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- The Retrographer, Issue Eleven (November, 2015)
The Retrographer, Issue Eleven (November, 2015)
November, 2015
The Retrographer, Issue 11
Bulletins
This is the last standard Retrographer of the year. Next month’s issue will be a year-end roundup, featuring my top 100 songs of 2015. The form will be familiar, just longer.
Grimes, “Venus Fly” (Spotify / YouTube) - As PW pointed out: How does the male gaze affect you? Just like in particle physics, observation changes the equation whether you realize it or not. Do you pull your teeth? Cut your hair under your chin? Make a huge, bass-heavy song that bangs so hard as long as you have their attention?
Missy Elliott, “WTF” (Spotify / YouTube) - Hate to do this but: Does this remind you a little bit of Pharrell’s aborted Azaelia Banks collab “ATM Jam”? Almost like that one was like a demo for Missy’s triumphant return? Missy raps all over this thing, the sort of riffy two-mic wrecking crew that leaves room for a great, great rapper.
Logic, “Young Jesus” (Spotify / YouTube) - “Take ‘em back to the 90s!” Logic opens, and he isn’t kidding. This song reminds you at first of “1 Train”, but has more in common with the late Big Pun’s timeless “Twinz,” all the way to his fast-forwarded second verse-capping tongue twister.
DJ PayPal feat. DJ Earl, “We Finally Made It” (Spotify / YouTube) - Like Flying Lotus’ “You’re Dead”, Sold Out explores soul and jazz’s place in trap music (or vice versa). This track, a masterwork of the MPC, is best enjoyed with an ear tuned to the drums. Listen for the off-kilter hi-hats, different in every bar, and the drama created when they drop out.
Floating Points, “For Marmish” (Spotify / YouTube) - What I love most about the Fender Rhodes piano is the misty sound it makes when a note is sustained for a moment, like it’s fading from view right before your very ears. Rainy day music.
Justin Bieber, “Company” (Spotify / YouTube) - There are really legit arguments for best song on Purpose, an album that makes up for its lack of subtlety with huge hits. But my favorite is this one, which is funky but restrained, light but heavy. It does as much to tell you Bieber has grown than anything he says.
Oneotrix Point Never, “No Good” (Spotify) - This song’s opening lets chords naturalistically bend out of tune for long enough to give the song room to breath. And like “What Do You Mean”, it begins with odd sounds, like those from an 80s action flick about Japan. But where Bieber snaps into pop, Daniel Lopatin shows how such unusual elements can assemble abstractly.
Young Thug, “Hercules” (Spotify / YouTube) - In one of my favorite Young Thug Instagrams (and there are many), Thugger sits in the front of his car while his fiancé Jerrika records them doing the chorus of this song, alternately riding its unhurried flow and emphasizing its goofball showtunes-y “woahs”. That’s Thugger: Half great rapper, half inexplicable weirdo, all earworm.
Ty Segall, “The Slider” (Spotify / YouTube) - Ty likes to slip on accents when he sings. January’s “The Picture” (you do have to differentiate Ty’s songs by month, he makes that much) had a Bowie-esque British twang, and on this rereleased cover he channels this song’s congested author Marc Bolan. It grooves slow, chugging like a locomotive with a head cold.
One Direction, “Olivia” (Spotify / YouTube) - Bid farewell to the world’s biggest boy band. After five years of tour-record-repeat, 1D made an album that says goodbye but sounds like they’re already grown and gone. Here, they sound like British boys and men at once.
One Album for November, 2015
In 1977, NASA launched the Voyager spacecrafts, two robotic probes tasked with observing our outer solar system, specifically Jupiter and Saturn. Not all space probes are aimed to make it to planets beyond the asteroid belt, however, and those that do either crash land someplace or just keep on going, inert, at incredible speeds into the frozen vacuum of space. Voyager spacecrafts endeavored to be the latter.
Voyager 1 was the first man-made object aimed to enter interstellar space, and in late 2012, it made it. It passed beyond the termination shock and heliopause, the demarcation for the end of our sun’s solar wind, and kept going, traveling 11 miles further into nothing every second. It’s still going.
The whole thing weighs about 1,704 pounds, and of that, 231 is scientific equipment. It’s got spectrometers and magnetometers and a variety of computers, luggage all packed to peer into the black and tell us back home what’s out there.
But there’s one thing on board both Voyager spacecraft that’s packed to do the opposite, and tell what’s out there about us back home: A golden record. This record, a Rosetta Stone for everything significant to mankind, contains a variety of clues: Images, like those of mathematical proofs and the Grand Tetons; Signals, specifically Carl Sagan’s future bride Ann Druyan’s brainwaves; Sounds, like crickets, or a man greeting you in Esperanto; And music, from Zaire and Germany and elsewhere.
The purpose of these inclusions, where space is precious even within endless emptiness, was articulated by then-president Jimmy Carter:
This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.
Sounds, science, images, music – these are all concrete things, perhaps only understood when you know what to look for, but coherent ideas to those familiar, no doubt. But thoughts and feelings, that’s tougher to encapsulate. It’s also what makes those inclusions, and indeed, the secondary mission of this intrepid device to arrive mysteriously in some cosmic stranger’s lost-and-found, mean anything at all. A distant and unfamiliar civilization might get that we make music; but why? Harder to explain with the contents of a supersonic trashcan.
I think it’s possible, though. Allow me, Mr. Sagan, to submit a much-too-late inclusion, of a recording from just five years before we cast off our message in a bottle: Donny Hathaway’s cover of Carol King’s “You’ve Got a Friend”.
Donny Hathaway grew up in a Chicago church, where he became a virtuosic pianist and singer. As an artist, he most famously joined a songwriting partnership with Roberta Flack, a classmate from Howard, that produced “Where is the Love”, a crossover hit that went gold in 1972. In that same year, Hathaway released possibly the greatest live album ever made, Live. With an absolutely stellar band, across two bicoastal nights, Hathaway made an album showcasing the best of tightness and looseness, darkness and light, jams and cuts. Though Hathaway’s career is far less celebrated than his contemporaries, many of whom he covered on his 1972 album Live, his renditions of their songs, like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” and his recently celebrated cover of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy”, are less reimaginations than they are celebrations of the period’s great songwriting, and are often more fun than the source material.
Hathaway doesn’t just sing beautifully, he sings to the music, and all music. It brings out the best in him, his voice shining, his smile audible, and in his sidemen, who keep apace and add generously without ever getting in the way. Willie Weeks performs the greatest bass solo of all time on “Voices Inside”, playing to the instruments strengths but never abandoning the listener’s ear, and Cornell Dupree, erstwhile sideman to Miles Davis, Lena Horne, and Bill Withers, lends “Little Ghetto Boy” its shimmer.
“You’ve Got a Friend” closes the first half of the album. Written by Carol King for her classic album Tapestry, the song was made famous as a #1 song for James Taylor in 1971. It was also the second single from Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway’s eponymous platinum debut, released a year before the album in 1971. When Live was recorded in 1971, both singles had been out for just a few months, and yet had alrady spoken somehow to the souls of people the world across, charting simultaneously within Billboard’s top 30 tracks.
When Hathaway plays the first four chords, his audience breaks into shrieks somehow both rapturous and terrifying, like a spirit had entered the room. When he begins to sing, his voice doesn’t lead, but rather riffs, as if he’s accompanying someone only he can hear, like you would over a song alone in your car.
Then the chorus comes, and he stops singing. The audience, together, unprompted, picks the melody up and, in perfect coordination, carry it together. And they don’t just sing, they harmonize. Strangers, dozens of them, in a room, wordlessly align to sing a song they all somehow knew together, some intervals of a third or a fifth apart, all in spontaneous concert. With songbooks learned from the radio and ears trained in the church, Hathaway’s audience becomes the album’s most expert instrumentalist. The song closes, and the shrieks of joy return, rising and swelling and fading away.
Where in nature do creatures wordlessly organize so? Where do independent beings come together, not to evade a predator or take prey, but to join in on the pleasure of shared experience? Why does a species make something new, where does it agree it’s meaningful, and how can the best of what it makes cross from mind to mind?
Demonstrating to a foreign race that we make music is straightforward; demonstrating why requires something beyond songs themselves. It means showing how music exists in space, between people. It means showing that this purposeful organization of tones is catalyzing, rallying, unifying. “Is” tells you something, but “because” tells you everything.
Our music is a vessel for our thoughts and feelings, yes; But maybe it's a promising sign of our chances to survive our own time, too.
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."November, 2015October, 2015September, 2015August, 2015July, 2015June, 2015May, 2015April, 2015March, 2015February, 2015January, 2015Best of 2014 (Honorable Mentions)Best of 2013 (Honorable Mentions)Best of 2012Best of 2011