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- The Retrographer, Issue Ten (October, 2015)
The Retrographer, Issue Ten (October, 2015)
October, 2015
The Retrographer, Issue Ten
Bulletins
My brother PW shared with me this video of Jason Isbell playing one of my favorite songs of this year, "Speed Trap Town."
This video had me grinning like an idiot, both because Keith is a treasure, and because Guitar Moves is back. Also check out Marc Maron's interview with Mr. Richards.
Ten Songs for October, 2015
Paul Wall, “Swangin in the Rain” (Spotify / YouTube) - If this sounds like Paul Wall’s comeback to you, you definitely missed his ice-cold guest verse last year on Slim Thug’s “Pokin Out.” (Thanks again, PW). Let this be your final notice: the way Houston’s venerable motorhead avoids hidden curves is monumental.
Kelela, “Rewind” (Spotify / YouTube) - This child of Janet delivers an ode to sexuality bottled up by social anxiety, missed opportunities that run through your head the rest of the night, miscommunications that leave you scrambling for another shot.
Neon Indian, “News From The Sun (live bootleg)” (Spotify / YouTube) - Neither live, nor a bootleg. One thing Prince was amazing at was hiding infinitely bizarre ideas within imagery that was almost too normal. Starfish and coffee. Bambi. The Wizard of Oz chant in “Beautiful Night.” When, under shrill synth stabs, the bassline descends in the chorus, you might be fooled into thinking that’s him right there, too.
Beach House, “Majorette” (Spotify / YouTube) - Sounds a bit like the Deerhunter that isn't anymore. Beach House opens their stargazing surprise second album this year with celestial arpeggios that culminate tracks later on “Elegy to the Void.”
Deerhunter, “All the Same” (Spotify / YouTube) - So sings the sufferer of Marfan syndrome, whose condition trapped him inside for a whole summer of his childhood, the queer who endured homophobia in his backcountry home of Georgia, who leads the best psychedelic band of his generation: “You should take your handicaps / Channel them, feed them back / Till they become your strength.”
Adele, “Hello” (Spotify / YouTube) - Such a brilliant pop move to open an album no one knew was coming so soon with a personal-feeling reintroduction not just slightly reminiscent of a meme. And once you’re brought in, thinking she’s talking about you, you’re imprisoned by the towering power of her voice. Hello.
Majical Cloudz, “Downtown” (Spotify / YouTube) - Such gravitas, all in the service of love. It's looping reversed sample sounds like the tape of memory played backwards. One of the few things in life you can be obsessed with and it’s okay.
Joanna Newsom, “Things I Say” (YouTube) - It's not the first time Joanna has written about her quiet doubt and self-abnegation, smallness in the face of a love she values so much. Her anxiety cancels everything in her existence, breaking into echoes, then washed away in ghostly wails, and her voice, reminded to nothingness.
Blood Orange, “Sandra’s Smile” (Spotify / YouTube) - The title is likely a reference to this mugshot of Sandra Bland, a black woman who was inexplicably arrested, imprisoned, and then found dead in her prison cell. Witneses to the brutality of police violence shared conspiracy theories suggesting she was already dead in that photo, her death a murder, rather than a suicide. “Close my eyes for a while,” Hynes sings. “I still see Sandra’s smile.”
Chance the Rapper (feat. Saba), “Angels” (Spotify / YouTube) - But through that terror, how empowering to hear Chance’s laser of positivity, the blueprint to a real man, who jukes gleefully past the haters, the murderers, the ones who make you scared to let your grandmother outside, the bloggers who try to set him against everyone from Drake to Chief Keef. Gospel has been in Chance since the beginning, and ecumenism, too.
One Album for October, 2015
Part of why I write The Retrographer is because of the Beatles. They made some of the most important music in my life, and they made the music that meant the most to my parents and everyone of their age, who were the adults when I was a kid. Their music is beautiful, but the opinion of their formation as the beginning, and their breakup as the end of a golden period in music and society is oppressive. There is so much more outside that prevailing opinion, and not just for music: For the Beatles, too.
Paul McCartney released his first solo album just a week after he announced the group’s breakup. Beatles fans worldwide were stricken, and, based on their response, clearly unready for the album McCartney would put out. Where the Beatles had virtually invented the album format, McCartney rolled out an album that sounded like demos, like the unwanted trinkets he described on “Junk.” Where the Beatles had introduced sounds and recording techniques theretofore unheard in popular music, McCartney sounded like he recorded in his living room between cups of tea. The Beatles were a miracle of collaboration; McCartney was, save his wife’s backup vocals, performed entirely by one person. My idol Robert Christgau opened his review of the album writing, “When I first heard this record, I felt insulted.” It was, after everything the Beatles had created, wrong.
But hindsight is a funny thing. It often makes events seem inevitable, preordained. The Beatles had to break up when they did, right? Much of the music written for McCartney, including two of its true gems, “Junk”, and “Teddy Boy”, were not only written for the Beatles, but rehearsed with the group. Hindsight defines our experience with songs, and with songwriting, too: we only experience music as it’s final released form because, generally, that's all artists let us hear.
McCartney is, in some part, the closest listeners would get to the process of making a Beatles album until the Anthology box would come out decades later, and even that invaluable compilation tells more of the group’s meticulous process than where the individuals were coming from.
Just as the Beatles’ breakup was the product of innumerable decisions made behind the scenes, so was the creation of all their music. We experience Abbey Road as a solid whole, sounding just the same today as it did in September, 1969. But it passed through phases of development, from concepts to structures to demos to rehearsal to editing to refinement to production and packaging and marketing to you. These songs were altered and molded, but you never heard that. These are songs, yes, but they’re created by songwriters. We experience product, but never process.
Except, perhaps, on McCartney, which strives to be nothing, and so achieves being everything. Artists of all types have ways of collecting their ideas, with lyrics on scraps of paper, or little ideas stored on a recorder beside their bed, or voice memos on their phone. They listen through that mess and see what sticks. Some doesn’t make sense on a second listen, some come out fully-formed, and some have just a flash of something great in it.
Beatles fans: From your first encounter with the band in their identical suits and haircuts, to McCartney’s flourishing concepts on Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour, to the “back-to-the-basics” gimmicks of the White Album and Let It Be, you consumed the Beatles as product. The commodified Beatles. Beatles for sale. You met the Beatles.
But on McCartney, you didn’t. You met a crushed alcoholic with the 20th century’s greatest ear for melody, and you really knew him. You heard his private lovesongs, on “The Lovely Linda,” his goofy jams, on “Man We Was Lonely” and “That Would Be Something”, songs where the recording doesn’t go quite right, on “Hot as Sun/Glasses”, plain dicking around on “Kreen-Akore” and “Valentine’s Day”, sketchpad jams like “Momma Miss America”, tracks that break from mediocrity into the sublime, on “Every Night”, private moments of unadultered brilliance, on “Junk”, heartbreakingly personal stories on “Teddy Boy”, and then, the beam of genius that explains it all, “Maybe I’m Amazed.”
That last one, that was the only part of this album, the first real look at our sainted McCartney, that the critics and stricken Beatlemaniacs could get behind: the clear image of a pop song. Just a small part of the Paul that really was.
Later on, McCartney returned to his concept formulae, then tried to play catch-up with the times, and seems finally to be serving his remaining audience’s nostalgia for the Paul they want to remember. But on McCartney, and in a more formed state on Ram, he quietly adjusted the listener’s vantage of an album. Those two albums are the rare constructions in music to reveal the artist in the state of songwriting, with all the notes and memos and demos on display. It's the context that means more to the music than any other, truest to the experience of the artist.
There he is, on the back cover, smiling at you clearly, open with his child looking to you. Do you see him?
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."October, 2015September, 2015