The Retrographer, Issue 89 (April, 2 0 2 2)

May 15, 2022

Mallrat, Azealia Banks, Pusha T, billy woods, Mike Ladd, Daniel Rossen, Ty Segall, Phoebe Bridgers, beabadoobee, Oliver Sim, FLO, Robert Stillman, Joni Mitchell, and more!

The Retrographer, Issue 89 (April, 2 0 2 2)

Bulletins

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

“Surprise Me”, Mallrat and Azealia Banks (Spotify / YouTube) – Mallrat’s vaporous pop is lovely, but you’re likely to have forgotten it even existed just moments after Azealia Banks stomps in, shattering the glassy ambiance with hilariously dirty bars. 

“Brambleton”, Pusha T (Spotify / YouTube) – Biggie was Push’s favorite rapper. You can hear the GOAT in every syllable his Virginian acolyte drops, the greatest form of tribute and flattery possible.

“Christine”, billy woods and Mike Ladd (Spotify / YouTube) – woods can sound grim, austere, spare, frank, unvarnished; Like Ka, he barely needs drums to grip you, just an unbroken stream of storytelling, images, quotes, unshakeable memories..

“I’ll Wait For Your Visit”, Daniel Rossen (Spotify / YouTube) – A virtuoso guitarist with a sound all his own, Rossen’s work has finally been realized across a full album outside of his work with Grizzly Bear, spinning unmistakeable, ever-intensifying arrangements in sylvian instrumentation.

“Hello, Hi”, Ty Segall (Spotify / YouTube) – Don’t expect Ty to change much; Sure, this may sound like the mode he has occupied since as far back at least as Manipulator if not further, but it rules and as long as he can keep finding new ways to crack this nut… crack it, man.

“Sidelines”, Phoebe Bridgers (Spotify / YouTube) – Bridgers has had seasons of doubt, seasons of grief, seasons of sadness, seasons of infatuation, seasons of regret. Now, for the first time, she seems to be blooming in the warm season of resolution: “Watch the world from the sidelines, had nothing to prove ‘til you came into my life, gave me something to lose.”

“See You Soon”, beabadoobee (Spotify / YouTube) – Bea Laus has a penchant for melody, and the chorus of this latest single soars on stratospheric thermals of driving drums and twinkling guitars, the song growing ever upward until it escapes into the diffuse beyond.

“Romance WIth A Memory”, Oliver Sim (Spotify / YouTube) – You know this voice from the xx, but that band never had this much fun, never opened the shades this wide and let the sun flood in like this one does. And who doesn’t love a good old bass vocal?

“Cardboard Box”, FLO (Spotify / YouTube) – You may be noticing the younger set busting out the threads of generations past, excavating the antiquity of the 1990s and 2000s. Those sounds are back too, like those acoustic guitars Darkchild gave to Destiny’s Child and Janet Jackson.

“Self-Image”, Robert Stillman (Spotify / YouTube) – The multi-instrumentalist opens on the saxophone over a chugging, Rhodes-driven groove; He melts into echoes and a tambourine rattles below; The feel finally shatters into jagged, syncopated hits, the bell of the ride tolling like bells as a distant train passes.

One Album for April, 2 0 2 2

“Taming the Tiger”, Joni Mitchell (Reprise, 1998) (Apple Music / YouTube) 

As a restless, independent, questing genius who derives a ten times as much pleasure from realizing her own creativity as she does from giving others what they want, Joni Mitchell has long been resigned to a fate of opprobrium, disapproval, mischaracterization, miscategorization marginalization, misogyny, rejection, and discardment from a public that remains variably enchanted by her spirit and frustrated by their inability to control it.

In 1998, she released her best album in decades, Taming the Tiger. Speaking to the New York Times about it, she described her personal goals: ''I don't like to make fluffy little songs but now I want to make some light songs,'' she said. ''I think that comes from watching a lot of comedy. People will probably not enjoy it as much as the deep suffering that I've done in the past.”

But that’s far from how critics understood the music; they rarely agreed. The Hartford Courant said the album was “far less accessible than her previous two albums”, whereas Entertainment Weekly said Mitchell was “reaching out to a wider audience after years of stubborn insularity.” The Baltimore Sun called it “unrepentantly uncommercial, following its jazz-inflected muse without regard for current trends”, but musiccritic.com felt some of the music “...reads like a cheesy Hallmark greeting card.”

Critics couldn’t decide if the music was boring (Uncut felt the album, especially it’s second half, had “a real sense of sameyness”), whereas The Washington Post (“boring it's not”) thought it was thrilling. Some thought the lyrics suffered; others thought they were brilliant. Speaking about the same song:

Billboard: “But the twin triumphs on Tiger are the quietest. “No Apologies” continues the heavier themes of Indigo: it’s a ripped-from-the-headlines indictment of a rape incident involving servicemen in Okinawa, Japan. But the music isn’t aggressive or didactic; it’s pure melancholy, riding on long, gorgeous trails of lap steel.”

The Village Voice: "When Mitchell intends to be angry, she ends up sounding merely perturbed."

And even today, listeners can’t agree among themselves to find their way to Mitchell’s side of these songs. She may have been inspired by comedy to seek lightness in her music, but in 2018 Spectrum Culture “it’s still as sad as ever, as is legally required from a Mitchell album.” (“I'm not a pitiable creature,” she prebutted decades prior, “It's just that I suffer very eloquently.”)

Indeed Mitchell, sharp as she is, saw all of this coming. She’s never lacked self-awareness, but she’s also never allowed the court of public opinion to sentence her to the hard labor of monotonous conformity. “Hip is a herd mentality,” She said once. “Picasso was restless,'' she said on another occasion, this time to The New York Times. ''I mean, he just kept changing and changing and changing…So those are my heroes. The ones that change a lot.''

Some understood this (“No one in the art world expected to see Picasso paint ‘Guernica’ for the 600th time”), but the worst among her critics refused to even list her among her peers and heroes – Picasso, William Blake, Miles Davis – because they were men and she is not. Take, if you can, The Daily Telegraph:

"Female singer-songwriters have never been in greater demand - or supply, for that matter. So it's nice to welcome back, after a four year absence, the original and, indeed, the greatest of them all to show everybody how it should be done. The opening of "Lead Balloon" (“Kiss my ass," I said/ And threw my drink”) suggests Mitchell may even have taken on board some of the post-Alanis Morisette feminist aggression, but the pay off ("Must be the Irish blood/Fight before you think") reveals that she's just being playful. There's a similarly light mood to most of these tracks. It may be that one of the reasons Mitchell has never achieved the mythological status of her most obvious male contemporary, Bob Dylan, is due to her preference for detailed miniatures over grand statements.”

“One thing that I do get tired of is all the ‘Women of Rock’ articles, you know, always lumping me in with the women,” Mitchell told The Austin Chronicle. “Genderization is a form of bigotry and (a result of journalists) not really hearing what I'm doing.” She had faced this diminishment throughout her career, going back to her beginnings. “I looked like a folk singer, like the girl with the guitar,” she explained to The Times. “I got caught between being pigeonholed by critics and laboring for the sake of commercial exploitation.” She understood this marginalization and its risks – as she would sing later, “An angry man is just an angry man; But an angry woman, ‘bitch!’” – but nothing could stop her from executing her vision.

The commentary that hung over Taming the Tiger was typical for all past Joni Mitchell releases. She had secured an inarguable place in the pantheon of American songwriters, and was treating its seemingly incurable comorbidity, the ceaseless argument about who she really was and why she was there. Decades of this hurricane of misapprehension and disapprobation had passed and washed Mitchell on the shores of the 1996 Grammys, where she was surprised to find her brilliant 1994 album Turbulent Indigo win Best Pop Vocal Album. Smoking a cigarette in the parking lot, she inhaled the moment of recognition and exhaled complete disdain for the whole scene. The Recording Academy may have considered her “pop”, but commercial radio had disowned her. “[F]or the genuinely gifted, such as myself, being shunned from the airwaves in favor of tits-and-ass bubble gum kind of junk food is a tragedy,” as she cogently put it. And so began her work on her next album’s title track.

“Taming the Tiger'' opens with just this scene, Joni, the “runaway from the record biz, from the hoods in the hood and the whiny white kids”, by which she may have meant honorees Alanis and Coolio. She outlines the tenuousness (“Accolades and honors / One false move and you're a goner”), cynicism (“Every disc, a poker chip / Every song just a one night stand”) and inanity (“Formula music, girly guile / Genuine junk food for juveniles”) of the whole enterprise. “[T]here is no other arena for me to make music in. So I feel constantly in a position of injustice.” As the song and album’s title suggests, Mitchell sees this whole scene as masturbatory and devoid of connection. This dismissal doesn’t come off as an aging artist back-in-my-daying a new generation, but rather Mitchell’s own thirst for a vitality conspicuously absent from that exsanguinated display (“Life's too short, the whole thing's gotten boring!”)

This speaks to the existence of a defined number of consistent, core elements across Taming the Tiger; what Uncut glossed as “sameyness”. The first attribute – which turns some off about the album – is what literally averted Mitchell’s planned retirement, the Roland VG8, a synthesizer that pairs with a guitar custom-made for her to not only provide a multitude of sounds, but to immediately jump to her idiosyncratic tunings. Fred Walecki, the proprietor of the now-shuttered Westwood Music in LA, custom built the rig for her with the help of Graham Nash to address a daunting duo of deterrents to Mitchell’s live playing: Her polio-weakened back, for which Walecki provided an ultra-light stratocaster mod, and her predilection for inventive tunings, which the VG8 could load and simulate without need for keeping many guitars around in different tunings, or spending long passages of a show exacting pinion gears. Beyond that, it also opened a library of sounds that define the album, none more than the heavily chorused tone that sparkles off her guitar throughout the album. There are no acoustic guitars here, no resonant “River” pianos, none of the hallmarks of even her fusion 70s or electro 80s records. The album is highly effected but still judiciously spare, the guitar a luminous pixelation beneath her smoky, knotted voice. It invigorated her; Mitchell was slated to play a final performance in New Orleans in 1995 – a “swan song”, in her words – but the bloom of possibilities this setup created for her not only rekindled her creative spirit, it became her go-to for performances, which she had ceased for a decade prior.

The VG8 is the centerpiece of a notably excellent ensemble, including Brian Blade, who was just a few years out of college and riding a vertiginous rise to becoming one of his generation’s best drummers and one of Mitchell’s soulmates for decades hence; Her old friend and collaborator Wayne Shorter, who connected her both sonically and spiritually to Miles Davis and the roots of fusion she had done so much to expand; and bassist and ex-husband Larry Klein, her fretless player for Mitchell’s 80s albums on, with the unenviable burden of inheriting Jaco Pastorius, Max Bennett, and Wilton Felder’s chair in Mitchell’s band. Appearances from Greg Leisz, a session pedal steel guitarist whose credits would stretch as far into the future as Vampire Weekend’s latest album, as well as guitarist Michael Landau, Mark Isham, and Femi Jiya rounded out a small, tight cast that defines Taming the Tiger’s distinctive palette: A mist of digital instruments, diffuse, yet steady grooves, and Mitchell’s weathered, matured vocals.

Speaking to Roland’s Roland Users Group technical publication about the VG8 in 1996, Mitchell addressed the second core element: Her exasperated disdain for the state of the world (as heard on "No Apologies"), and especially the music business as represented at the Grammys that year. “I was up to my neck in alligators, so to speak,” she said, previewing a lyric “Love Puts on a New Face”. “I was in a losing fight with a business that basically, you know, was treating me like an also-ran or a has-been, even though I was still doing good work. So I was frustrated. Okay, I thought, it's time to get out, this is no longer dignified. Everything about the business disgusted me; I just wanted to paint.” And paint she did; in addition to doing the cover of the album, a portrait of the artist with her cat Man from Mars, but fine art suffuses her imagery, fine artists serve as her inspiration, and even represent her painterly expressions of love as in the gorgeous “Love Puts on a New Face”: “He said, ‘I wish you were with me here, the leaves are electric, they burn on the river bank, countless heatless flames.’ I said, ‘Send me some pictures, then, and I'll paint pyrotechnic, explosions of your autumn 'til we meet again.’” Even the way she writes about her lost cat on “Man From Mars” paints love in cosmic colors.

The third is Mitchell’s lifelong desire for thrilling inspiration. She’s described her younger self as a dancer, until polio weakened her back, but still songs like The Hissing of Summer Lawns’ “In France They Kiss On Main Street” describe her connatural exuberance. Mitchell frames this characteristic in Taming the Tiger’s opening song, “Harlem in Havana”, a childhood memory of awakening to the illicit joy of the circus, the meeting of the restrictions of her prosaic upbringing with the scintillating world of performance, musicians, drag queens – “Auntie Ruthie would've cried if she knew we were on the inside!”

Decades later she finds this same dynamic, between the passion of freedom and the prurience of where she came from. Her mother’s rejection of a new boyfriend over Christmas (“She put blame on him and shame on me / she made it all seem so tawdry and cheap”) is met with Mitchell’s enlightenment (“She said, ‘did you come home to disgrace us?’ / I said, ‘why is this joy not allowed?’ For God's sakes, I'm middle-aged, Mama, and time moves swift, and you know happiness is the best facelift.”) It’s a double-edged sword, one she learned from philosophers past but naturally forged herself. “I’m an individual,” she explained once. “Defined by Nietzsche, is a person who can’t follow and doesn’t want to lead.” Or said another time, “To make it interesting for me, I have to discover it; I can’t learn by route.”

Though it doesn’t suffer from it, Mitchell hardly needs such conflict to make her points. Among her gimlet depictions is a simple scene at a diner, of a couple skipping out on a party to be together: “In the back booth of an all night café, two dripping raincoats are hanging. Outside in the weather, the shade on the streetlight is clanging. And they smile ear to ear and eye to eye, ice cream is melting on a piece of pie.”

The fourth attribute, Mitchell’s manifest maturity, is present across all the songs on the album. “An actress is not expected to continue to play her ingenue roles,” she explained to The Austin Chronicle. “I've written roles for myself to grow into gracefully, but there is no growing gracefully in the pop world, unfortunately.” But rather than resign, literally or figuratively, to this cheapness, Mitchell finds her own voice and path. “There's a civil liberties thing here. Is it my chronological age? That should never be held against an artist. We're all going to grow middle-aged. We need middle-aged songs. I'm an unusual thing. I'm a viable voice. For some reason, even though I want to quit all the time, you know, I still have a driving wheel to do this thing.”

Yet there’s nothing worn or pallid about these “middle-aged songs.” Take the yearning, yet deep courtship of “Love Puts on a New Face”: “He said ‘You think you're a lady, but I know you're a woman, and we are as young as the night.’” Or the gentleness with which she reunites with her estranged daughter, the subject of Blue’s “Little Green”, the tentativeness and excitement she displays at the prospect of building a new relationship together, reflecting her best lyrics: “So we should just surrender, let fate and duty shape us, let light hearts remake us, let the worries hush.” And then, recalling her masterful closing lyrics to Hejira’s closing track “Refuge of the Roads”, she makes the perspective planetary: “In the middle of this continent, in the middle of our time on Earth, we perceive one another – stay in touch.”

Stay in touch with what? Mitchell seemed almost omniscient of how people discussed, criticized, rated, and interpreted her. But she was simultaneously in touch with the people she loved, even when estranged for decades, her own feelings, her own sense of taste. The former never compromised the latter. Chatter swirled around Joni Mitchell. She was left for dead, she was eulogized, her place in history was debated, decried, debased. But her work continued, wild, turbulent, untamed.

CATCH UP ON BACK ISSUES AT TINYLETTER

MONTHLY

#89 April, 2022 | Joni Mitchell, “Taming the Tiger”

ANNUAL

DECENNIAL

THEMED