The Retrographer, Issue 92 (July, 2 0 2 2)

August 21, 2022

Florist, Alvvays, The 1975, Maggie Rogers, Dierks Betley, Ty Segall, Tobe Nwigwe, Chamillionaire, 2 Chainz, Fat Nwigwe, Jessie Ware, Beyonce, Sam Prekop, John McEntire, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and more!

The Retrographer, Issue 92 (July, 2 0 2 2)

Bulletins

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

“Red Bird Pt. 2”, Florist (Spotify / YouTube) – “I can hear you singing still; Wake up in the morning when the morning comes,” Emily Sprague recalls. “Where has it gone now? Where has it gone?” The beauty of loss, time passing, memories that linger. 

“Pharmacist”, Alvvays  (Spotify / YouTube) – Hairy, oceanic, here and gone, Alec O’Hanley’s My Bloody Valentine tribute tremolo’d guitar floods this constantly-replayable song, only a hair over two minutes but made up, at the atomic level, of galaxies.

“Part Of The Band”, The 1975 (Spotify / YouTube) – Dirty little Matty can’t stop writing about sex, self-doubt, hypocrisy, just like he always has. He’s told you he’s full of shit since “Love Me” or before perhaps to beat you to the conclusion, a big beautiful mess to pick apart.

“Be Cool”, Maggie Rogers  (Spotify / YouTube) – She has a powerful voice and a degree from Harvard, two strengths that can be used for good or evil. All that matters is the songs and a message, and this song has both.

“Gold”, Dierks Bentley  (Spotify / YouTube) – Standard fare country rock, Chevies, gravel roads, big old slide guitars and all, but as the title suggests, there’s a heart of gold and skyward gaze baked into this diamond-selling country troubadour.

“Looking at You”, Ty Segall (Spotify / YouTube) – We’ll likely never learn just how far Ty can mine Bowie, Led Zeppelin III, and Marc Bolan, much to our benefit. When the closing guitar figure twinkles into view, clanging like the chiming of a clock, the spirits of psychedelia rise. 

“BEEN BROKE”, Tobe Nwigwe, Chamillionaire, 2 Chainz, and Fat Nwigwe (Spotify / YouTube) – Word is Tobe brought Chamillionaire out of retirement (or an investor relations meeting?) for this track, a simple ode to making it out of the hole with a hallucinogenic music video to boot.

“Free Yourself”, Jessie Ware (Spotify / YouTube) – Jessie cooks, she falls in love, she grows her family, but above all she dances, she grooves, she can’t stop and won’t stop the music, keeping the beat going endlessly, transcending the frontal lobe and riding the brain stem all the way down. 

“VIRGO’S GROOVE”,  (Spotify / YouTube) – Not easy to pick a song from this record, but as a bass player, picking within the stretch from “CHURCH GIRL” to this incredible song is torture. Ultimately this one just sat better on the playlist, but please enjoy them all.

“Crossing At The Shallow”, Sam Prekop and John McEntire (Spotify / YouTube) – Music you can disappear into, change as it changes, time your heartbeat to. Sounds stream down from all sides like a meteor shower, streaking, shimmering, shining.

One Album for July, 2 0 2 2

“Southern Accents”, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (MCA, 1985) (Spotify / YouTube) 

Over the last decade, the advent of social media and the ubiquity of smartphone cameras exposed untold millions around the world to graphic evidence of racist violence perpetrated by the state, elevating stories centralized media outlets had previously determined unfit for proportional coverage. Mass unemployment and isolation triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic led to protest and unrest peaking in the summer of 2020, when enraged protesters poured into the streets to push previously dismissed ideas of social equity to the center of the public conversation.

Pejorative neologisms cropped up in reaction. Those who took public stands against inequity were derided as “social justice warriors”, a sarcastic sneer at the audacity of standing up to injustice. Acts of conscious consumerism, such as refusing to patronize businesses or give monetizable attention to public figures who violated moral beliefs, were recast as “cancel culture”, an alleged cruel intolerance to different ideas. Even holding moral beliefs at all in the face of systemic discrimation was disparaged as “woke”, a term that originally referred to the act of awakening to invisible forces of division, co-opted cynically to indicate a kind of oversensitive sanctimoniousness. In the short two years since, public opinion has swung against 2020’s progressivism, its fresh ideas now muddied by disingenuous counterarguments, convenient aspersions, and false equivalencies. This reactionary retaliation is nothing more than revanchism, a new incarnation of the same “lost cause” mythology propagated by the defeated South to suppress antiracist efforts and reimpose the social order of the Confederacy through Reconstruction.

Tom Petty and his band the Heartbreakers released their fifth album in six years, Long After Dark, in 1982. They had rocketed from one of Gainesville, Florida’s most prolific bar bands to one of the world’s biggest acts, led by a string of hits that still rumble through car speakers and frathouse PAs today: “American Girl”, “Breakdown”, “Refugee”, “Don’t Do Me Like That”, “The Waiting”... the list goes on. His rock was taut, electric, propulsive, a distillation of sex and excitement that peaked with 1979’s brilliant Damn The Torpedos. Slight, blonde, wry, soft-spoken and humble in interviews yet dynamic and explosive on stage, Petty was backed by a drum-tight ensemble of Floridians including drummer Stan Lynch, bassist Ron Blair (replaced in 1981 by Milwaukee’s Howie Epstein), keyboardist Benmont Tench, and Petty’s stalwart, guitar dynamo Mike Campbell. They were so energetic live the British thought they were punks, but they were just a god-tier bar band fronted by one of their generation’s best hook wranglers. Petty loved the Byrds, and indeed Roger McGuinn gave him his first break; He loved the Stones, and used to learn their albums front to back to learn how to be a rock star. His Cheshire Cat grin and rolling drawl belied a tireless, fanatical desire to clobber the charts, and he worked obsessively to build a catalog that stands, even today, as a cornerstone of the late 20th century’s American songbook.

While he occasionally baked the foundational racism of his home state into his music (take the slick, snaking groove of his debut album’s “Strangered in the Night” wherein Petty weaves a murder fantasy wherein a “black guy” shoots a “white guy” to death), Petty’s music was not ideological or thematically serious. He seemed just to want to rock (“Anything that’s rock and roll’s fine”), fall in love, and rue the women who made the mistake of leaving him. He was comedic, impassioned, emotive, excitable, all heart. His best music in this era seemed solely concerned with making his listener get lost in the revelry he whipped up.

Until Long After Dark. Then Petty decided he needed a change. Rather than spend a career simply trying to hit the pleasure center of the rock dartboard, he decided to make his sixth album say something, reveal him, form a concept, elevate his profile beyond good times. This southern man decided on a song cycle for Dixie, Southern Accents. He found a Winslow Homer painting, The Veteran in a New Field, which he assumed represented a confederate soldier returning to his plantation, to adorn the cover. He enlisted a prior troubadour of the lost cause, Canadian Robbie Robertson, to co-produce along with his stalwarts Mike Campbell and Jimmy Iovene, and the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart for a new sound. And he found a visual aesthetic: The stars and bars, a Confederate flag exploding behind the band in their live show, sewing the banner of secessionists who died to preserve their right to keep humans in bondage into the jacket he wore on stage.

But of course, Homer’s painting depicts a Union soldier, who Petty’s narrator scorns as a “blue-bellied devils”, his uniform and canteen strewn on the painting’s bottom right corner. Petty didn’t know that. And while with the Band Robertson gave voice to the defeated South cinematically on “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, he was careful in his espousal of confederate imagery. Petty was ostensibly allegiant.

Was he? “It began as a concept record about the South, but the concept part slipped away probably 70 percent or so into the album. I just let it go, but the Confederate flag became part of the marketing for the tour,” he told Rolling Stone decades later. “I wish I had given it more thought. It was a downright stupid thing to do.”

Southern Accents is as confused musically as it was conceptually. Only a few songs seem to actually concern themselves with the South: the anthemic “Rebels”, the elegiac “Southern Accents”, the needling “Spike”. Some pick up a regional argot, like “Don’t Come Around Here No More”, but Dave Stewart’s new wave aesthetic and electric sitar invoke something entirely different. “It Ain’t Nothin’ To Me” almost sounds like Primus; “Mary’s New Car” sounds like Peter Gabriel lite. By closer “The Best of Everything”, an arc lands and its narrator finds some peace and resolution, it can feel hard to understand what Petty was actually getting it; The album is too mushy to overcome the potency of the battle flag.

In his fervor to be a star, Petty acceded to inflammatory symbology – marketing, in his words. In his desire to be taken seriously, he branched out his writing to portraiture, his attempts at nuanced, empathic depictions of lost men from his holler. Southern Accents’ most strident tracks, read plainly as lyrics, are images of broken men, who find age-old resentments in their own foibles. They are Confederates by lineage even if they aren’t insurrectionists or seditionists by act. The narrator of “Rebels” is thrown out by a fed-up lover and, walking the urban streets, blames Northerners for his alienation; the narrator of “Southern Accents” weaves along a path of iniquity and yet yearns for the bosom of the South, where every prayer starts with his familiar drawl. The narrator of “Spike” hassles a nonconformist, teasing his dress and taunting him. These men are embittered, pugnacious, parochial, insular, angry. Southern Accents doesn’t present a flattering representation of its subjects.

“I had one song on the album called ‘Rebels’,” Petty explained. “It’s spoken from the point of view of the character, who talks about the traditions that have been handed down from family to family for so long that he almost feels guilty about the war. He still blames the North for the discomfort of his life, so my thought was the best way to illustrate this character was to use the Confederate flag.”

Yet on release Petty shrank from the implications of the iconography he chose. “I never intended to paint a complete picture of the South,” he dismissively disclaimed at the time, describing it as “snapshots”. Mocking critic Dave Marsh, who raised concerns about whose snapshots Petty chose to take and his conspicuous erasure of black people, Petty recommended Marsh “go out of Bruce [Springsteen]’s kitchen and see the world.” His great gift for striking proximal to the pleasure center surpassed his ability to drive home his intended point about the broken sons of the South. Like Marsh’s beloved Bruce, whose “Born in the USA” saw its bitter lyric lost in a candy-coated exterior gobbled up by Reaganites, Tom Petty’s Southern Accents became another Lost Cause anthem.

It may have been that Petty, having grown up in segregation, had accepted its codified rancor as a bedfellow on his path to marketing his music. Or maybe he was blind to its ugliness and never forced to confront the pain it represented. Either way, he embraced the emblem and asserted it meant tradition, not violence. He wore the battle flag on his cap during a promotional run where he exaggerated his twang, and the banner pictured in the interior of the LP was reportedly Petty’s own. “The Confederate flag was the wallpaper of the South when I was a kid growing up in Gainesville, Florida,” he explained later. “I always knew it had to do with the Civil War, but the South had adopted it as its logo. I was pretty ignorant of what it actually meant. It was on a flagpole in front of the courthouse and I often saw it in Western movies. I just honestly didn’t give it much thought, though I should have.”

This ignorance is endemic; so many can’t see beyond their own experiences. For artists in particular, that’s commonly the end of the story. They win their audience and refuse to risk their own livelihood by betraying them. Rebels seeking causes. Society knows what to do with such individuals: Divide around them. Partisans entrench behind their aggrieved icon as the broader conscience rejects it. Generations pass and Ted Nugent stays Ted Nugent. This first phase in unrest rarely gives way to enlightenment.

A fair society shouldn’t tolerate the normalization of hateful imagery, yet it so often does. It also can’t expunge individuals who transgress; Redemption must be possible. Tom Petty’s years after Southern Accents stand as an instructive example for not just growth from ignorance, but authentic and successful efforts to right past wrongs. 

He disavowed his use of the Confederate flag; His point was subtler than it was taken and subsumed by the vehicle he foolishly chose to forward it. “I didn’t want to be an anthem to wave Confederate flags,” he lamented. “I see kids come to the shows with these Confederate flags and I think they think, ‘Oh Tom’s really going to dig this’, but I don’t dig it at all. It wasn’t meant to be my trademark or logo.” The damage was done. Read this comments section, awash with jilted fans who swear Petty had fallen prey to some shadowy “PC police”. The potency of the image overtook the subtlety of Petty’s message.

Like so many unaware of the advantages their skin color affords them, Tom Petty left his privilege unexamined for too long. But despite the craven error of his ambition, Petty was a thoughtful man. He sought recompense. Fred Mills of BLURT Magazine recalled seeing Petty in 1990, five years after Southern Accents, when his conscience began to prevail:

“A certain yahoo element had already been making its presence in the crowd known, emitting whoops and raising beer cups whenever Petty would make a regional reference. It was starting to feel like a NASCAR rally in the arena. Now, as the band eased into the song’s signature piano intro, somebody tossed a folded-up object onto the stage. Petty walked over, picked it up, and started unfolding it: a rebel flag, symbol of the Confederacy—and of a whole lot more. He froze, uncertain as to what he should do. Well, wave it proudly at all your fellow Southerners, you could almost hear the collective thought ripple through the air. Instead, Petty walked back to the mic, still holding the flag, and slowly began to speak, talking about how on the Southern Accents Tour a few years ago they’d included a Confederate flag as part of the stage set, but since then he’d been thinking about it and decided that it had been a mistake because he understood maybe it wasn’t just a rebel image to some folks. As a low rumble of boos and a few catcalls came out of the crowd, Petty carefully wadded the flag up and concluded, ‘So we don’t do’—nodding at the flag—‘this anymore.’ Glaring at it one last time and then chucking it back down, he glanced at the band then launched directly into the next song.”

It may have helped that Petty experienced a renaissance in the late 80s and early 90s that would nearly dwarf his 1970s footprint; he didn’t need to win on the terms of Southern Accents’ devil’s bargain. But it spoke to his commitment to contrition that he stood against the mob he invited as his star began to rise again. He made his thoughtful reconsideration central to his character as an artist. As he reflected in 2017 before his death:

“[W]hen they wave that flag, they aren’t stopping to think how it looks to a black person. I blame myself for not doing that. I should have gone around the fence and taken a good look at it. But honestly, it all stemmed from my trying to illustrate a character.

Again, people just need to think about how it looks to a black person. It’s just awful. It’s like how a swastika looks to a Jewish person. It just shouldn’t be on flagpoles.

Beyond the flag issue, we’re living in a time that I never thought we’d see. The way we’re losing black men and citizens in general is horrific. What’s going on in society is unforgivable. As a country, we should be more concerned with why the police are getting away with targeting black men and killing them for no reason. That’s a bigger issue than the flag. Years from now, people will look back on today and say, ‘You mean we privatized the prisons so there’s no profit unless the prison is full?’ You’d think someone in kindergarten could figure out how stupid that is. We’re creating so many of our own problems.”

Such a turnaround is stunning and should be commended. Petty humbled himself in contrition, rejected the audience he’d cheaply won, found his moral compass, and transformed his callous past into a moral platform. If his reversal were replicated among the innumerable masses unaware the damage and violence the symbol he endorsed caused, this might be a fairer world.

For those who would today be besmirched as “woke”, Southern Accents could easily be seen as a valid reason to ignore Petty’s work overall. But as Tom Petty realized the ugliness he’d given anthem to, he sought correction. When individuals betray public morals, they must face retributions. But when those same individuals seek to mend their misdeeds, can they be absolved?

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