete, however, as simply colorful reportage. He’s defined by his imaginative creativity, and displays it on tracks like “Thug’s Mansion”, a duet with a posthumous 2Pac verse that envisions the peace that comes after life’s strife, or “Book Of Rhymes”, wherein he recites ostensibly real, discarded concepts for songs from an old journal to illustrate his grit and commitment to the craft, proven by the drafts of Illmatic he once piloted on his demo tapes. He shows his sentimentality as well as his desire for a better world on “I Can”, which has as much regimental afrocentric pride as an Afro-Sheen commercial.
But among all the jockeying and tumult, deep down Nas is wracked by grief. His mother was everything to him. It weaves its way into verses otherwise unrelated to the topic: On “The Cross”, he explains his brother’s ambition as driven by jealousy, itself driven by their shared grief. He approaches the loss head-on, but it’s always too big to surmount. On “Warrior Song”, he vents his sorrow: “Earlier this year I buried my queen in a gold casket. Your mother's the closest thing to God that you ever have, kid. I'm asking, what would you do at your own mom's funeral / Wanna pick her up out of it, this can't be real / Telling my daughter grandma's gone, but I can't keep still / I can't go on, responsible for so many / Her last days at the hospital, visits from family I'm trying not to bust shots.” On “Dance”, he pleads for just another moment with her, “I dream of the day I can go back to when I was born, layin' in your arms, wishin' you was here today, Mom.” But he knows his desperation is a permanent condition, one he can barely live with: “Mom, you could never be replaced. I'd give my life up just to see you one more day, to have one more dance with you.”
He closes the album with a simple homily:
Talking about, "I'm fucked up," "I got to get on," "I got to…"
"I'm in the grind," "I'm fucked up"
Yeah, we all in the grind
But look at the beautiful shit around you, it's a beautiful life
All my niggas locked up, keep ya heads up
Heaven's just a mile away
I'm talking Heaven on Earth, ain't got nothing to do with money
Got nothing to do with nothing material
I'm talkin' about Heaven in your own heart
In your own world, baby, in your own existence
To my moms, look at me, baby
I love you, girl, your boy's shining, God's son.
Nas knows that his spirit is too strong to be crushed by fierce competition, betrayal by those close to him, the impossible stakes of following up a work of genius, a battering assault from a hungry peer, or the greatest loss he’d ever known. He finds strength in each way his response manifests, from rage, to despair, to hope, and ultimately, most godly of all, to peace.
CATCH UP ON BACK ISSUES AT TINYLETTER
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#86 January, 2022 | Nas, “God’s Son”
#69 August, 2020 | Special Issue
#29 May, 2017 | Steely Dan, “Aja”
#27 March, 2017 | Wire, “154”
#16 April, 2016 | RIP PRINCE
#15 March, 2016 | Prince, “Prince”
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