March 4, 2019 On Music What We Saw When We First Saw the Wu-Tang By Will Ashon The cover of the Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). It starts with the picture, back in the time when the picture comes first. Before we’ve slipped out the white paper inner, before we’ve pulled out the black disc inside—three fingers on the label, the meat of the thumb resting along its edge. Before we’ve lifted the lid of the turntable, placed the record over the spindle, before we’ve set the whole thing running. Before the needle comes down, before that bump and crackle as it rides the run-in grooves. Before the music. A creation myth. The very first time. A big room, hard to make out, curtains and a gilt mirror at the back, half of a reflective, misshapen globe, a sun sinking (or rising?) through clouds and smog. The floor wooden, or etched with double lines to make it look wooden, the pinstripe on the suit of a god. A ring of votive candles, seven or eight in the shot, each set on a thin stick stuck into a blob of gold, the flames running horizontal—quite a distance—in such a way as to suggest an open door, or fan, or a complete lack of walls, as if the shot were taken on a platform high up in the sky, levitating above a city. But not a gust, nothing variable, utterly under control. Each flame uniform, part of a set, so that the candles seem to be pointing at something or someone just beyond the frame. There are six figures. It’s possible, if we squint, to see a seventh, distorted by the light from the sun at the back. But what we can interpret as a head and shoulders blocking the light is in fact a cutaway, and what we’ve seen as a circle—that rising sun—is a huge, stylized W, their emblem. Legs bent, shoulders hunched, arms out in front of them. Gun fingers toward the back, thumbs cocked. The hand of the second figure distorted, so that the thumb seems to grow over the top of its index finger. The front-most figure making signs, right hand pointing downward, left hand the kind of shape you form to throw the shadows of a duck or an alligator onto a wall. Fingernails very white, overexposed, long and thin and graceful. Maybe we know how to interpret these hand signals, maybe not. It doesn’t matter. It’s not important. Read More
February 26, 2019 On Music A Tribe Called Quest Is Gone, but Hip-Hop Isn’t By Hanif Abdurraqib Lil Uzi Vert. Photo: Spike Jordan. Photo courtesy of Atlantic Records. I spent a lot of 2017 in schools, and I imagine that I will spend a lot of future years in schools. Because of this, I spend a lot of time talking to people younger than I am, and I spend a lot of time talking to them about music. This creates an interesting discussion point for me—I spent 2017 remembering that when I was young and wanted to talk to someone older about music, I mostly wanted validation that the thing I liked was not, in fact, awful. This had mixed results in my teenage years. My love of the so-called “shiny suit era” had its detractors, many of them older than me, many of them longing for the days of what they imagined to be “real hip-hop.” The question I spent most of my time answering in 2017 was how I felt about what is now called “mumble rap” in the popular discourse—rappers who eschew lyrical prowess in the name of drum-heavy trap beats and melodic choruses. If there’s one thing that’s for sure, changing trends in music will forever have their scapegoats, and because the trends in rap music shift so rapidly, scapegoats appear and then are replaced by new scapegoats nearly every two or three years. Shiny-suit rap was a scapegoat once, back after Biggie was murdered, and Tupac murdered before that, and conservative media outlets were delighting in what surely was soon to be the death of the genre they hated most. But then songs about money and partying and living like no death would ever arrive for you ended up on the radio. Auto-Tune was a scapegoat for a while, until Kanye West made 808s & Heartbreak in 2008 and people decided Auto-Tune was a worthwhile artistic endeavor—until Jay-Z released the song “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)” in the summer of 2009, and then it was done for good. “Mumble rap” is the most active and vigorous scapegoat rap has had in years, in part because the internet—particularly social media—has created a landscape for it to thrive and be a hotly debated topic, engaging with ideas of language and whether or not rappers should have to adhere to them, and whether or not this so-called mumble rap is actually pushing the genre forward, past some of its bowing to establishments. The real truth is that the rappers don’t actually mumble. Rappers like Lil Yachty, Lil Uzi Vert, and Young Thug aren’t really aesthetically or sonically similar, and all of them rap fairly clearly. What people are really angling at is the drug-drenched persona of young rappers who seem to, as they put it, have no substance. What people are really pointing at is what they believe to be a lack of lyricism. I don’t necessarily rebuke this in its entirety, but I rebuke the idea that my pals and I weren’t young once and didn’t listen to shit that moved us to dance or get reckless no matter what the rapper was saying. I rebuke the idea that every lyric written when I was a young hip-hop lover was sent down from the heavens and written with a golden pen. I rebuke the idea that the “turn up” is new or something that anyone in need of it should be ashamed of. Or the idea that the turn up isn’t flexible. That it doesn’t happen in the middle of a gospel song on Sunday, or in a trap house on any day when people in the hood get paid, or in a nightclub in New York when the horn player catches a good solo and the band lets him air it out until he’s gotten all he can out of his instrument. Read More
June 1, 2018 On Music Lonesome Together By Drew Bratcher On YouTube exists a rare video of Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson performing the song “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” The segment, which was taped in Los Angeles as part of a 1978 prime-time special, made for a very public reunion—it had been nine years since Cash first performed Kristofferson’s song on The Johnny Cash Show, his short-lived TV variety program featuring rock, blues, and folk singers alongside the Grand Ole Opry crowd. The original performance had been controversial. Cash’s producers, anticipating blowback from the song’s references to drug use, had asked him to switch the chorus from “On a Sunday morning sidewalk / I’m wishing, Lord, that I was stoned” to “On a Sunday morning sidewalk / I’m wishing, Lord, that I was home.” Cash said he’d give it some thought, but when the time came, he delivered the lines as is, putting the weight of his quavering bass-baritone behind a lyric that was at once a provocation (drugs were a Nashville taboo) and a personal confession (Cash really was hooked on pills). A live recording of the performance was released to country radio and quickly ran up the charts, eventually winning the 1970 CMA Award for Song of the Year. Read More
May 24, 2018 On Music A Siren in a Paper Sleeve By Christopher King Still from Ghost World, by Terry Zwigoff. I am a record collector. The type of disc with which I am obsessed, the 78-rpm phonograph record, is made of slowly decaying organic materials, bound together and coated with synthetic compounds. John Blacking, a pioneering ethnomusicologist of the twentieth century, proposed that music is a “humanly organized sound,” a pat yet inclusive definition. Like most of the music he studied in the fifties, the 78-rpm phonograph record is a relic of the past, a fossil. These curious black discs are all that connect us with the best part of our musical past, with the rapture that we were once able to convey through deep song and dance. These records are fragile, yet they were the dominant medium of auricular permanence and commerce for roughly the first fifty years of the twentieth century. When I was young, I discovered that 78 recordings—unlike so many other parts of contemporary culture—needed no outside validation, just an attentive, appreciative listener. I was the listener, and the artists that made them were my friends. They were constant. People would betray you, institutions would fail you, but this, this old music, a music lacking all pretension, would never change. Read More
May 9, 2018 On Music This Feels Like Never-Ending By Alexander Lumans The Dillinger Escape Plan in concert. Photo: Stefan Raduta. And I was every question that never had an answer I see right through you And never even noticed that there always was a reason That we were never meant to be left alone. —The Dillinger Escape Plan, “Milk Lizard” 1. “Low Feels Blvd” I am not what you picture when you think of a metalhead; I have no tattoos, no wide ear gauges, no long hair with which to head bang. There are teenagers who are twice as metal as I will ever be. But I do listen to metal—have done so for years—on both the brightest days and the grayest. I do have a pierced septum; it’s relatively new and more an accessorized front. And I do want a tattoo, though I’ve only committed to the temporary kind. However, skin accessories and a darkly monochromatic wardrobe do not alone a metalhead make. One might assume this crowd to be full of fearless counterculture anarchists who give zero fucks about what anyone thinks. I am not so confident. I am afraid of letting people get too close because I don’t trust others to understand me on a basic emotional level; I rarely trust my own judgment in the myriad of easy and difficult situations that daily life presents; and what little remaining self-esteem I have lies buried beneath a high-rise of self-hatred that manifests in destructive impulses—all of which leads me, on the worst days, to wish I weren’t alive. In other words, I live with major depression. What does my depression look like? More often than not, I sleep too late; I’m sad and angry at myself for sleeping in; my whole day is thrown off course. With no established routine or foundation, I become sadder and angrier. Hopelessness sets in like quick-dry cement. Feeling all but ruined, I just want to go back to sleep. Instead of pulling myself out of my emotional quagmire through self-care, I feel paralyzed. I sleep more. With any notion of a regular schedule long gone, once I’m finally awake, I recount every single way I’ve failed myself. Tomorrow feels so impossible I don’t even want to think about it. Then all this repeats the following morning because I’ve stayed up too late worrying about what I cannot control. When this becomes the norm, I tell myself that I simply want to disappear. This is, somehow, the best answer. I know that’s not healthy to think, but I’m still searching for what is healthy. What could make me want to stay here through today’s sadness, loneliness, and pain? Read More
April 20, 2018 On Music Twenty Years Later: On Massive Attack and Mezzanine By Michael A. Gonzales In 1998, when I was a writer for Vibe magazine (which was the leading black culture journal), I went to London to interview the trip-hop kings Massive Attack. They were preparing to release their third album, the beautifully complex and brooding Mezzanine. Although they collaborated with other singers and musicians, the core Massive trio consisted of Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, Andy “Mushroom” Vowles, and Robert “3D” Del Naja. Del Naja penned most of the Dadaistic lyrics on Mezzanine and thought of its title. As a pop journalist, I had already covered their contemporaries Portishead and Tricky, so of course I felt it was my duty and destiny to fly to London to cover Mezannine. I had to beg the cornball editor in chief to send me, and in the end, the story was never published. But I never forgot the experience of sitting with Massive, trying to refrain from being too much of a fanboy. The year before, when I’d visited Paris, I’d taken Blue Lines along to serve as my soundtrack of the city. Me and my beautiful homegirl Wendy Washington rode out to the Palace of Versailles as Massive’s remake of the soul classic “Be Thankful for What You Got” blared from the speakers. “Mezzanine is that place in between, when you’re not sure if it’s yesterday or today,” Del Naja told me at Olympic Studios in London. “That little space where it’s quite scary and erotic.” Also known as an excellent graffitist and painter (inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat) and rumored to be the mysterious street artist Banksy (a claim he denied), Del Naja had seemingly become the leader of the group. He was its resident auteur, and his Francis Bacon view of the world was visible in the band’s videos, album designs, and stage lighting. The band first came together in their hometown of Bristol. Though Del Naja was shorter than the lanky Daddy G or the equally tall Mushroom, who were both somewhat reserved, his presence towered over the group, and it caused an earthquake break between the brotherhood. “When we got together to record, we realized the amount of creative friction between us,” Mushroom would confess later. “In fact, we wound up recording in separate studios.” The producer Neil Davidge later described the process as “messy,” but from that angst, tension, and messiness, Massive Attack delivered a masterpiece. Read More