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- The Retrographer, Issue Eight (August, 2015)
The Retrographer, Issue Eight (August, 2015)
August, 2015
The Retrographer, Issue Eight
Bulletins
Quick story: a little over a year ago, my friend Hilary drove across the country. She had the idea to make a crowdsourced playlist on Spotify from all her pals. Control freak that I am (I do write a playlist newsletter, after all), I offered to make her my own. That playlist, Go West, Young Lady, is my 200-song, 13-hour long love letter to summer driving. In these waning days of summer, just before Labor Day shutters your white pants, you might find yourself in the need for a soundtrack. This is it.
I talked to my friend Graham at Pigeons and Planes about the stuff we’re working on at Cymbal. He said nice things!
By popular request (Julian), I’m now posting these playlists to both Spotify and YouTube. Look for that below, non-Spotify listeners. This is actually a great issue to listen to the YouTube version on, since I’ve got a (very conspicuous) Apple Music exclusive on here.
Photo by Julian Master. Listen to this playlist on Spotify or YouTube.
After Taylor Swift explained the classic-meets-80s inspiration of 1989 to Mario Testino, he commented that, "When I went through the 80s, I thought it was all ugly. But when I look back now I think, 'How interesting. From ugliness comes a lot of beauty." "Nostalgia works this way," Taylor agreed, and such is the revival of 80s music that courses through Jepsen's stylized, if fitful, new record.
More on that: Driving around Sheepshead Bay on a hot, salty night, marveling at this song with my friends, and one, Annie-Rose, said, "I bet you could slip this onto the 80s station and fool all the listeners into thinking they remembered it." Moreso: for weeks after, I couldn't stop listening to Purple Rain or "Everybody Wants to Rule the World."
Relatedly: It infuriates me when people say "Your generation hates Bruce." Yeah, right. If Adam Granduciel and Ronnie Stone aren't enough to convince you otherwise, let Dan Bejar, who summons the E Street Band and the ghost of the Big Man for a Born To Run-worthy romp.
You think it's a game? After that, I defy you to identify more than half the lyrics from this banger on your first listen. Which is why it's so amazing that, on such a minimal beat, and with so little indication as to what he's talking about (beating cases, copping bop), Quan's raw charisma can tell the whole story.
While the verse bassline never changes throughout the verse, Jonas describes the harmonic character with a supremely simple "I can't get enough." This melody is unconventional and thrilling, porting between registers like the lifts described within.
Dr Dre, “Genocide” (Apple Music / YouTube)
Picture me, age 13, all-Jewish summer camp. They wouldn’t let me and my friend Eli get our mail, because they knew Eli’s mom had sent him a lot of candy and instant ramen noodles (strictly regulated at the PX border). So we stomped around campus playing "Fuck the Police." Consider that at that point, until the first half of last month, Detox was a hotly anticipated follow up. And then Compton, this astounding, scintillating beat, and Kendrick's expectation-crushing verse.
"Voice leading" is a term in music theory that describes when a lead melody indicates underlying harmonic changes by emphasizing notes in each new chord that weren't in the previous. A good example of this is when Kwabs' melody feels all funny and cool as he gets to the word "peace" in that first line.
Royal Headache's lead singer Shogun - like Kurt Cobain or Frances Quinlan - is possessing of a bristled voice that, when pushed to its emotional limits, tears apart, werewolf-like, into an animalistic yowl. This tender song, halfway between Yuck and, I don't know, Third Eye Blind, stages it beautifully.
Is no one actually listening to Mac? For years, this Alfred E Newman lookalike has personified puerile juvenility in interviews and performance, all while tenderly singing of love, loneliness, and the toll all that churlishness takes on the psyche with a maturity incongruous to his back-of-the-class shenanigans.
I never hear anyone complain about Beach House, but maybe that's just me. Seems like someone should get fed up with the languid, gauzy Ronettes-33-on-the-45-setting schtick they've been chipping away at for albums. But no one does, because they're all hypnotized by Victoria LeGrand's honey voice, and waltzing guitar themes like this one.
The decades wore on, and BB King kept playing. Like an AM radio station you can't turn your car dial away from, BB wailed away, just scratchier and fainter as the odometer ticked.
Rock music was born in BB's chronological backyard, and though he remained a bluesman throughout his life, his image was the one every rock guitarist formed in the reflection pool. His career spanned the whole history of pop music's modern mainstream art form. His story is like Richard Trevithick riding the Shinkansen.
In 1971, King recorded the second best live album ever performed at a prison, at Chicago's Cook County Jail. It starts with a piece of unintentional comedy so good it almost belongs in a Marx Brothers movie, when some jailhouse administrative stooge tries to get the literally captive audience to applaud the warden. "Thunderous boo" has an encyclopedia entry.
But King, the raconteur who croons with his voice and wails with his fingers, comes onstage and escapes their ire for the MC entirely. He breaks into a boogie-ing rendition of Memphis Slim's "Every Day I Have the Blues," and we're all emancipated. His set glides through a variety of moods and messages: "How Blue Can You Get?" has some hilarious one-man role playing on the part of King; "Sweet Sixteen" is as sultry as this group of delinquents are likely allowed; his "3 O'Clock Blues / Darlin' You Know I Love You" medley hits the right notes; "The Thrill is Gone", BB's all-time hit, is trotted out at double the clip of the original, now less a lament than a liberation. The album's centerpiece, a strolling, almost 10-minute version of "Worry, Worry, Worry" includes reams of reformative life advice, including: "I don't care if she weigh 32.5 pounds wet, or 550 on her feet. If she's your lady and you dig her, then she's your pretty little thing!" The crowd loves it.
Let's pause, momentarily, to consider that there was a time when our nation's treasured correctional facilities not only hosted top notch performers like BB or Johnny Cash, but venued as tremendously as this one. He only plays for less than 40 minutes, but King cuts no corners from his penal pulpit.
When BB died three months ago, the voice for all of that - the direct line to that pre-modern, pre-rock, pre-felon-dehumanization thing - went too. It's just what'll happen when we lose the last World War II vet: the voice in our national consciousness that spoke for that time will fade in the static. But even as those voices go, one at a time, there's still B.B. in them. He taught us the blues for moments like this.
Best-of Playlists
Though these playlists are all on Spotify, not every song (including many of my favorites) is available to stream. To see what tracks are missing, go to "Preferences", scroll down to "Display Options," and then switch on "Show unavailable tracks in playlists."