The Retrographer, Issue 88 (March, 2 0 2 2)

April 18, 2022

Aldous Harding, Rex Orange County, Tyler, the Creator, Nigo, The Range, Charli XCX, Rosalía, Oso Oso, SASAMI, Scree, Louisa Tantillo, Young Thug, and more

The Retrographer, Issue 88 (March, 2 0 2 2)

Bulletins

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

“Ennui”, Aldous Harding (Spotify / YouTube) – Harding refers to herself as a “song actor”, and, song to song, her voice can seem to come from another strange character living in a remote district of her imagination. They’re odd people but fun to meet. 

“Open A Window”, Rex Orange County and Tyler, the Creator (Spotify / YouTube) – Tyler loves interesting chords and elegant harmonic movement, and Rex specializes in it, accounting for why their partnership goes back half of Tyler’s career and almost all of Rex’s.

“Come On, Let’s Go”, Tyler, the Creator and Nigo (Spotify / YouTube) – Tyler again, this time bedecked in Nigo’s auspices, making a ton of hay from the needle that breaks so many camels’ backs, waiting for your date to finish getting ready to go out.

“Ricercar”, The Range (Spotify / YouTube) – In a statement, James Hinton explained: “A Ricercar in a musical context is a prelude fugue that kind of sets the tableau of a piece to follow.” This twinkling, stomping, lamenting track changes shape and size, but points up.

“Twice”, Charli XCX (Spotify / YouTube) – Charlotte Aitchison has proven herself every way she can - with huge smashes, writing for others, launching and popularizing futuristic aesthetic movements, and crafting endless gemlike album cuts like this one. 

“DELIRIO DE GRANDEZA”, Rosalía (Spotify / YouTube) – After a short soliloquy confessing her heartbreak, Rosalía cedes the spotlight of her heartbroken ballad to a chopped and screwed sample of Soulja Boy, a time-traveling remembrance of happier, more innocent times.

“father tracy”, Oso Oso (Spotify / YouTube) – Jade Lilitri can write a hook; but more importantly, he can build up to it, shaping a song to swell, rupture, and explode at just the moment of maximum satisfaction and then let the juice run down your chin.

“Make It Right”, SASAMI (Spotify / YouTube) – There’s something so classic about this song, the harmonized lead vocals and harmonized lead guitars and the Spectoresque reverb on the drums, like it would’ve popped in 1980 just as it does now.

“Cut Short”, Scree (Spotify / YouTube) – The neck of Ryan El-Solh’s telecaster is unusually thick, but in his hands – and with Carmen Rothwell and Jason Burger – notes bend away from their semitone shapes along its neck into ghostly wisps, floating around doorframes and down through the floorboards.

“Leaving and Never Coming Back”, Louisa Tantillo (Spotify / YouTube) – Tantillo, a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, taps into deep wells of indie and emo to draw out this potently brief eddy, morphing between singing and speaking, then suddenly disappearing.

One Album for March, 2 0 2 2

“Barter 6”, Young Thug (2015, 300/Atlantic Records) (Spotify / YouTube) 

The flowering of the internet forwarded radical new ideas in human communication and interaction: information could and should flow freely, be collectively cultivated but not owned by anyone, exchanged between individuals without intermediaries. No movement was better suited for this new paradigm than rap, which distilled its potential by digitizing the corporeal mixtape into a virtual vehicle for endless, permissionless collaboration and communication. 

Beats could be picked up by any artist, artists could join any other artists, they needed nothing more than headphones, a way to record, and an internet connection, and could reach fans. Rappers launched careers from obscurity from the liminal space of file lockers, torrenting, and the file transfer protocol, where creation couldn’t be encumbered by copyright or licensing. The physical cassettes rappers handed out on sidewalks became a skeuomorphic metaphor for a much larger phenomenon.

Many rappers vied for primacy in this era: Lil B made scores of tapes; Odd Future emerged, legion, from the shadows, building their legend across a coordinated onslaught of associated works; A$AP Rocky, Future, and Chief Keef introduced completely original aesthetics. But no artist seemed as inspired, at home, at ease, and dominant as Lil Wayne.

Wayne tapes have taken on a truly legendary status. He took to other rappers’ beats like a fish to water, towering over the source material he chose. His verses were always freestyled, but this freedom was fluidly fluent. He found endless lyrical ideas in each successive line, in equal balance puerile and evolved, so often with meaning curled inside meaning. He birthed his own style, his own rhythms, a style – hashtag rap – that engendered a generation of imitators, and a single, nonverbal coinage – the sound of his lighter flinting just before a verse started, a now-legendary warning shot before the next onslaught.

Famously, Lil Wayne was put on by Birdman, the entrepreneur, impresario, and rapper who started Cash Money Records in the 1990s with artists like Juvenile and a group called the Hot Boys, which included the 12-year-old Dwayne Carter. He was a father figure to Wayne, who called Birdman his “daddy”. And likewise, Wayne was the best bet Birdman ever made, the man who not only made Cash Money into one of the most renowned labels in rap, but whose influence on young rappers was so vast that the likes of Drake and Nicki Minaj flocked to his tutelage in Cash Money’s imprint Young Money in the halcyon days of Wayne’s imperial mixtape period in the late 2000s. He was so different, he referred to himself as a martian, alone on a remote red rock of his own.

Another rapper started coming up a few years later in another fief, Gucci Mane’s 1017 Brick Squad. Young Thug, from the same Jonesboro South projects as Brick Squad’s founders Gucci and Waka Flocka Flame, as well as a host of other Atlanta rappers, started making mixtapes at 19 and released the now-classic 1017 Thug at 22. Birdman took notice and signed him to a management deal. Thugger, a devotee of Lil Wayne, planned to pay tribute by continuing his hero’s stalled “The Carter” album franchise by putting out the sixth through tenth installments himself, but he was met with frigidity; He even got close to his idol, but the younger rapper was rebuffed, setting off a full-fledged beef. Birdman threw his lot in with Young Thug to the extreme, and rap’s axis tilted.

This drawing of battle lines coincided with Thug’s development not just as a star, but as a singular voice within music. Where Wayne’s genius lay in his bottomless, dynamic, ingenious freestyles, Thug rapidly opened a new dimension in the art form entirely, engaging as no rapper before had with words as sounds. He shook the music world with his verse on 2014’s “Lifestyle”, his group with Rich Homie Quan and Birdman, by rapping “Living life like a beginner, this is just the beginning” in a way that warbled syllables down to yelped phonemes, an approach that delighted, confused, and fascinated listeners, and opened a new plane for artistic exploration that changed how they heard music.

Other artists had been noted for their indecipherability before – Future, notably, as well as Wayne himself – but Thug had most clearly found that the sound of words could be as impactful and beautiful if they were entirely divorced from their legibility and admired simply as sound. The neologism “mumble rap” emerged at this time, but it was hardly a pejorative when applied to the sound of Young Thug’s music. He had become an auteur at the very moment he surpassed his dismissive hero as the artistic vector for his genre with the release of the full-length realization of this style, his mixtape Barter 6.

(Barter, rather than Carter, because Young Thug alleged a lawsuit had been threatened. B, rather than C, to indicate the Bloods. 6, because Wayne had become mired in label issues delaying The Carter V, which wouldn’t come out until 2018, when he could be released from his contract after an acrimonious split with Birdman).

Barter 6 opens on “Constantly Hating”, a duet with Birdman that pairs the infectiousness of his lyricism with his novel delivery: “Hop out the motherfucking bed / Hop in the motherfucking coupe / Pull up on Birdman” then, leaning into the sound like a car spinning out in slow motion, “Skrrrrrrr.” Listening to Thug, it is easy, and indeed rewarding, to not construe, discern, or even process words, but to feel them as sound, examine them like brushstrokes, note how other rappers sound with this new auditory lens. The six-minute “Can’t Tell” is particularly rewarding in this exercise; Thug opens the track roughly, rasping like a zipper. T.I.’s characteristic swing and loose enunciation pairs perfectly, a tilted-brim uncle fitting in. But Boosie’s punctuating, staccato closing verse open a new corner to this sonic world, with thundering punches landing “you ain’t read the paper?”, plosives landing brutally on the mic just as morbidly as his laments – “I miss you, I miss you” – for a lost friend.

Two exemplar instances of this idea uniquely stand out on Barter 6. First, on “Halftime”, after a marathon first verse, the beat falls away, an arpeggiator scintillates below his voice, and Thug croons… something. Lyrics sites say it says “Hey, let’s have a good time / Hey, let’s have a very good time”, but that transliteration seems to heavily miss the point. It rises through the track again at its closing sounding, in Thugger’s delivery, like it was something else played backwards. It’s a stream of sound, like the sight of a leviathan passing just below the ocean’s surface.

Second, on the closing track, “Just Might Be.” The song has that unplaceable quality that great final songs do, like credits are rolling. After an album of ear-bending elisions between speech and sound, Thug arrives at the lyric “You can roger that like my motherfuckin' buzz (Losie!)” and, with no warning, breaks out into what sounds to be pure scatting for two bars. Lyrics sheets claim there are words there, but again, that purely misses the point; listen to it yourself. It’s like a meta-commentary, an in-joke for listeners whose ears are now adjusted to the artist’s way of hearing things. And yet, it can’t be heard as the divine marble-mouthing explored in the album’s preceding 49 minutes. It’s jarring, unartful, and knowingly so. After realizing how different and unnatural it sounds, the music that led up to it seems stunning in just how well it fits; it’s a concisely inarticulate expression of Young Thug’s paralinguistic logodaedaly.

Mixtapes have come far from their revolutionary rebirth as loose sparring grounds; today they are often musically indistinguishable from albums, and the categorization may be as irrelevant as it is nominal. But today, Young Thug is one of the biggest stars in the world, and he may be the principal forefather of a divergent variant genre budding from rap that has yet to fully speciate. He has proteges, like Gunna and Lil Baby, and innumerable acolytes and imitators of his own. The times are changing in his wake. Rappers and singers stretch to replicate his pure musicality, his enduring originality. He even got in the studio with Lil Wayne. But he is still alone, singular, alien, a martian of his own.

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