To self plagiarise a little: Pulitzer prize winner Lamar is the greatest lyricist, probably in any genre, of his generation. This mastery is as much about form as it is lyrical content; his phrasing, his use of tone, his skill at exploiting the rhythmic possibilities of any given piece of music are all peerless. In content, Lamar, is in many ways the apotheosis of what draws a lot of people to hip hop; he vividly melds the personal and political through direct, bracing storytelling.
To Pimp a Butterfly — a sprawling celebration of black American music full of jazz, p-funk, blaxploitation influences, and an emotional first person account a of black American experience –places Hip Hop somewhere between sermon, speech and stand up. It’s probably the most important American album of the decade. It’s definitely Lamar’s masterpiece. You know, so far.
Ok, so technically, as the title suggests, this isn’t from the last decade. But let’s face it, neither you or I were going to get it until 2015, when the peerless Analog Africa label compiled this mysterious Guinean Salsero’s recorded legacy (outside his work with Senegal’s Star Band De Dakar). A feline cocktail of Afro-Cuban Rhythms, psychedelic organ and guitar and African clave, I half wondered if I was including this soley because of N’ga Digne M’be a strange, sexy and cinematic and singular number and one of my all time favourite songs. But re-listening, the whole thing is even better than I remember.
Most people who’ve played guitar with some application for six months would have the knowledge to write these songs. And most bands with three or four good, sensitive musicians could replicate their warm, clean sound. Except none of them do, because none of them can write as elegantly as Julia Jacklin.
Musically, Don’t Let the Kids Win has an interior, yearning, Sunday-afternoon feel, like watching a patch of sun traverse the carpet and slowly fade altogether. Melodically, Jacklin’s graceful, pillowy voice floats and curls into every corner of these song, like smoke.
Most important, her lyrics match, veering from dreamy, discursive recollections to journalistic accrual of detail, often within one song, one line, such as the opener of track one, Pool Party: “I was shorter than my dad’s dining room table, you were taller than my bedroom door frame”.
The title track reaches the peak of this warmth and insight, Jacklin pulling together simple, tender observations — “Don’t let your sister walk down the aisle without pulling her close and saying ‘I love you, and it’s ok if I don’t see you for a while'” — over a plain but remarkable chord progression, all tied together by that voice; pleading but assured, lively and wise.
It’s everything guitar music should be, or at the very least, everything it needs to be.
If I’m lucky, the debt this blog owes to the work of Robert Christgau is painfully obvious to anyone who has read both. This is particularly true in Bookmarks, where I attempt to sum up an artist’s appeal – sometimes political as well as aesthetic — in a couple of sentences. No one is better at that – or its inverse, skewering poor work — than Christgau.
It was the end of a certain era when, after near enough 50 years of writing about popular music, Noisey published his last “Expert Witness” column in March. He’d had an itinerant professional existence since 2006, when New Times Media took over his long-time home, the Village Voice, and promptly got rid of him. The idea of Christgau type cultural critic is long dead; Drake or Lizzo might whine about “the media” as an amorphous whole, but who writing today matters enough that the likes of Lou Reed or Sonic Youth would disparagingly namecheck them on a record. Still, the idea that man himself, writing as well as ever, couldn’t get a paid gig in the current market is bracing.
I honestly don’t know of any other writer able to pack so much, not just information, but implication and tone, so much allusion into a sentence, or even a word. Famously, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water got a one word review: “Melodic.” Ryan Adam’s Gold managed a sentence: “asked for Gram Parsons, they gave me Billy Joel”. I am extremely fond of both those albums. I know exactly what he means. His sentences weigh a tonne. It’s all still out there, decades of terse, dense writing. A lot of it for free on his delightfully hideous website – the absolute fucking state of it. It’s almost beautiful — and, going forward, for a little money on his patreon And it Don’t Stop.
Reading Christgau is often like having a drink with a smart, provocative, funny and maddening companion. As often as you are delighted to hear what you had thought so often and never said so well, you’re infuriated (“what are you talking about?!”). I realise I’m in a minority on this, but the best critics don’t just tell me whether I should or shouldn’t expend time and money on this album or that film, and why. They do do that, but in the process, tell me something useful about life, whether I think it’s true or not.
A few of my faves. On Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model: “while I still wish he liked girls more, I’m now willing to believe he’s had some bad luck”. On Childish Gambino’s Culdesac: “he’s too keen on proving something, even if all the success and sexcess stories are true. Which is why I like him best when I’m surest he’s lying.”
Or DJ Shadow opening Endtroducing with a sample of “a square, self-taught drummer’s” nervous chuckle. Shadow “loops that chuckle for a second or two, making of it music and chaos and satire and self-mockery and music all at once.” On MIA’s Kala: “Where so many bands who consider tunes beneath them compensate with piddling portions of texture or structure, this record is full of things to listen to: zooms and scrapes and grunts and whistles and kiddie voices and animal cries, weird Asian drums and horns, down-home melodica and didgeridoo … The songs imagine and recreate an unbowed international underclass that proves how smart it is just by stating its business, which includes taking your money.” His observation that on Wu Tang Clan’s The W, leader RZA has “gone sensei, achieving a craft in which the hand leads the mind. Anyway, that’s how it sounds–which since this is music is what counts”.
I could go on. Some of those I had to look up to check exact wording, some I didn’t – his work has a tendency to come back to me like, well, music.
My personal gushing aside, of course, it does raise the question of what we lose when we lose figures like him. A white boomer guy, pontificating about the value of art, isn’t being published anymore? Who cares? Even I sometimes think “that’s quite enough of that tone, Robert”. I can only say, I think he does it right – he combines aesthetic and moral consistency, acknowledgement of his blind spots and prejudices with rigorous standards and unquenchable thirst for music and what it tells us, or fails to tell us, about life now, and life in general, about systems and about inter-personals. He’s engaged and curious; the first mainstream white critic to take hip hop seriously, he writes as energetically about pure pop now as he did in 1970. If you think a good culture requires a good conversation, singular voices of this sort are a basic requirement.
He gets music as science as well as art, and at his best he is like Feynman and his flower, offering a dissection that adds to rather than subtracts from the awe and mystery and beauty of its subject. Anyway, that’s how it feels –which since this is writing is what counts.
There’s something about the way the strings swoop down over the jaunty guitar picking within seconds, a black-grey cloud appearing on the blazing horizon. We feel the squinting heat and the dust and we know something is off. The family finishes chopping cotton, bailing hay, to gather around the dinner table; this hard, close regional life is the set up for a million happy country songs. But that yawning string line, melting from its centre like an eroding cliff face, tenses the smallest muscles in our ears. Every detail that Bobbie Gentry accumulates squirms through that tension. Even once it’s reveled that Billie Joe McAllister has jumped off the Tallahatchie bridge, we sense there’s more. The news from Choctaw Ridge seems to disturb no one around the table, but the mother takes the narrator to one side, notes her lost appetite and mentions a nice young preacher who saw a “girl that looked a lot like you” with Billie Joe “throwing something off the Tallahatchie bridge”. It’s a an exquisite, tanatlising touch. We find out nothing more, except that the narrator returns every year to toss a bunch of flowers into Billie Joe’s makeshift grave.
Diana Ross‘s version foregrounds the desperation; you hear her guilt, whatever that is, from her first utterance. There was a cluster of these covers within a year of the first recording; Lee Hazlewood, Nancy Wilson and a gender swapped French language version by Joe Dassin.
Idris Muhammed — born Leo Morris — began playing professionally while still a teenager: he was 17 when he provided Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” with the backbeat which “gave it a sexual undertone, which could be simultaneously appreciated yet denied, which was the essential character of modern popular culture up to the 1990s”. In 1967, he gave that sensitivity and swing to the opening of Saxaphonist Lou Donaldson‘s version of Billie Joe.
Those scraps of unadorned drumming became gold dust for hip hop producers in generations to come. The most famous of whom happens, as ever, to be Kanye West. Jesus Walks should probably be the first song on his best of. It’s that good.
Gentry knows what they threw off that bridge, and she’s not telling: “Those questions are of secondary importance in my mind”. Her focus was “the obvious gap between the girl and her mother … both women experience a common loss, and yet Mama and the girl are unable to recognize their mutual loss or share their grief”. It’s why the hidden details deepen the story rather than distracting from it. These people feel real. That sense of intimacy and distance, of dysfunctional community, pervades every moment of the song. From the clinging dust in the wide open fields, to the feeling that the detail of every life clutters uncomfortably into the detail of every other, and yet produces nothing much more than indifference. And so, more than 50 years later, we’re no closer to knowing what is going through the head of blank, curt narrator. The bird soars on, and reveals nothing of what it has seen.
Bookmarks is a monthly series of recommendations, recent addictions and subjects for further study.
My birthday this year delivered a quite remarkable array of releases from artists who helped define what their genres could mean for me. Firstly, The Goal, a minute and a half of poetry from beyond Leonard Cohen‘s grave. He speaks, grim and funny as ever, of “the fall, it began long ago/can’t stop the rain, can’t stop the snow”. Piano, strings and guitar — added posthumously by Leonard’s son Adam — curl around that velvety voice like smoke. There is more to come. I can’t wait.
Even more surprising is the return of Gang Starr, with DJ Premier encasing a verse from the late Guru in a glinting patchwork of a beat, all the more beautiful for the seams you can see. J. Cole guests, apparently his last time in that role; not the worst way to sign off.
Stuart Murdoch and his chums in Belle & Sebastian always sounded like the smartest and most mature 19 – 22-year-olds you’d ever met, so as they spanned their 40s and now 50s, there wasn’t all that far, emotionally, for them to go. For whatever reasons, Did the Day Go Just Like You Wanted? with it’s spiderweb melodies and tales a of boy who’s “a long haired puddle of doubt, but he’s yours” landed for me in a way nothing of their’s has for some time.
JS Ondara is a Kenyan born folkie, obsessed with Americana; his pure, keening voice does not always practically match his emotional ambitions for it, but somehow that adds to the power.
Noel Gallagher‘s genius as a songwriter is writing the loveliest/most difficult melodies that an average singer can join in with. I’ve loved his solo work, as it strips away the bombast of the Oasis years (not that I didn’t love that too), and reveals something vulnerable, even sweet, with those melodic chops completely intact.
You already know I’m not exactly a dispassionate observer of Lucky Ocean‘s. The full album of Hank Williams covers is out and I’ve included my second favourite track, his collab with Tex Perkins, Lost Highway.
I featured, a while back, Durand Jones and The Indications, a fabulous neo-soul group. Nothing has brought me more reliable joy that the playlist they’ve put together of inspirations — it’s up to 30 hours of music now, and I’ve not been bored by a second of it yet. That’s where I found The 5th Dimension’sTogether Let’s Find Love, one of those fantastic soul numbers where the beauty and power emanates from the drums and billows out through the horns and strings and voices. This set me off on a “related-aesthetic” trip that netted old favourites from Donny Hathatway, Funkadelic and The Staple Singers.
Brittany Howard‘s solo debut manages that same trick as Prince (not a comparison I make lightly); cutting a swathe through the glorious clutter she surrounds herself with, using those flawless vocal instinct and innate sense of what the funkiest thing to do next would be.
James Holt evokes the same reaction as a shopping trip were you buy yourself all the junk you would have been denied as a child — I would have LOVED his big bright driving pop and Lennonesque vocals as a 14-year-old, but I would have been hording my pocket money for the sad and serious young men I wanted the world to know I loved. Spotify and age has put some of this impulse right.
I absolutely loved Nitty Scott‘s earthy, dirty, poetic 2017 album Creature! Nevertheless, I’m happy to hear her back in a straight RnB setting, showcasing her prodigious skills as a rapper.
I just want it on the record that Mereba, with her slide guitar and programmed beats infused Kinfolk, convinced me of things Old Town Road never quite could.
Finally, The Beatles 50 year anniversary re-release of Abbey Road (enjoy it folks, after next year, we’ll have to wait another decade before we get a rash of Beatle-cash-ins) provided me easy access to a bootleg I’ve loved for a while — Paul’s home demo of Goodbye, written for Mary Hopkins, when the Lennon/McCartney byline basically guaranteed a hit. It’s a nice reminder of what a fine guitarist Paul is, but mainly, the way winsome melodies sighed out of him like breath; if the song isn’t enough evidence, listen to the final 15 seconds: a exquisite sequence that could be the basis of best song someone else would ever have written. He threw it away.
Super quick Birthday post — a collection some of my favourite break beats. As much as possible, it’s aimed at crate diggers, so I’ve tried to steer clear of anything that’s been sampled to death elsewhere. That said, you’ll see by about three quarters in, I get lazy and let some of the most obvious and frequnetly sampled breaks of all time in, just because they’re great songs.
Enjoy, and go to the climate strike if you’re not already there.
Bookmarks is an fortnightly series of recommendations, recent addictions and subjects for further study.
Apologies for a delayed, and very brief Bookmarks — time and energy have been in short supply, so I’m letting this fortnight’s tunes largely speak for themselves.
Book ending this bookmarks is the late Daniel Johnston, composer of some of the most beautiful, disarming songs of all time; that gunk covered bedroom tape sound, that voice of pure uncomprehending woe, demons like many of us can’t imagine. We will miss him terribly. I hope he knew.
Gordon Koang is a South Sudanese refugee to Australia who plays my new favourite instrument, the Thom; he and his band lock into a unspoiled groove on Clap Your Hands.
June Jones‘ woozy, weighty, heavily accented — any vocal coaches trying to teach Australian tone need look no further than her pronunciation of “home” and “rome” — voice is a distinct cocktail, that I suspect you may have to be in the mood for, but when you are, I also suspect nothing else will do.
Sound and gospel from the arresting outtake from the Majestic Arrows (from the fabulous and properly named 2013 compilation Eccentric Soul) and the great Willie Scott.
I found the thumping, trappy hip hop of Injury Reserve difficult to ignore, but hard to love. Now I just find it difficult to ignore.
Lucky Oceans‘ new single, an exquisite, haunting take on Hank WilliamsRamblin’ Man with Kasey and Bill Chambers gives me a good excuse to talk about his other legacy, and what it has meant to me.
I was fortunate enough to do a bit of work on Lucky’s unmatched and irreplaceable world music showThe Daily Planet, for the final few months of his 20 year run, before it was brought to a close in the great cultural purge that Radio National underwent towards the end of 2016. Beyond what he taught me just by knowing more about his musical blind spots than I did about my areas of expertise, he taught me a lot about what it is to be a good listener, a good consumer of music. He would listen with warmth and curiosity and more than that, with intent: It was very easy to spark his interest, and pretty tough to impress him.
I generally don’t much like the phrase “World music” – at best more or less meaningless and at worst lazy Anglo-centric shorthand for “any genre not sung in English”. But the Daily Planet rendered it meaningful, a big idea, but a specific one. Any endeavor like Dancing to Architecture, anything that tries to look at music as much in historical/global /political terms as tones and techniques operates very nervously in it’s shadow.
He sums it up better than I could in the following video, a beautiful summation of music as history, music as exchange, music as possibility. There’s a broader discussion about what a public broadcaster is for, what they can do that no one else can, but that’s for another day; in the spirit of the talk, I’ll simply encourage you to listen.
Lucky’s new album – Purple Sky, a collection of Hank Williams songs — is out later this month.
In Future Echoes we look at the evolution and influence of those songs that split off in all directions.
The melody is so brisk and direct, so immediate, it’s not at all surprising to find out it was banged out in an afternoon – as it turns out, by an 18-year-old called Carole King (born Carole Klein) while her baby played in a crib near the piano. It is a surprise that it was the child’s father who wrote the lyrics, an impressive feat of empathy and reflection for a 20-year-old bloke in 1960. But that was the division of songwriting labour between King and then husband Gerry Goffin over a decade of producing mini-masterpieces together, and while his lyrics were always an elegant adornment to King’s sprightly melodies, Will You Love Me Tomorrow must be the only time they truly do 50% of the heavy lifting in the song.
It was first a hit for The Shirelles, the first US number one for a black female group and they add the final kick; lead vocalists Shirley Owens provides a performance as restrained, intelligent and clear-eyed as the song. Doo-Wop was an inherently melodramatic genre, and like most pop that dealt with sex pre- Prince and Madonna, found its pleasurable tension in hinting, through tone and performance, at what could not be explicitly said. Not Will You Love Me Tomorrow, which is bracingly, bravely clear in content. And compared to the operatics of, say, Mel Carter, the production is relatively sparse.
The song is from the point of view of a young woman, deciding whether the promises being made tonight by a prospective lover are going to be honoured the next day. Big deal, I know, but sufficiently shocking in post-pill 1960 America to get the song banned by several radio stations. On the face of it, it all sounds a rather quaint, an 18-year-old’s idea of a big commitment. It’s not. When Owens sings ”So tell me now, and I won’t ask again”, that honesty, that agreement that responsibility for whatever turns out to be the truth will be shared, it’s, well, for lack of a better phrase, incredibly grown up. It rings as true for me at 33 as it did at 19, and I don’t trust anyone for whom the conversation in Will You Love Me Tomorrow has never once felt necessary.
The song, as hits often did back then, inspired a couple of “answer songs”, including one from The Satintones, a largely forgotten group who nevertheless earned immortality as the first to record a single for Motown. The vocal arrangement is a delight, a reminder of just how imperishable that melody is (it still sounds so new) but … look, a protagonist as smart as King/Goffin/Owens’ is going to see straight through the empty sentiment and flattery these guys are peddling.
Things have shifted by the time King’s own version comes round – as the Financial Times podcast “Life of the Song” notes, it feels wearier, like the question has been posed a few times now, and few disappointing responses have been logged. The immaculate Joni Mitchell/James Taylor harmonies are a nice reminder of why everyone’s mum owns a CD of Tapestry.
By the time Smokey Robinson gets his hands on it – in full Afro/tache/quiet storm early 70s mode – the lyrics have become more or less embroidery. What Smokey wants to say with the song, he’ll say with strings and quivering falsetto, thank you very much. I’m a real soft touch for this era, those nimble basslines tiptoeing along under lush strings and angelic horns, but if you’re not, I merely encourage to listen through once and pay special attention at 2 minutes 6 seconds and again at 3 minutes 51.
Devil in a New Dressis the only track on Kanye West’s decadent masterpiece My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy that he didn’t produce – and, gifted talent spotter he is, he ceded control on the right track. Bink!’s flipping of Smokey’s version — plucking out two moments that are improvised around the original melody and looping them into a circle — glistens with the possibility of a city skyline, as the longing in Smokey’s voice is engulfed in synths and guitar. Like the rest of the album, the lyrics play on the conflict between religion and more earthly desires (“we love Jesus, but you done learned a lot from Satan”). Conscious or not, his worry that his companion for the night only wants his money echoes the original song: whatever happens, I just don’t want to be used.
She may well have been the greatest song interpreter of her generation, but perhaps Amy Winehouse wasn’t quite there yet with her version for the Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason soundtrack in 2004, which felt oddly saccharine and perfunctory. After her death it fell to Mark Ronson, as he had done onBack to Black to find the right settings for her performance, which he did with great thumping melodramatic horns for the posthumous Lioness: Hidden Treasures, another indication, as if any were needed, of what a shocking waste it all was.
Finally, we have Jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington who, like the song, has collaborated with artists across genres. In his billowing, diffuse version, snatches of the melody arrive in his sax like one of those dreams where you think you’ve written one of the greatest songs of all time, only to wake and find someone’s listening to it in another room. The 2018 EP on which this is featured is called The Choice.
Such are the possibilities of King’s melody – no version (except, perhaps, the original) tops any other. It all rests on the way the performer, on the word “completely”, has to draw the melody to the back of the throat, like the deep breath before a decision you can never take back.
Dancing to Architecture 