The Retrographer, Issue 91 (June, 2 0 2 2)

Alex G, Soccer Mommy, Sky Ferreira, Maria BC, Perfume Genius, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Midori Hirano and Mami Sakurai, Luis, Drake, Denzel Curry, George Harrison, and more!

The Retrographer, Issue 91 (June, 2 0 2 2)

Bulletins

• Blind Gary Davis, “I Heard The Angels Singing”

• Emmylou Harris, “Tulsa Queen”

• Madison Cunningham covering Judee Sill’s “The Kiss” (thanks Ian)

• The Replacements, “You’re Getting Married”

• Tom Petty and Gary Shandling

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

“Runner”, Alex G (Spotify / YouTube) – Gianniscolli’s metaphor in “Gretel”, a candy home that kills you, is an enduring metaphor for the devastating beauty of his music: Though it gnaws at your soul and points to a deeper sadness in the lives of ordinary people, you can’t help but return again and again. 

“Don’t Ask Me”, Soccer Mommy (Spotify / YouTube) – Sophie Allison is despondent, depressed, disillusioned. But for just this one track from Sometimes, Forever, she is “no longer sinking, no longer seeking, no longer drowning in all my lonely thoughts, would never even matter all along.” These feelings come and go like the seasons, cruel and changeable.

“Don’t Forget”, Sky Ferreira (Spotify / YouTube) – Throbbing synths, carburetor bass, snare hits ricocheting out in the nosebleeds and, at center stage, a pop star gripping the microphone like the clutch of a rally-car peeling corners.

“The Only Thing”, Maria BC (Spotify / YouTube) – Joni Mitchell once sang, “There’s comfort in melancholy, when there’s no need to explain; It’s just as natural as the weather in this moody sky today.” While Maria BC’s music can sometimes take the oppressive planar whiteness of a gray day, sunlight can break through as it does on this beautiful chorus.

“Eye in the Wall”, Perfume Genius (Spotify / YouTube) – Mike Hadreas’s vision as grown steadily wider and wider, now finally and terribly breaking free from the strictures of pop formulae into a work that sounds like a companion to a new work of Justin Peck choreography, avant-garde club music.

“Spitting Off the Edge of the World”, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Perfume Genius (Spotify / YouTube) – … which is not to say he can’t still ride the horse when he likes. Hadreas’s meeting with Karen O seems somehow foretold, the spectral yin to her shadowy yang, her muscular power intertwined with his quavering effervescence, two pure elements juxtaposed.

“yoonito”, Luis (Spotify / YouTube) – Beautiful, twinkling, crystalline, static interstitial music for the cloud level of the video game in your dreams, an angelic loading bar elongating imperceptibly against a heavenly down comforter of synthesizers.

“Myth”, Midori Hirano and Mami Sakurai (Spotify / YouTube) – Plucking drones resolve, again and again, with whispered, resonating melodies settling featherlike on the surface of this song.

“Falling Back”, Drake (Spotify / YouTube) – It’s hard to remember now, but Drake was once controversial; his naked sensitivity defiled rap’s suffocatingly steely masculinity until it transformed it so completely that it’s rare to find artists who don’t cop from him. So now he must reinvent himself again, this time in house music’s nocturnal seismograph.

“Walkin”, Denzel Curry (Spotify / YouTube) – Curry is one of the best rappers working today. His facility over styles is almost too easy for his age. He is a formalist, executing the styles and flows of days past with startling ease. He may not lay his imprimatur on terra nova, but he can conquer the known world.

One Album for June, 2 0 2 2

“Living in the Material World”, George Harrison  (Apple, 1973) (Spotify / YouTube) 

When he was just a teenager, George Harrison followed Paul McCartney into the Beatles, sharpened his guitar playing on records by Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley, learned scores of songs by the masters of the day, and committed them to memory in untold performances during his band’s residency at the Cavern Club in Hamburg. He turned 20 when the band released their first album, Please Please Me, in 1963 and just 26 when they recorded their last, Let it Be, in 1969. Over those six years, the Beatles’ established a famous breakneck recording pace, meeting commercial demand and opportunity for fresh product with new albums sometimes twice a year while maintaining artistic standards that inspired and baffled the culture and, to this day, defined the apex of pop art. Harrison wrote the preponderance of lead parts for two of the 20th century’s greatest songwriters, artists who demanded the most of his ideas with the unmatched momentum they surpassed their past work and pushed further boundaries.

Yet Harrison was circumscribed, his guitar artisanship relegated to a prominent but demarcated zone of Beatles recordings. McCartney and John Lennon brought new songs to the group and Harrison consistently met their compositions with inventive instrumental contributions. But the songwriting institution he served was entrenched. As Harrison’s own interest in writing grew, he found it inimical to Lennon/McCartney’s financial and reputational interests. Not to mention that the baseline standard necessary to occupy real estate on a Beatles record was intimidating at best; competition of this caliber might smother another fledgling songwriter in the cradle. But for Harrison – and in no small part because of the otherwise encouraging creative environment of the band – this cauldron forged brilliant artistry within and beyond the group.

By the end of the band, Harrison’s surfeit of finished songs had become a burden to him, the bottleneck rationing of one or two songs per record seriously lagging behind his own productivity. In Peter Jackson’s Get Back (a re-edit of the footage that produced the infamously bilious 1970 film Let It Be chronicling the album of the same name) Harrison finds a moment alone with Lennon and casually suggests he might peel off for a solo album or two before the next Beatle album as if he intended to get a beer at the pub or drop some old clothes at a thrift store. Lennon is notably and laconically noncommittal about the idea. Harrison’s benign neutrality barely (and unconvincingly) veiled deeper slights, injuries, misgivings, and fissures that were evidently forming. His bandmates dismissed and lightly ridiculed his work when it didn’t meet their rubric requirements: Lennon declared he loved “Yer Blue” (meaning “For You Blue”, not his own “Yer Blues”, though the self-referential misnomer couldn’t have been purely accidental), but dismissed the waltzing “I Me Mine” as an insufficiently rocking “Harrisong”. 

The latter track – one of many that cast his band’s squabbles as unenlightened manifestations of earthly materialism – was indicative of a broader awakening still on the ascent for the young songwriter. Beginning with his introduction to the sitar, and later Indian classical music, on the set of Help!, Harrison found God. This quickly became another path on which he diverged from his bandmates, who became increasingly atheistic and, in Lennon’s case, hostile to religion and idolatry entirely. Harrison invited Hare Krishnas to mediate at the band’s Let It Be sessions. Sitting around in one of their endless January 1969 rehearsals, McCartney jocularly recalls their time in Rishikesh, commenting on how uncharacteristically student-like the usually roustabout Lennon appeared in their home videos from the trip. He concludes the weren’t really being themselves, and at that moment Harrison seems as out of the group as he would at any time in the documentary, including when he walked out. “That is the biggest joke, to be yourselves, because that was the purpose of going there, to find who yourself really is” he scoffs. And then, damning the group: “And if you were really yourself, you wouldn’t be any of who we are now.”

“Met them all in the material world,” Harrison would later sing on the title track of his fourth solo album, 1973’s Living in the Material World. “John and Paul in the material world.” The cracks becoming visible then had become crevasses between each member of the defunct band. They announced their break up in 1970. The same year Lennon declared God a psychological device, he also aimed scabrous lyrics in Harrison’s direction:

Harrison simultaneously cut an opposite path of godliness to Lennon’s godlessness, opening the locks to his songwriting dam with the triple-LP All Things Must Pass. A luminous album brimming with ideas and unencumbered by editing (some songs repeat in different iterations, and its last disc is comprised of squiggly, wandering, overstuffed instrumentals, its creator gorging on all the freedom denied over his preceding decade of servitude), Harrison made his belief central to his work in songs like “My Sweet Lord” and his cover of Bob Dylan’s “If Not For You”, the subject in question implicitly elevated from the temporal, material plane to the spiritual.

When All Things Must Pass’s songs weren’t about God, they were about his life and challenges as a Beatle. Harrison’s backlog stretched back as far as 1966 with the exultant “Isn’t It a Pity”, one of many songs regretting the internecine political battles of the band, casting them not as the peccadillos and disagreements of individuals experiencing unprecedented success and pressure, but rather the foibles of the flawed, fallen children of a loving God who had strayed to far from His light. Harrison could hardly tolerate these arguments, and the tears he had occasionally witnessed McCartney shed made their way into his lyrics, as on “Isn’t It a Pity” and “Wah-Wah”, and even on the songs that made Beatles albums, like his breakout “Here Comes The Sun”, the first A-side single his regents ever afforded him.

It was an enormous album, and an enormous hit, topping the charts and trouncing his former bandmates angry (Lennon) and shambolic (McCartney) maiden voyages into the postlapsarian. All Things Must Pass was vindication, catharsis, realization, self-actualization, and refutation. But this unburdening didn’t release Harrison from its spell; rather, it thematically templated the music he would make through the rest of his career.

Before he could follow All Things Must Pass up, however, he set out to settle unfinished business. As early as the Let It Be sessions, Lennon mused that with their new manager Allen Klein, the group could stage charity concerts and direct the proceeds directly to those in need. The band didn’t survive long enough to see this charity given, and Lennon soon turned his sights inward to incendiary self-analysis through primal scream therapy. Harrison, however, didn’t forget, and in 1971 staged The Concert For Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden, which became another triple-LP and raised tens-of-millions of dollars to address horrific famine in the region. The Beatles, who had always given to the world their art and love and pocketed the proceeds (Lennon symbolically drove a Rolls-Royce painted psychedelic colors), had modeled no precedent for such generosity. While no ascetic, Harrison presented yet another alternative.

He was quiet for two years and then, in 1973, released Living in the Material World. Unlike its predecessor, all the music for the album was written after his band’s dissolution and reflects his narrow focus in that period on God, charity, and the Beatles’ fallout as friends and business partners. It is modest and focused in the wake of All Things Must Pass, but almost any album shrinks by that comparison. It went gold and topped the US charts, but ranks low on the group’s commercial achievements, but almost all albums do. It’s an incredible record in a thicket of great post-Beatles releases. Harrison’s second post-breakup album is oddly lost to the canon despite being a comparable work of brilliance by an artist at the dawn of his fourth decade.

Living in the Material World’s godly songs are suffused with a light only Harrison seemed to be able to conjure, but without the grandeur of “What Is Life” or “Let It Down”. Living in the Material World is more clearly staged by a rock band, often with a down-home sound marked by Nicky Hopkins’ wide-open piano and Harrison’s yearning slide. The opener opens mid-strum, as if Harrison had been playing off-record all along, and it was you who found him lifting a pleading prayer to the lord to simply be closer to his grace. Calling God the lord gives Harrison’s Hinduism a distinctly Christian quality, hoping only to be nearer, my god, to thee. His devotional floats over Jim Keltner’s skittering kit, lending the band the same tight funkiness he put beneath Bob Dylan and Joe Cocker’s work of the same period. This firelight glows on “The Light That Has Lighted The World”, which appears to comment directly on Lennon’s apostate “I Found Out” by painting, in terms of natural phenomena, how he has changed, sprigs and sprouts of slide guitar budding through an intervening instrumental. Harrison not only sounds content, not only “grateful to anyone that is happy or free”, but even offers a hand to his unenlightened friend, observing that it is “so hard to move on when you’re down in a hole, where there’s so little chance to experience soul.” The younger Harrison now knew better; no wonder Lennon sounded so pissed. 

The holiest moment on the album is the droning “Be Here Now”, a gorgeous and simple piece that offers koan-like truisms that project wisdom. But be not fooled: Harrison’s choice to ask, “Why live a life that isn’t real?” may sound like an allegation that the material world is rendered false with knowledge of the spirit, but it exists within a dialectic with a counterpart who famously alleged that “Nothing is real.” 

Harrison presents the material world as an escapable internment. “Try Some Buy Some”, a gorgeous, singular composition within his catalog, resplendent with fluttering mandolin and sweeping strings right out of a carnival, recounts the artist’s earthbound prehistory and his liberation therefrom. Yet this proves to be a beautiful oversimplification. Where Harrison concerns himself with worldly diversions, he does not necessarily rise above them; The second song on the album, “Sue Me, Sue You Blues”, bemoans the protracted, expensive legal battles his defunct old band remained ensnared in. The man who claimed the material world wasn’t real was the same man who collected racecars and railed on his tax bracket to open Revolver, and unsurprisingly had no problem rhyming “money flow” with “joint escrow.” Surely he must have known that his ashram lifestyle was fighting for bankroll with the bills his lawyers endlessly filed to disentangle him from Apple and Klein.

This is not to say Harrison was a hypocrite; he was a human being, a flawed one, who gave himself to the task of not only improving himself but healing the world too. This sometimes manifested itself in evangelism, as in the messianic “The Lord Loves The One (That Loves The Lord)”, which spins his old band’s credo, “The love you make is equal to the love you take” to a paraphrase of the golden rule, “The Lord says if you don’t give then you don’t get loving”, likely not the author McCartney hoped listeners would imagine when closing the Beatles’ career. Just as he humbly requested peace on earth with the album’s opener, Harrison imagined a day when humanity would awake to its barbaric cruelties on “The Day The World Gets ‘Round”, written, along with his related non-album single “Bangla Desh”, in the wake of his Madison Square Garden concerts for Bangladesh. He watches, divinely, “such foolishness in man,” and declares, “I want no part of their plans.” Yet he sees himself as imperfect, him “working from day-to-day as I don’t want to be like –” an unidentified yet obvious “– you.” He saw himself as a person working to be better, aspiring not only to be more like God, but less like a certain selfish, materialistic, worldly listener from his past, one who he would only direct his anger at when they remained nameless.

He closes with “That Is All”, a simple homily: “That is all I want to say, our love can save the day.” A clean couplet such as this could have been plucked out of his old friend John Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love”, but his writing continues on its eschatalogical note, “That is all I’m waiting for, to try to love You more.”

Love, a simple concept in their rendering, had defined the Beatles’ message. But as they fractured, so too did love experience a schism, with the band’s three apostles each raising their own church of love. “Yoko and me, that’s reality”, John concluded. “Please let me love You more, and that is all,” George concluded. That was all.

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MONTHLY

#91 June, 2022 | George Harrison, “Living in the Material World”

#90 May, 2022 | The Wild Tchoupitoulas, “The Wild Tchoupitoulas”

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

#88 March, 2022 | Young Thug, “Barter 6”

#87 February, 2022 | Stephane Grappelli and Stuff Smith, “Violins No End”

#86 January, 2022 | Nas, “God’s Son”

#84 November, 2021 | Milt Jackson with the Thelonious Monk Quintet, “Wizard of the Vibes”

#83 October, 2021 | For Against, “Coalesced”

#82 September, 2021 | Pat Metheny, “Bright Size Life”

#81 August, 2021 | The Chicks, “Fly”

#80 July, 2021 | Allen Toussaint, “Southern Nights”

#79 June, 2021 | Novos Baianos, “Acabou Chorare”

#78 May, 2021 | One Direction, “Four”

#77 April, 2021 | Bob Dylan, “New Morning”

#76 March, 2021 | Ty Dolla $ign, “Free TC”

#75 February, 2021 | Ghostface Killah, “Fishscale”

#74 January, 2021 | Minnie Riperton, “Minnie”

#72 November, 2020 | Sufjan Stevens, “Seven Swans”

#71 October, 2020 | Common, “Resurrection”

#70 September, 2020 | Herbie Hancock, “Thrust”

#69 August, 2020 | Special Issue

#68 July, 2020 | Cam’ron, “Purple Haze”

#67 June, 2020 | Jorge Ben, “A Tabua de Esmeralda”

#66 May, 2020 | The Meters, “Rejuvenation”

#65 April, 2020 | Eddie Kendricks, “People… Hold On”

#64 March, 2020 | Thelonious Monk, “Solo Monk”

#63 February, 2020 | Cat Power, “Moon Pix”

#62 January, 2020 | Yusef Lateef, “Eastern Sounds”

#59 November, 2019 | Frank Sinatra, “In The Wee Small Hours”

#58 October, 2019 | Steely Dan, “Gaucho”

#57 September, 2019 | Bonnie Raitt, “Streetlights”

#56 August, 2019 | Daft Punk, “Alive 2007”

#55 July, 2019 | John Coltrane, “Interstellar Space”

#54 June, 2019 | Big Pun, “Capital Punishment”

#53 May, 2019 | Paul Simon, “Rhythm of the Saints”

#52 April, 2019 | Dirty Projectors, “Rise Above”

#51 March, 2019 | Kate Bush, “The Sensual World”

#50 February, 2019 | Sonny Rollins, “Next Album”

#49 January, 2019 | Sade, “Diamond Life”

#47 November, 2018 | Curtis Mayfield, “There’s No Place Like America Today”

#46 October, 2018 | The Blue Nile, “Hats”

#45 September, 2018 | Lucinda Williams, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road”

#44 August, 2018 | Aretha Franklin, “Amazing Grace”

#43 July, 2018 | Teddy Pendergrass, “TP”

#42 June, 2018 | Dennis Wilson, “Pacific Ocean Blue”

#41 May, 2018 | Bobby Brown, “Don’t Be Cruel”

#40 April, 2018 | Amy Winehouse, “Back to Black”

#39 March, 2018 | Q-Tip, “Kamaal the Abstract”

#38 February, 2018 | Miles Davis, “In a Silent Way”

#37 January, 2018 | Beck, “Sea Change”

#35 November, 2017 | Slum Village, “Fan-tas-tic Vol. 1”

#34 October, 2017 | Steely Dan, “Two Against Nature”

#33 September, 2017 | Baaba Maal and Mansour Seck, “Djam Leeli”

#32 August, 2017 | Billy Joel, “The Stranger”

#31 July, 2017 | Big Daddy Kane, “Long Live the Kane”

#30 June, 2017 | Janet Jackson, “Control”

#29 May, 2017 | Steely Dan, “Aja”

#28 April, 2017 | The O’Jays, “Back Stabbers”

#27 March, 2017 | Wire, “154”

#26 February, 2017 | Professor Longhair, “New Orleans Piano”

#25 January, 2017 | Elvis Costello, “Live at the El Mocambo”

#23 November, 2016 | Erykah Badu, “Mama’s Gun”

#22 October, 2016 | Donald Fagan, “The Nightfly”

#21 September, 2016 | Aretha Franklin, “Young, Gifted, and Black”

#20 August, 2016 | The Dave Matthews Band, “Under the Table and Dreaming”

#19 July, 2016 | Clams Casino, “Instrumental Mixtape II”

#18 June, 2016 | James Brown, “Love, Power, Peace”

#17 May, 2016 | Ali Farka Toure & Ry Cooder, “Talking Timbuktu”

#16 April, 2016 | RIP PRINCE

#15 March, 2016 | Prince, “Prince”

#14 February, 2016 | Big L, “Lifestyles Ov Da Poor & Dangerous”

#13 January, 2016 | Bill Evans, “Live at the Village Vanguard”

#11 November, 2015 | Donny Hathaway, “Live”

#10 October, 2015 | Paul McCartney, “McCartney”

#9 September, 2015 | Talk Talk, “Laughing Stock”

#8 August, 2015 | B.B. King, “Live at Cook County Jail”

#7 July, 2015 | Miles Davis, “Filles de Kilimanjaro”

#6 June, 2015 | Joni Mitchell, “Hejira”

#5 May, 2015 | Kanye West, “The College Dropout”

#4 April, 2015 | MF DOOM, “Operation: Doomsday”

#3 March, 2015 | Bruce Springsteen, “The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle”

#2 February, 2015 | Eric B. and Rakim, “Paid in Full”

#1 January, 2015 | Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, “L.A.M.F.”

ANNUAL

#85 | 1 0 0 2 0 2 1

#73 | 1 0 0 2 0 2 0

#61 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 9

#48 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 8

#36 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 7

#24 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 6

#12 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 5

1 0 0 2 0 1 4 (+ Honorable Mentions)

1 0 0 2 0 1 3 (+ Honorable Mentions)

1 0 0 2 0 1 2

1 0 0 2 0 1 1

DECENNIAL

#60 | 1 0 0 2 0 1 X

THEMED

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