2020 – Music in review

By Francelino de Azevedo

I am back to my tradition of writing about my to-listen lists from the previous year. Last year, I actually listened to a full list of 168 music releases from 2019, but in the midst of the pandemic, I didn’t have the will to write an overview of what I found. This year I managed to muster the strength to write this article. I have listened to 175 records released in 2020, the greatest amount so far, and this is what I think about them.

2020 was a year marked by the pandemic and its respective quarantine, a year of great isolation. One record that was notable for capturing this feeling was Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters. The international critical consensus is that it was the album of the year, and it indeed is a great emotional journey that, despite not having been written about the pandemic, seems to have “married” extremely well with the zeitgeist. I tend to listen to records the year after they came out, however, so the record that really marked my period of greatest isolation was from the 2019 list, God Is Not a Terrorist by Ustad Naseeruddin Saami, and we’ll return to him later. Another singer-songwriter critical darling was Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers, a beautiful, personal and talkative album, I could see why many loved it, although for me it was nothing past “good”. Popstar Taylor Swift also released two albums in this quieter, more personal style, perhaps trying to emulate the success of 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell, but both were pretty weak.

The female popstar figure was rather present in last year’s best records lists, often bringing a dance-pop sound. The worst of the batch was Sawayama, by Japanese-English Rina Sawayama, who made the horrible decision to rescue the early 00s pop sound of artists like Britney Spears and Max Martin, and I have no idea why. Modern dance-pop production is very good, which is the strong point of records like Róisín Machine by Róisín Murphy, How I’m Feeling Now by Charli XCX and *What’s Your Pleasure? * by Jessie Ware. All three of these slip up, however, by having low energy in general. My favourite of this style turned out to be Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia, competent and with beautiful choruses. Grimes’ new record, Miss Anthropocene, still has some elements of what made her music very good, but it’s very aimless. Another one that lost a lot was Kali Uchis, her Sin miedo (del amor y otros demonios) ∞, which more closely resembles the bland but atmospheric sound of artists like Kelela than her great Isolation. A different Colombian woman released a better work, Lido Pimienta and her Miss Colombia brought a rich sound that vaguely reminds me of Björk, the single Nada was particularly good.

Among Brazilian records, the most critically acclaimed was Bom mesmo é estar debaixo d’água by Luedji Luna. It is MPB with jazzy leanings a la Djavan that sometimes loses the thread of the melody but never the thread of the lyrics. Luedji herself has an amazingly open and emotional vocal delivery that carries the album. A bit similar, but leaning more towards bossa nova is Ilessi’s Dama de espadas, which is very good on the more upbeat tracks, but extremely boring when doing pure bossa. Mateus Aleluia has in Olorum an evolution of the sound of his Fogueira doce; my biggest criticism of his previous record was the excessive lightness, remedied with intensity aplenty. Zé Manoel made poetic piano-based MPB in his Do meu coração nu. The sentiments may be stronger than the melodies, but those are still beautiful, especially the collaboration with Grupo Bongar in No rio das lembranças, one of the best songs of the year. Two members of Metá Metá, one of my favourite groups, released solo albums in 2020: Thiago França messes with buzzing saxes in Kd vcs, but the highlight is Rastilho by Kiko Dinucci. It’s a beautiful guitar recital, playing with textures and melodies. The melodies are catchy, it’s a great listening experience, but it lacks something more emotionally impactful to be compared to the best records of his career.

My all-time favourite musician, Paul McCartney, released McCartney III, the sequel to II from 1980. Like the previous McCartney self-titled albums, it is more charming and creative than brilliant, but it certainly fits well into his discography with its pop-folk-eclectic sound. Not bad for a man who is almost in his 80s. To put an end to this cloddish idea that musicians lose something with old age, the Sparks brothers Ron (75) and Russell (72) are as creative and energetic on A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip as they were on their classic records of the 70s. On the first few listens, I dismissed Para la espera as just Silvio Rodríguez on autopilot. But the truth is that Silvio, whether on autopilot or not, always brings a show of humanity and emotion in his vocal delivery, in simple but effective melodies. Rough and Rowdy Ways is a very Bob Dylan Bob Dylan record. 6-minute songs repeating the same melodic stanza, with different lyrics, with the focus being on how those lyrics progress. Not for me. The 17-minute song talking about Kennedy’s life is unbearable!

I also noticed an interesting trend of great MPB legends teaming up with younger notable artists to make an EP. Existe amor unites Milton Nascimento and Criolo, and Gilberto Gil and BaianaSystem launched their Gil Baiana ao vivo em Salvador. Both are good, and interesting, but they don’t say anything new. Baiana’s instrumental strength makes me want an entire solo album of them live however. Gil also recorded a beautiful single with Chico Buarque, Sob pressão, as the theme song to a series about doctors dealing with the pandemic. Mixing celebration and protest, Acorda amor brings a selection of good to great songs, with good to great new performers, some versions being better than the originals. Onze – Músicas inéditas de Adoniran Barbosa is exactly what it says on the tin, and the songs are all great, as expected from Adoniran, but the interpreters are not always the most adequate. Who had the idiotic idea to invite the soporific Rubel??

Compilations of more obscure Latin American genres abounded. The weakest was Guasá, cununo y marimba, which brings the currulao genre from the Colombian Pacific coast, nice, but I’ve heard better examples of this genre. Color de trópico compiles Venezuelan music from the 60s and 70s, it is mostly instrumental and, despite being very jazz-oriented, rousing. La locura de Machuca 1975-1980 portrays the Colombian underground full of psychedelic cumbias and champetas, and some specific tracks are wonderful. Two other compilations close out my top 10 of the year, so I’ll mention them later. The single artist compilation by Peruvian cumbia group Ranil y su Conjunto Tropical is also very good, with extremely catchy guitar lines. The other Peruvian artist I listened to is of the same quality, but of an extremely different style. Pedro Mo brings in his Urku runa short and solid hip hop with excellent flow, the first two songs are particularly strong.

In Brazilian hip hop, several albums stood out. The most praised was O líder em movimento by Bk’, which to me is incomprehensible! He rhymes “nisso” with “disso”, “doido” with “soco”, his flow is bad, it is honestly the worst I’ve heard this year! Djonga’s Histórias da minha área, on the other hand, did not receive as good a reception as his previous ones, but for me it was a clear evolution, in a search for more pop sounds and less shouting. The same move was taken by Hot & Oreia in their Crianças selvagens; good hooks, weaker flow, but the striking production hides the flaws and maximizes strengths. Excellent samples. Marcelo D2’s Assim tocam os meus tambores is a very collective record, very much of the pandemic, with an atmosphere of “videoconference between friends in social isolation”, which gives it an extra charm. At the same time, the songwriting also seems weaker than his previous Amar é para os fortes. The two best records of this wave escape the RJ-SP axis. From Pará, Pelé do Manifesto’s Gueto flow, preto show has good lyrics with lots of energy, carefully-crafted hooks and the beats, if not extremely original, fulfill their purpose with merits. I loved his usage of guitar samples. Rapadura, from Ceará, took many years to make his Universo do canto falado, which attempts to take a fusional trip of hip hop and countless genres from all over Brazil, cantoria, baião, carimbó, aboio, reggae, etc. It is exactly what I feel the national hip hop scene lacks, and by itself it is a drive to innovate music that I haven’t seen in a while, as lately most people are searching for their individual sound, instead of inventing a new movement that can be built upon by others. For all of this, I hoped to enjoy this record a bit more, to actually have come to love for it, but it fell just a bit short of that, and I shall look forward to Rapadura’s future works to see if they can break this barrier in me.

Internationally, chelmico’s Maze is a very Japanese and chill hip hop with good hooks; the opener Eezy breezy is an immediate classic. In the US, surprisingly few rappers got critical commendation in 2020. I only placed three on my list, all very good old acquaintances. Alfredo, the collaboration between Freddie Gibbs and The Alchemist just needed more memorable hooks to level up. clipping.’s Visions of Bodies Being Burned brings back the sound of their previous album, but more perfected. Run the Jewels released RTJ4 but they might as well have called it Ultra Super RTJ1 Turbo: The New Challengers, not that there’s anything wrong with that, I love their sound. A fresher hip hop sound came from England: Pa Salieu’s Send Them to Coventry with its Afroswing-ish production and a lot of strength on the hooks. Even more innovative was the group Onipa, of Ghanaian origin, which mixes Afro-British hip hop with a dozen different genres from all over Africa. The result, We No Be Machine, is a very long record, 1 hour long and 20 tracks, which affected me in different ways. I admire the concept, but overall, I thought the good tracks were diluted among forgettable ones, and it could greatly benefit from more focus.

Africa, which by the way shows itself more and more electronic. Nihiloxica finally released their first LP, Kaloli, with the same nervous percussion as the previous EPs, but now with more atmosphere. Balani fou by DJ Diaki is perhaps the epitome of ultra-high bpm electronic music, highlighted in the brilliant track Show Time Mix. Tunisian artist Ammar 808 seems to have taken a step back. Instead of further refining the electronically modernized North African sound of his previous album, he left for Chennai, South India, inviting exponents of Carnatic music to make a new stew in Global Control / Invisible Invasion. My impression is that he starts too many projects and doesn’t fully finishes them. The self-titled album by South Africans Keleketla! is kind of boring, but contains a really good song, Crystallise featuring rapper Yugen Blackrok. Israeli Kutiman used recordings made in the villages of the Wachaga people of Tanzania, to make the homonymous album, fashioning them into funky songs. Msafiri Zawose, of whom I am a fan, returns on an EP with the Hispanic-British group Penya, named Penya Safari. To me it sounds a lot like a sample from Msafiri’s previous album, Uhamiaji; the same rhythms with textured percussions that produce good stimuli in the brain.

The typically British genre of grime started to get a national Brazilian production. SD9’s 40˚.40 is nothing more than ok, but CESRV, Fleezus & Febem’s Brime! showed more potential, especially the opener Raddim. Another unusual pair was of idiosyncratic “forró” records. I use the quotes because Trio Pó-de-Serra’s Forró abstrato is everything but forró: rather it is improvisation of textures and noises, a waste of time. More interesting was Forrível by Satanique Samba Trio, which combines forró and horror synth, still worth listening more due to the proposal than for the music itself. Inside Brazilian rock, Julico’s Ikê maré seeks to rescue energy of the seventies, with touches of MPB, soul and psychedelia, pleasing from beginning to end. Equally good is Rolê nas ruínas by Mateusfazenorock, quite eclectic, experimenting fusions with funk carioca on As vozes da cabeça, or with reggae in Névoa.

The last Brazilian record that I will mention before my list of favourites is Kaatayra’s Toda história pela frente, a metal album that I surprisingly enjoyed at various moments. The guitar is very atmospheric and interesting, although not enough to justify the whole record; the percussion is impressive, especially at a specific moment on the track Toda mágoa do mundo; and the vocals don’t shit everything up as usual in the genre. Which is the case of Mestarin kynsi by the Finnish group Oranssi Pazuzu, the hilarious voice sounds like a goblin henchman of a cartoon evil sorcerer, complaining that he could not kidnap the enchanted princess. And since we’re talking about trash, I must mention a trio of the year’s worst. Jacob Collier returns in Djesse Vol. 3 with his ultra-complex sound without understanding what makes a song good. It is pitiful how he seems so confident in being “funky”. The 1975’s Notes on a Conditional Form begins with a five-minute speech on climate change and then gets into a Bon Iver-ish vibe. The worst album of the year was The Microphones’ Microphones in 2020: I did my humble review on this work here.

But let’s get back to talking about good stuff, how about moving to Asia? Meni mana by the Tuvan group Alash is competent, but ended up overshadowed by another similar record that is among my favourites. Streaming, CD, Record by Gesu No Kiwami Otome is progressive pop that unfortunately has less energy than their previous Daruma ringo. Ichiko Aoba’s Adan no kaze is a musical painting of ethereal scenery. Sweet but without much substance, like a frosting without a cake below it. Underneath the Dangsan Tree Tonight by Chudahye Chagis is a very creative and innovative album that depends on you enjoying the vocals. I didn’t but I still respect the overall sound. Xuefei Yang’s Sketches of China is a selection of pieces for solo guitar by Chinese composers from the ancient dynasties to modern times. Being very long and similar-sounding, the beautiful melodies end up coming and going without leaving any strong impact. Taiwanese singer Abao theoretically brings in Kinakaian a modernization of the music of the Paiwan indigenous people of Taiwan, but in practice it is more of a modern R&B record. A record that charmed me was RAAZ by the Iranians Hooshyar Khayam and Bamdad Afshar, the first classically educated, the second an adept of electronic music and cinematographic soundtracks. The two teamed up with a group of three singers and two instrumentalists from the Balochistan region, split between Iran and Pakistan and with its own culture and language, and the result manages to be everything at the same time: traditional and modern, erudite and popular, avant-garde and restorative.

This type of mixture was a trend in Europe. Jrpjej’s Qorror reconstructs Circassian music in a different but dark and atmospheric way, although I have much more love for the more traditional dance-centered energy. The Occitan ensemble Cocanha brings in its Puput a polyphony of kaleidoscopic effect with sparse instrumentation that complements it well. Raul Refree, known for having produced Rosalía’s innovative sound, has now tackled fado together with Portuguese singer Carolina, in Lina_Raul Refree. This time the changes are smaller, more in the production and less in the structure of the songs, but everything meshes well. Hostis humani generis by Ye Banished Privateers consists in Swedish singers playing Irish sailors on a concept album with a weak plot but good music. Moving to the more erudite area, Firenze 1350: Un jardin médiéval florentin by the Sollazzo Ensemble under the director Anna Danilevskaia is exactly what the record’s name record says: songs by Italian composers from the 14th century. Beautiful, but they often go in and out of the head without much impact. Tunisian Ghalia Benali and Austrian Romina Lischka made in Call to Prayer a fusion of Arab, European and, in some tracks, Indian classical traditions where instrumental textures and vocal emotions are weaved together in a slow and thoughtful, but never boring, way. Fusions with North Africa set the tone for another two albums, both mixing jazz with Arab, Andalusian and Moroccan gnawa music. Magic Spirit Quartet by Majid Bekkas, Goran Kajfeš, Jesper Nordenstöm & Stefan Pasborg is too slow and jazzy for the gnawa energy to stand out. JISR’s too far away makes a much stronger and more nutritious stew, suprisingly homogeneous and organic.

Gnawa’s homeland also bore a good mix of the genre, this time with rock and blues: they don’t even look like separate genres in Bab L’ Bluz’s Nayda. Blues also features in Tamikrest’s Tamotaït, and I can easily say Ousmane ag Mossa is one of the greatest guitarists of the present time, although the album itself is marred by sameness and loss of strength by the ending. Tidiane Thiam is also a great guitarist, albeit in a completely different style, and his Siftorde consists of acoustic treatises on nostalgia, simple and touching, but with low energy. Still on guitar-based music, we’ve had two good bluesy records from Songhai people: Lindé by Afel Bocoum and Optimisme by Songhoy Blues. Sharhabil Ahmed’s The King of Sudanese Jazz is actually all about rock ‘n’ roll, a compilation of six vigorous tracks from an undated past, Zulum aldunya is specifically wonderful! Malian icon Oumou Sangaré’s Acoustic is a little unnecessary: it brings the same songs from her previous Mogoya with slightly different acoustic arrangements, that are always in my opinion also slightly inferior. The Dancing Devils of Djibouti by Groupe RTD brings together the biggest names in Djibouti making swinging funky music. Tinn tout by Danyel Waro features traditional maloya songs, with good vocal delivery and rhythmic pressure. The songs themselves are large and repetitive, the disc is an hour and thirteen minutes long, and not all tracks maintain the same standard as the best ones. In the world of African jazz, we had To Know Without Knowing, a forgettable collaboration between the Australians Black Jesus Experience and Ethiopian legend Mulatu Astatke. I much preferred the work of the other father of Ethio-jazz, Hailu Mergia, whose Yene mircha tales great care the melodies, with the help of Alemseged Kebede’s wonderful bass that often steals the show. Another show-stealer is Tony Allen’s drumming in his last work, Rejoice, with South African Hugh Masekela. But the best African record of the year for me was Kalan teban by Aly Keïta, Jan Galega Brönnimann & Lucas Niggli. The Malian’s name is not at the front for no reason, because although the two Cameroonians do a good job, it’s his gigantic balafon that dominates the soundscapes here.

To close Latin America, I would like to mention Rita Indiana’s eclectic Mandinga Times, a collection of Caribbean music linked by a thread of anti-capitalist stories. After paying homage to her Musas, Natalia Lafourcade now tackles traditional Mexican music in Un canto por México Vol. 1. Her voice is very beautiful, but I think the repertoire was not very good, it was a bit tacky and low energy, especially compared to the opener, folkloric song El balajú. Someone else who has recorded this same song has returned with a notable single. Chéni (Miedo) is perhaps the best song by La Bruja de Texcoco, and I eagerly await to hear what she has in store in the future. The Panamanian group Señor Loop continues in their guitar rock La leña que prende madera. They don’t reinvent the wheel, but still bring a fresh and new sound, even if it doesn’t have the same high climaxes as the previous Vikorg. Chilean Gepe also doesn’t repeat the same quality of his previous album, Folclor imaginario, in his new Ulyse. It is not the poppier sound to blame, but rather the songwriting itself which, while still good, isn’t on the same level.

My beloved Animal Collective continue in their more ambient sounds in Bridge to Quiet. It’s not exactly my thing, but it’s very good at what it attempts, it doesn’t owe anything to Here Comes the Indian for example. The one who got to reinvent psychedelia was Yves Tumor in his Heaven to a Tortured Mind. It took me a while to enjoy their voice, but I’m already curious to delve into their discography, and Kerosene! is pure fire. French Canadian Klô Pelgag, in turn, rescued the ethereal pop of the Cocteau Twins in her Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs. Room for the Moon by Russian Tatar Kate NV is progressive pop with a lot of rhythmic and textural experimentation, and especially the tracks with more vocal parts are really good. In the neo-soul universe, Moses Sumney returns with græ, and I, having liked his previous Aromanticism a lot, felt that something was lost in this one, although I can’t consciously point out what. The opposite movement was made by the anonymous ensemble Sault. Untitled (Black Is) is an experimental mix between R&B and soul, with a wide variation both in song formats, but also in song quality; everything good about it was amplified, and the weaknesses removed, in the subsequent Untitled (Rise).

2020 also got the first official release of an artist whose music I have a special affection and concern for. Jerônimo is a busker who sings his music on buses in my hometown Recife as well as in Maceió, capital of Alagoas, the neighboring state to the south. His song Gatinho angora is folkloric around these parts, with unofficial recordings of it circulating since at least 2008. It and his other song, O amor do mudo e da muda, have finally been released on all official streaming platforms, and are very good melodically, in addition to the intentional and unintentional comedy they bring. I am very glad to see his art perpetuated.

Among the albums released last year, ten were the ones which stood over the others as my favourites. Of these, two don’t contain new music, they are compilations of older material, and thus, I will not list them in order. Disques Debs International Vol. 2: Cadence Revolution 1973 – 1981 does for the small French Caribbean islands what my beloved African Scream Contest did for Benin: a potent exhibition of their vibrancy. Covering the entire world, Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World’s Music is of such enormous historical value that it is difficult to assess purely musically, certainly unmissable. My eighth favourite album of 2020 is Jangar by the Mongolian band Khusugtun. It does not reinvent Mongolian music, but brings in its 55 minutes of length a great diversity of styles and emotions. In seventh place is Ustad Saami’s Pakistan Is for the Peaceful, that I have mentioned previously. It is very beautiful, but more monolithic, placid and conflict-free than the previous God Is Not a Terrorist, which makes it lose something.

It’s common practice for music fans to try and build a narrative out of an artist’s discography. Each album has a role to play: the awkward beginning; the weird experimental one that divides the fans; the celebrated masterpiece; the rawer, quieter, more personal album; etc. In the 20-year span of Sufjan Stevens’ career, basically every record of his has fallen into one of these categories… until this last one. The Ascension hasn’t fallen on critics’ graces perhaps for being Sufjan’s least “essential” album, but on the other hand it contains a bit of everything that makes his music fascinating, and I place it in sixth place on my list. On the fifth spot, Ex Silentio’s Lethe brings renaissance and medieval music originating in Spain, France and Turkey, with a golden musical unity that transports the listener to an idealised version of those times. The best Brazilian album of the year is found in fourth place in my list: Orquestra Afrosinfônica’s Orín, a língua dos anjos. The symphonising of afoxé music is a brilliant proposal, and they execute it with melodic and instrumental richness combined with delicate strength.

In third place, the Thracian ensemble Evritiki Zygia’s Ormenion. By mixing the multi-ethnic Thracian traditions with electronic touches, they unveiled a very percussive and energetic, contagious, sound. Fleet Foxes’ Shore is my number two album of the year. It is the perfect sequel to the turbulent Crack-Up, as it musically translates the feeling of having gone through a storm, the sun finally breaking through the clouds after calamitous rains. At last, my album of the year 2020 was Ella by Cuban rapper La Dame Blanche. I have been following her work for a while, and it seems that now her sound is finally fully ripe. All her strong suites, energy, vocal delivery, catchy hooks, are as fresh as mangoes in springtime.

Cats: Beyond Any Meaning

 

By Dina Levina

In nearly every person’s life I’m sure there comes a moment, perhaps not even once nor twice, when they ask themselves – where am I going? Am I good or bad? Is not my life devoid of purpose, meaning? One thing is certain – of where I am going today I’m fully aware. Through snow and slush I carry these bothersome thoughts to a cinema in the middle of the city I never loved. There’s a huge sinister Soviet mosaic on one side of the building, a monstrous billboard with oil company ads upfront, summing up the country perfectly. How dreadful it must be with Russian dubbing I’ll never know – some things are better left unexplored. I’m mildly scared – the gifs I’ve been sent the other day disturbed me – yet it’s the last chance to see the movie and I’m grabbing at it.

The final screening of CATS is about to happen at the same place where I saw the local premiere of The Room a few years back: symbolic. These two are now being compared but they’re different. The Room makes sense. At its core there’s a simple dramatic narrative that works despite all. The Room is relatable. The thing I’m about to witness is beyond the realms of relatability. Since drugs are illegal, I’m treating it as a way of having a trip, good or bad. Turns out it’s gonna be both at once. The ticket number ends in 666, the number of the beast. It’s early morning and the theatre is empty but for a bunch of sleepy employees. In the end it’s only me and five weird-looking ladies in the auditorium when darkness falls. It’s about to begin.

Unsettling – the only word that comes to mind from the very first seconds. It feels wrong and you’re not entirely sure why. I glimpse a cemetery, the wrong shapes, the shadows. Five minutes in and I cannot stop laughing. Crying. Trying to sneak a message to a friend to share the experience but the feelings are impossible to convey. I end up just typing “help” and promptly hide the phone – can’t miss a single second of what begins to unravel before me. The music sounds twisted, cheap, yet somehow I don’t feel violated by what the movie has done with the songs. I soak it all in greedily, I revel in it. It’s beautiful. I’m so glad it exists.

Back in 1981, the original London production could boast it all – the music, the vocals, the acting, it was damn good. The show is so obscenely popular for a reason. The only thing that ever irked me about it was the lyrics. Listed in the “light poetry” section on Wikipedia, the playful verses T. S. Eliot once wrote for his godchildren gained a certain level of darkish absurdity when first performed altogether on stage. They sound bizarre but it all depends on the context. What now stands out as stunningly misshapen in the movie was perfectly fine in the musical. The nonsensical silliness with the undertones of macabre that worked wonders in the London recording was soon lost. The musical went to Broadway and downhill, full dumb onstage and full bonkers onscreen.

The story that I’m seeing now is an abomination. As minutes go by, confusion deepens. Here come the cockroaches, the dark unidentified figures crawling on the walls, straight out of a horror movie. This is like someone’s bad trip. How, why, who was it made for? The feeble attempts to insert an intelligible plot into this carnival of madness keep failing, the story has no heartbeat. Like the Frankenstein Monster, it lives despite being essentially dead. It goes on and on, uneven, with moments of relative calm followed by yet another burst of the inexplicable. Victoria is forced to be the main character and drags the plot around like a dead limb. The other cats just spook me. It’s frightening. Grizabella’s snot is overwhelming. Bustopher Jones is suddenly, flamboyantly gay, except for in the Russian subtitles of which I have a glimpse or two, then look away in disgust. The translation lives its own twisted life I don’t care for. The horror is aplenty without it.

The moist, overly emotional faces, the sizes shifting, the breasts. Vaguely I feel that what’s going on with the breasts is wrong but it’s the ears that unsettle me the most. Then I’m hit in the face with the first joke about castration. Far too many gags based on reproductive organs follow considering the unnatural creatures onscreen don’t have any. All the attempts at cat-themed jokes give me chills. Mungojerrie and Rumpleteaser act more like a couple than a pair of siblings which adds a hint of incest to the brew. The fact that they bring back the original jazzy version of my favourite song is refreshing but is beside the point now. This movie is making me very, very happy for all the wrong reasons.

When Dame Judi Dench appears, I spot the wedding ring on her finger – jackpot! It’s the first undercooked copy retched up by the studio in their gluttonous haste. Here it has never been updated, the CGI’s in all its fucked up glory. I feel blessed. The close-ups seem too much, the wide shots seem too much, the visuals are hallucinatory and I’m lost in the uncanny valley of fear. With Dench, new depths of scary open up. Old Deuteronomy is horrifyingly sexual and it shouldn’t be like that. Then, the Jellicle Ball happens. Unnatural, ungodly thing. This, I imagine, is what life’s like on heavy drugs. Things are happening too fast. I think of Dante’s Purgatory. Are they all dead? The dancers, the body horror. Did I just see Idris Elba naked? Is it a drug orgy in a PG-rated movie? I don’t understand what’s happening but it’s giving me mystical powers. Now clairvoyant, I can see Tom Hooper’s future career or rather the absence of it. As the ball concludes, at last I understand there is no god. It’s a relief.

Indescribable things follow and it’s time for Mr. Mistoffelees, the Original Conjuring cat. I love him dearly but only when his real name is Wayne Sleep, the Original Performing human. In the 1981 musical his song is one of the best, especially since I keep hearing “he can play any trick with a cock” instead of “cork” each time I listen. The character fascinates me. For all I know, he may not even be a mister – the lyrics hint at a possible case of mistaken identity as in the end he “produced seven kittens right out of a hat” which to me sounds a lot like giving birth. The poem is playful and silly but the West End song ends in such a macabre phantom-of-the-opera-esque way it sounds more like Mr. Mephistopheles. I’m thinking that maybe the darkness has always been there and finally surfaced in the movie to devour all. Onscreen, the once brilliant song is utterly fucked. All of them are. The writers try to force the role of Victoria’s love interest upon Mr. Mistoffelees but like the rest it doesn’t work.

After this botched up number the most hellish sequence in the history of cinema transpires. I finally manage to pinpoint the genre – it’s horror. Sir Ian McKellen aka Gus The Theatre cat aka Asparagus is responsible for the most of it. Sir Ian McKellen snarling, Sir Ian McKellen hissing, Sir Ian McKellen licking something dismally in a dark corner. When the boat horror ends it feels like it’s already been too long but the story crawls further on. Now, an uncomfortably close close-up of Dame Judi persists, looming. I think she’s singing at me, I’m not sure of anything anymore. “Beyond any meaning” she utters, that phrase sticks with me. I fail to grasp the rest. I see light, I see Trafalgar square. What’s happening onscreen feels weirdly and appropriately religious. Like life itself, it doesn’t make sense. The credits roll at last and I realize the scariest part of the whole experience – my five fellow viewers never laughed.

Now, how do I go on with my day? I don’t know. I don’t care. People are passing me by – can they detect the mad glint in my eye? Have they seen what I’ve seen? It is like drugs, the giggles won’t cease. I try to hide them under my scarf, pop into a pie shop, can’t master the names of the fillings and just blurt out something barely intelligible with a sickly smile. In the metro an old lady in a gray fur coat and hat sits down in front of me and I expect her to sing but she doesn’t. Someone leaves a bag under a seat, a woman presses the intercom to inform the driver but keeps talking before her turn. The driver cannot hear her. She keeps doing it over and over again, the driver’s voice starts to tremble. She doesn’t understand. It feels like the movie has seeped into the fabric of reality. Outside in the street, a grim-looking lady suddenly speaks as I pass her by – come, buy fresh beer. She only speaks to me. She knows. I step over a used syringe in the dirt. I need to be in the comfort of my home as soon as possible.

“Who’s a good, real cat” I mumble repeatedly while vigorously petting Manon in the kitchen. I’m still riding the high, a feeling I’ve never experienced before – of horror mixed with elation and sick glee. For some incomprehensible reason an Alan Cumming song I heard years ago pops up in my head. “Taylor, the Latte Boy, bring me java, bring me joy!” I think it’s about a sexy barista. For a minute it saves me from the perverted movie version of Magical Mr. Mistoffelees but then the horror returns, obscuring all thought. There’s asparagus on my kitchen table – I’ve never tried it before and was planning to roast it today. Now it only reminds me of the impenetrable darkness of Sir Ian. I’ll never know what it’d taste like without Gus the Theatre cat in the back of my mind. Nothing will ever be the same.

On the eve of the screening I was forced to look at myself, to ponder on good and evil. My life is a joke, my actions questionable. I have no idea where I’m going. I do things without thinking and sometimes it’s somewhat fun but not for long. Is there a point to anything at all? What does my heart desire? Do I even have one? Does love exist? Do I need five children and a lawnmower? Strangely, the fucked up, twisted thing I just saw gives me the answer: it simply doesn’t matter. Some things are perceived as good, some things are considered bad yet they can still bring you pure undiluted joy, and some things are just beyond any meaning. Life doesn’t make sense and it shouldn’t.

There’s a special CATS episode on the H. P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast because of course there is. Someday I want to listen to that. As for everything else, who the fuck cares.

2018 em análise – melhores e piores álbuns do ano

Por Francelino Prazeres de Azevedo Filho

2018 foi um ótimo ano para a música. Desde que comecei a fazer este projeto de análise crítica do ano, eu nunca tinha encontrado tantos álbuns que amei. Mas não vamos colocar o carro antes dos bois. Olá a todos, meu nome é Francelino, e eu escutei 148 lançamentos musicais do ano 2018. Os álbuns, como de costume, foram selecionados de listas de melhores do ano, recomendados por amigos, foram novos lançamentos de alguns dos meus músicos preferidos, ou simplesmente chamaram minha atenção por algum motivo. Este é o resumo do que achei.

As listas dos críticos me fizeram escutar a novos materiais de artistas aclamados cujo trabalho anterior não me deixou uma impressão positiva, e eu acabei gostando. Car Seat Headrest me incomodou com seu Teens of Denial de 2016, mas seu novo Twin Fantasy não foi desagradável, apesar de não ter um pingo de originalidade, nem nenhuma melodia excepcional. Para dias ruins de Mahmundi puxou muito de Djavan e Tim Maia, melhorando muito o som de seu insosso disco autointitulado. Be the cowboy de Mitski foi um dos álbuns mais prestigiados do ano passado, mas para mim ele foi só bonzinho. Sua proposta é de um pop-rock com foco intimista, mostrando o âmago da cantora. Para isso ela faz o que eu tanto odeio, que é o uso de letras sem métrica, nem versos claros, nem rima. Isso não chega a atrapalhar, já que as melodias são consistentes, ainda que não das melhores. O mais surpreendente desta leva foi o Aviary de Julia Holter, uma sequência deslumbrante e diversa de pop polifônico, cuja ordem no disco fez com que cada faixa, e cada elemento das faixas, contrastasse com os outros. Foi um pouco longo demais, porém.

Dentre todos os músicos vivos, não há um que eu ame tanto quanto Paul McCartney. No entanto, seu Egypt Station não manteve o padrão de qualidade dos seus últimos lançamentos, e tem um começo particularmente genérico. Mas talvez seja assim intencionalmente, para compensar o single bizarro Fuh You. Uma sopa de elementos incaracterísticos, que soam chocantemente horríveis na primeira escutada, mas que, ao ouvir mais, não pude deixar de admirar o quão ousada e autoconsciente ela é. Um dos melhores exemplos do fenômeno “tão ruim que é bom” na música. A parte final do disco dá uma guinada positiva, com uma estrutura diversa e várias faixas excelentes. Outro ídolo meu, David Byrne, lançou um bom disco, American Utopia, que só pode ser descrito como sendo “muito David Byrne”. Spiritualized me desapontou com seu And Nothing Hurt, parece que baixou o espírito de Galaxie 500 em Jason Pierce, sendo muito menos melódico e intenso que o maravilhoso Sweet Heart Sweet Light. O Tangerine Reef do Animal Collective é uma sessão de psicodelia ambiente despretensiosa, gravada em um único take, e diferente de muita coisa ambiente por aí, nunca chega a ser tedioso. MGMT inaugurou um novo som em seu Little Dark Age, um synthpop denso e prateado, puxado na new wave, mas ainda peguento. Rebound de Eleanor Friedberger, é um disco de pop lentinho, mas que não chega a ser letárgico. Não atinge o nível nem melódico nem de inovação dos discos dela nos Fiery Furnaces, mas ainda assim é bem sólido. Adoro sua voz.

O Cordel do Fogo Encantado lançou seu primeiro disco desde 2005, Viagem ao coração do Sol, e retornou com maestria ao seu som tradicional. Todos os elementos estão aqui, os violões, a percussão, a ardente poesia de Lirinha. O disco é sólido em todos os aspectos, mas não atinge o poder instrumental do primeiro, nem os ganchos pop-poéticos de Transfiguração, ou mesmo uma única canção-chave que se destaca acima de todas as outras como Na veia foi n’O palhaço do circo sem futuro. Pelo contrário, é um disco muito bom, mas sem cruzar um certo limiar de excelência. Gilberto Gil lançou seu Ok Ok Ok para marcar a recuperação de sua saúde, que passou por diversos problemas desde 2016.  É um álbum cheio de amor à vida e à família, ainda que não de vigor.

A colega de tropicália de Gil, Gal Costa, também figurou na minha lista com seu A pele do futuro, um pop midtempo com climão de anos 70, que chega à fronteira do cafona, mas não a cruza. O MPB feminino teve muitos destaques este ano, com claras tendências: produção eletronizada, pelo menos uma canção sobre orixás e liberdade para falar de sexo abertamente, muitas vezes na primeira pessoa. Cavala de Maria Beraldo é o mais fraco dos que eu escutei, pura conversa. TODXS de Ana Cañas tem a melhor capa do ano, e o disco é agradável, com uma puxada arrastada pro R&B. Até a banda Carne Doce entrou nesta onda, com Tônus, um disco muito mais “conversador” que os anteriores. A mudança foi bem-vinda, ficou um pacote mais coeso. Azul moderno de Luiza Lian talvez se destacasse mais em outros anos, mas segue fielmente esta tendência, e neste mesmo ano ouvi vários discos seguindo essa linha e é preciso um bocado para se destacar. O disco é bom mas a concorrência é melhor. Trança de Ava Rocha e o disco autointitulado do conjunto Mulamba são mais irregulares, com uma diversidade de gêneros e emoções, e grandes pontos altos, mas também pontos baixos. O melhor da leva é Taurina de Anelis Assumpção, com uma combinação natural de letras e melodias, ainda que na minha opinião faltou um refrão-clímax em certas músicas. Um disco que me decepcionou foi Filha de mil mulheres de Clau Aniz. Escutei imaginando que seria mais um desta linha, e era um pop letárgico, onde tudo soa comprido demais. Outro chatíssimo, o pior disco do ano para mim, foi Casas, de Rubel. Parece que, para o artista, só é preciso falar com voz macia umas banalidades pseudopoéticas e botar uns violinos e sintetizadores no fundo, que já pode chamar de música.

O hip hop brasileiro continua a tendência de 2017, trap cru. Baco Exú do Blues, Djonga e BK’ lançaram álbuns que eu definitivamente não gostei. Mas dentro deste estilo, curti Comunista rico de Diomedes Chinaski e S. C. A. de FBC, este último também estende a mão para o boom bap dos anos 90. Ambulante de Karol Conká não foi tão apreciado pela crítica quanto seu anterior Batuk Freak, mas para mim é da mesma qualidade. Enquanto o outro trazia influências mais brasileiras, este bebe do trap brilhoso norte-americano e do reggaeton. O melhor disco do hip-hop nacional de 2018 foi Amar é para os fortes, de Marcelo D2, para o qual eu tive que escrever uma resenha completa para dizer tudo o que penso. Sucintamente, é um álbum muito bom, com momentos de excelência, que resgata o estilo do começo dos anos 2010.

Dentro do universo do pop-rock, tivemos a banda goiana Cambriana com uma ideia inovadora de misturar indie pop com rock progressivo, em seu Manaus vidaloka. A execução ficou aquém, e apesar de interessante, não empolga. Ainda assim, é melhor que Mormaço queima de Ana Frango Elétrico, um pop-rock supostamente engraçadinho, mas cuja tentativa de humor cai por terra, bem como Sdds rolê lixo de Marianaa, um indiezinho lo-fi lerdoso sem ganchos querendo ser agridoce e profundo. Pra curar, de Tuyo, é um pop de midtempo a lento, com produção bem moderna e foco nas letras introspectivas. Eu entendo pq uns pagam muito pau para esse disco, porque ele faz o que se propõe a fazer com louvor. Mas não é algo que se encaixa muito no meu gosto. Minha conterrânea Duda Beat teve um começo promissor em seu Sinto muito. Inaugura um novo estilo de brega-indie-pop, algo como o som que o brega teria se tivesse se originado nos anos 10. Parece algo que vai gerar tendência, e aguardo ansiosamente para ver em onde isto tudo vai dar. Tenho que comentar sobre o sotaque dela, que tem algo estranho, para mim parece que ela está se esforçando para perder a pernambucanidade, e isto é bem triste. O conjunto Samba de Coco Raízes de Arcoverde não esconde seu sotaque forte e maravilhoso em Maga Bo apresenta …, que se propõe ser uma renovação no coco. A produção do álbum, nos sons de coco puro, é excelente, mas o produtor americano Maga Bo vez em quando inventa de botar uns toques de música eletrônica totalmente fora de lugar. No mais, o estilo coletivo de vocais do grupo dá uma força a mais, combinando com a instrumentação composta puramente de percussão. As duas primeiras músicas estão acima do resto do disco, no entanto. Paralelamente ao coco, a ciranda tem sua renovação em Mestre Anderson Miguel, com seu Sonorosa obtendo sucesso crítico. Infelizmente, eu fui ler uma entrevista com o rapaz, e nela ele se assume fã de Zezé di Camargo & Luciano. Desde então, não consigo deixar de ouvir a influência nefasta dessas criaturas no estilo vocal dele. Quando eu não percebo isso, como na música O cirandeiro, com participação de Juçara Marçal, ele pode ser formidável.

Um disco que me foi bem recomendado foi Pedra preta de Teto Preto, com seu som eletrônico meio industrial com vocais repetitivos. Não vi nada de mais. A faixa-título destoa ao adotar uma estrutura de samba, mas mantendo a instrumentação anterior. O resultado é bem interessante, uma pena que o álbum todo não seja assim. O grupo de rock industrial Daughters está na primeira posição do ranking de discos de 2018 do RateYourMusic com seu You Won’t Get What You Want, mas para mim este foi completamente esquecível. Mais agradável, mas também esquecível, é o OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES, de SOPHIE. Endless, de Frank Ocean, desperdiça boa parte do tempo com uma ambiência eletrônica glitchy, mas a outra parte do álbum é uma espécie de dream-soul etéreo, lembrando o bom Aromanticism de Moses Sumney de 2017.

Já comecei este projeto ouvindo de amigos que tivemos muitos discos bons de soul / R&B. Infelizmente, apesar de admirar a produção, não vi nada de cativante nas melodias de Velvet de JMSN, Cocoa Sugar de Young Fathers ou Negro Swan de Blood Orange. O que não é o caso de Sweetener de Ariana Grande e, especialmente, Isolation de Kali Uchis. Ponto para o mainstream. Gostei do disco de country Years de Sarah Shook & The Disarmers, mas não amei, o que me deixou um pouco triste, já que me foi fortemente recomendado por amigos cujo gosto estimo. Everything is Love do par Beyoncé e Jay-Z, intitulados The Carters neste disco, é bonzinho, musicalmente, transitando entre o hip-hop e o R&B. Mas as letras, bem, eu não costumo focar muito nelas, mas tive problemas com este disco. Como diz o título, o tema é, supostamente, amor. Mas é o amor de casais felizes no Instagram, é amor-ostentação. Eu não ligo para ostentação quando é sobre dinheiro ou proeza sexual, quando é algo autoconscientemente raso, mas para se falar de amor desta forma, tudo fica muito feio. E não ajuda ser cantado justamente por dois bilionários que lucram com trabalho escravo no Sri Lanka.

Além de alguns álbuns que figuram entre meus favoritos, e por isto, falarei depois, o hip hop anglófono teve vários álbuns de destaque. Death Grips continua com sua sonzeira sombria, agressiva e divertida em seu Year of the Snitch. JPEGMAFIA tenta dar sua versão ao estilo deles em seu Veteran. Apesar de ter uma produção muito boa, espástica e glitchy, sinto muito a falta de um furor maior no rap, acaba não empolgando. TA13OO de Denzel Curry definitivamente empolga nas suas faixas mais fortes, misturando o trap ao pop rap, embora não mantém o mesmo nível pelo álbum inteiro. LD mostra seu belo flow em The Masked One, da tradição do trap inglês, de som mais profundo, “aquático”, puxado para o grime. Some Rap Songs de Earl Sweatshirt tem uma produção brilhante, me lembrando muito o gênio Daniel Dumile / MF Doom, mas o rap é meio monótono, não pude amar o disco. Room 25, o primeiro álbum de Noname, é uma continuação da mixtape Telefone. Consegue injetar mais influências de soul e funk mas mantém o mesmo estilo idiossincrático de rap quieto, contido, que é algo que até hoje, só vi ela fazer. Único.

Dentre os discos de hip hop africano, curti bastante 137 Avenue Kaniama de Baloji, que teve bastante influência de outros gêneros da música congolesa, como soukous e tradi-modern. Não deixem de ver o magnífico vídeo da música Peau de chagrin – Bleu de nuit. Já os nigerianos Burna Boy e ClassiQ me desapontaram com seus respectivos Outside e New North, bem genéricos. Outra decepção foi Dentro da chuva da angolana Aline Frazão, uma musiquinha acústica bem ao estilo Anavitória. Seu oposto na África lusófona é Kebrada de Elida Almeida, este sim emocionante, com vocais muito expressivos, me lembrando que tenho que escutar mais música cabo-verdiana. Angélique Kidjo lançou uma versão afro-pop do clássico Remain in Light, cantando faixa por faixa, recebendo grande clamor crítico. Por algum motivo, apesar de amar a música de muitos de seus compatriotas benineses, não consigo gostar do estilo dela. Ainda assim é Remain in Light, um dos meus discos favoritos de todos os tempos.

Ainda na África, Emakhosini do grupo sul-africano Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness é um álbum difícil de descrever, com canções compridas, repetitivas e rítmicas. Influências tanto do rock quanto do funk são claramente perceptíveis, mas eu pessoalmente não diria que se encaixa em nenhum dos dois gêneros. A togolesa Orchestre Abass teve uma coletânea de seus singles antigos lançada, intitulada De Bassari Togo. Dentro do grande universo que é o afro-funk dos anos 70, não se destacou muito, exceto pelos teclados interessantes. Escutei dois discos de compositores malineses do povo songais, de mesmo sobrenome, mas até onde sei, sem nenhum parentesco. Ambos têm a guitarra elétrica bem marcada típica da música songai, mas faltou um tempero para Wande de Samba Touré. Sidi Touré, por outro lado, me cativou com seu Toubalbero. Guitarras também são o ponto forte do tichumaren do povo tuaregue: Deran do nigerino Bombino é bom, mas não tem a mesma personalidade do anterior Azel; Temet, da banda argelina Imarhan, tem pegadas de hard rock, mas infelizmente nesta mistura eles perderam a “lágrima” tão característica e forte do gênero. Ainda assim as guitarras dão show em ambos.

O etíope Hailu Mergia fez um etio-jazz idiossincrático em seu Lala Belu, afastando-se de instrumentos de sopro, levando a música com a sanfona e teclados. É uma música que se deita confortavelmente no fundo da minha mente. O grupo inglês Sons of Kemet emula o som do jazz africano em Your Queen Is a Reptile. Falta intensidade e melodia, contudo. Amaro Freitas melhorou em Rasif comparado ao anterior Sangue negro, mas nada que chegue a me agradar. Meu odiado Kamasi Washington retorna com duas horas e meia de nada em Heaven and Earth, que exemplifica o pior que existe no jazz. Day De Senar da Mediterranean Deconstruction Ensemble é música sefardita (ibero-judaica) feita em Moscou, com infelizes toques de jazz. Bem quando a música vai pegando embalo e instigando, nas boas partes sefarditas, surge o jazz para encher o saco, é verdadeiramente frustrante!

Uma miscelânea ainda maior está em Antología del cante flamenco heterodoxo do espanhol Niño de Elche. Supostamente, é um disco de flamenco, mas tem de tudo, de tango, à música coral medieval, à entonação de vocais ao estilo Stockhausen. Mais uma inovação do flamenco foi El mal querer, de Rosalía. Traz a força emocional do gênero embalada em um novo pacote, com produção moderníssima. Dead Magic, da sueca Anna von Hausswolff, consegue ter atmosfera pesada e opressiva sem passar o ponto em que fica ridículo. As duas últimas faixas, instrumentais, são entediantes sem os vocais agourentos. Retratos é um disco de violão clássico, solo ou com acompanhamento esparso, de Otto Tolonen. São composições variadas, incluindo uma suíte do meu amado Ástor Piazzolla, e Otto extrai as melhores texturas e cores do seu violão. Honey, da sueca Robyn é supostamente dance-pop, mas é muito lento e não-dançável. Os beats e a voz dela, muito macia e “empolgada”, tampouco me deixam apreciá-lo como uma obra mais emotiva. Negirdėta Lietuva de Saulius Petreikis é música tradicional lituana, com muito foco em madeiras. As faixas são curtas e muitas, e bem sequenciadas, cada uma durando só o necessário. Gosto muito da música mongol-siberiana, e o conjunto lendário tuvano Huun-Huur-Tu se uniu ao americano Carmen Rizzo para fazer o EP Koshkyn. Os toques eletrônicos de Carmen não acrescentam muito, até atrapalham às vezes, mas, no mais, são quatro novas canções de um grupo que eu amo. Амыр-Санаа (Amyr-sanaa) dos também tuvanos Hartyga une o som siberiano com rock progressivo. Aprovei a ideia, mas a realização das músicas em si poderia ter sido melhor. Vejo muito potencial neste estilo.

Твои глаза da daguestanesa Аминат Ибиева (Aminat Ibiyeva) é um dance-pop do Cáucaso, muito bom, rápido e fervente, com muita sanfona e um lustre eletrônico. İstikrarlı Hayal Hakikattir, da turca Gaye Su Akyol não empolga tanto, mas é satisfatório. Não tenho muito conhecimento sobre música turca, mas me parece algo que representa para os turcos o que a MPB é para o Brasil. Talvez com maior conhecimento eu pudesse diferenciar mais se é algo banal ou se tem sutilezas que trazem grandeza. O muito aclamado álbum 무너지기, do sul-coreano 공중도둑 (Mid-Air Thief) é um pop leve, meio ambiente, meio psicodélico, não curti. Sua compatriota 박지하 (Park Jiha) foi muito mais bem-sucedida com seu Communion, um disco minimalista de beleza discreta e instrumentos tradicionais coreanos. Sujud, de Senyawa, traz um som que parece mistura de música tibetana com noise rock vindo e pitadas de Current 93, vindo de um grupo indonésio. Não conseguiu me passar o sentimento de autenticidade tão importante para me conquistar com esse tipo de música. Djarimirri, do falecido cantor aborígene australiano Gurrumul, é um álbum daqueles que, de tão lentos e emotivos, caso consigam romper uma certa barreira no meu coração, eu consideraria uma obra-prima. No entanto, se eles não atravessam, então é muito difícil para mim apreciar a música, embora eu racionalmente admire o que há aqui.

Uma tendência na música latino-americana é de misturar os sons locais com música eletrônica. Ouvi Ch’usay, dos peruanos Novalima; o autointitulado da dupla caribenha Trending Tropics; Mambo Cosmico, dos mexicanos Sonido Gallo Negro, que é uma cúmbia eletrônica; o autointitulado dos argentinos Panchasila, este mais para ambiente; todos não passam de ok. Não há um disco de 2018 no qual este som está melhor realizado que nas duas primeiras músicas de Bienaventuranza, de Chancha Vía Circuito. O disco todo é muito sólido, muito bem produzido, com uma atmosfera de amor pelo mundo, mas as duas primeiras músicas em particular acertaram na veia. Se o disco mantivesse o mesmo nível por toda sua duração, seria um dos meus favoritos do ano; do jeito que é, ainda assim é muito bom. Escutei também os dois mais proeminentes discos de reggaeton consecutivamente. O muito criticado Fame, de Maluma, me pareceu inócuo e um pouco irritante na primeira escutada, e foi ficando mais cansativo. Ao ouvir Vibras de J Balvin, ficou evidente o quanto mais de energia o gênero pode atingir. Norma de Mon Laferte é um bolero-pop bem peguento, especialmente a primeira música, Ronroneo. Natalia Lafourcade em Musas Vol. 2 repete a fórmula do volume 1, alternando canções próprias e do cânone latino-americano. Bom álbum, mas não há aqui uma canção que se destaque tanto como Que ha pasado con quererte, e neste mesmo ano, foi lançado um disco com os mesmos elementos, mas muito melhor…

Estou falando de Folclor imaginario, do chileno Gepe, e devo dizer que a partir daqui, começam os meus dezesseis álbuns favoritos de 2018, sem uma ordem específica. Folclor imaginario é uma busca de resgate da cueca, música romântica de violão latino-americana do começo do séc. XX, especialmente influenciado pela cantora Margot Loyola. Acredito que foi muito bem-sucedido nisto, por três fatores: o primeiro e mais importante é que o disco é delicioso e bem sentido, o segundo é que ficou muito difícil para eu, que não tenho tanto conhecimento desta área, distinguir o que era novo e o que era antigo, e o terceiro é que me deu muita vontade de descobrir mais desta rica tradição. O conjunto Okonkolo, em seu Cantos, traz força rítmica e vocal em música de santería, com arranjos ricos, usando de elementos de rock e música clássica ocidental, por exemplo, sem nunca descaracterizar a pura santería. Tudo permanece muito fácil na sua mente, e é incrível como ele mostra tanto poder e ao mesmo tempo tanta leveza. Fechando a trindade latino-americana, Bajo el mismo cielo da cubana La Dame Blanche é um exemplo de primor em hip-hop. Flow, ganchos, produção, diversidade, tudo aqui é excelente.

A dança dos não famosos de Mundo Livre S/A soa espesso e denso, como os seus álbuns clássicos dos anos 90 nunca soaram. É uma obra conceitual que traduz os anos Temer da história brasileira. Já li por aí que este disco já saiu datado, que perdeu o impacto, pois já estamos na era Bolsonaro, mas eu discordo fortemente. Primeiro que, musicalmente, o álbum é muito forte. Segundo que em grande parte o desgoverno Bolsonaro é continuação direta de Temer, então grande parte do conteúdo continua extremamente relevante. Dirty Computer de Janelle Monáe é igualmente influenciado pelas atribulações políticas e ideológicas da era Trump dos EUA, e pela morte de Prince. Talvez seja o disco mais “significativo” da carreira de Janelle, O disco de protesto dos anos 10. Mas ao mesmo tempo, musicalmente, não atinge os mesmos picos dos dois discos anteriores. Deus é mulher de Elza Soares é a continuação d’A mulher do fim do mundo. Segue a linha do magnífico antecessor, mas, até para refletir estes tempos tristes, tem uma pegada mais sombria, e por isso talvez, uma sonoridade mais “rock” e menos “samba”. O melhor disco político do ano é Memórias do fogo de El Efecto. Rock progressivo no sentido raiz, é a prova cabal que o gênero pode ser completamente relevante nos tempos atuais, desde que mantenha a atitude dos desbravadores dos anos 70, ao invés de buscar apenas repetir seu som. As letras revolucionárias combinam com as melodias perfeitamente, formando canções que vão e voltam e agradam tanto às partes mais racionais do cérebro quanto as partes mais profundas e rítmicas. Vigor e melodia estão no máximo nível aqui, e a variedade de influências em cada faixa não para de surpreender.

Se os renovadores do coco e ciranda obtiveram resultados díspares, os medalhões não foram menos que estelares. Depois de quase 10 anos já gravado e pronto, e 8 anos após sua morte, foi finalmente lançado o primeiro e único disco solo de Biu Roque, A noite hoje é maior. Fez jus à sua magnífica história, sempre marcado no passo, e sua voz única encantando em solo, ou contrastando nos vários duetos. Ainda melhor foi a colaboração de Nélson da Rabeca com o suíço radicado no Brasil Thomas Rohrer, Tradição improvisada. Incrível a diversidade de texturas que eles atingem do que é basicamente um dueto de rabecas, indo do baião tradicional a improvisações vanguardistas dissonantes. As faixas com participação da esposa de Nélson, Dona Benedita, trazendo seus vocais roucos, dão uma boa quebra, aumentando a variedade do álbum. O álbum é talvez longo demais, e especialmente no par de faixas “Deodoro” / “As andorinhas”, fica cansativo, mas logo depois se recupera nas faixas seguintes, e enfim, acho que o propósito é mais de registrar tudo que foi feito nas sessões entre os dois.

O gênio Kanye West, após apoiar Donald Trump e ser internado num hospital por psicose causada por extrema falta de sono e desidratação em 2016, retirou-se para um rancho no estado estadunidense de Wyoming para fazer música. O resultado foram cinco álbums, de artistas diversos, mas produzidos por Kanye, todos com menos de meia hora de duração, lançados um por semana, consecutivamente, a partir de 25 de maio de 2018. O primeiro da leva foi Daytona, de Pusha T, e não poderia haver um começo melhor que a pedrada If You Know You Know para mostrar a que veio. Tudo é de primeira qualidade aqui, mas com uma certa planeza, como se o disco se entregasse totalmente na primeira escutada, e depois, você pode (deve) apreciar os mesmos elementos, todos ótimos, mas não há mais nada a ser descoberto.  Em seguida veio ye de Kanye, em muitos aspectos o oposto de Daytona, e em outros tantos, seu segundo ato. Mantêm a mesma estética e fluem muito bem de um para o outro, mas diferente do anterior, este faz uma primeira impressão ruim. Pode ser culpa da faixa que abre o disco, I Thought About Killing You, que não é nem de longe a música mais acolhedora, iniciando sua experiência com o pé errado. Ou será mesmo? Pela quarta ou quinta vez que a escutei, passei a sentir seu verdadeiro impacto. O que parecia ser uma baboseira “oh, como sou psicopata” vira uma estrutura musical genuinamente brilhante. O resto do álbum segue essa linha, apesar de não haver uma diferença tão grande entre escutadas como na primeira faixa. Tudo aqui tem facetas, que eu posso perceber em uma sessão e não mais na seguinte, e com cada descoberta nova, eu fiquei gostando mais e mais. Daytona e ye, hoje eu os considero do mesmo nível, mas o terceiro disco da sequência é ainda melhor. O autointulado de Kids See Ghosts, colaboração entre Kanye e Kid Cudi, tem o melhor dos dois lados. Não só deslumbra na primeira escutada, mas tem sutilezas para se desvendar nas escutadas subsequentes. Tudo aqui é imponente, com produção basicamente perfeita, com um elemento de gigantismo, mas ao mesmo tempo sem a atmosfera de excesso de My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. É o segundo lugar na minha lista dos favoritos. Os dois últimos discos das sessões de Wyoming são Nasir, de Nas e K.T.S.E. de Teyana Taylor. Estão longe de serem ruins, mas estão longe da excelência dos três primeiros.

Siri Ba Kele, do conjunto burquinabê Baba Commandant & the Mandingo Band, é um tipo de álbum sobre o qual eu tenho muita dificuldade para escrever. É um afro-funk repetitivo e rítmico, com uma pegada que não deixa minha parte racional da mente trabalhar, mas mesmeriza do começo ao fim. Os nigerinos do Tal National soltaram toda sua fúria musical em Tantabara. Se no ocidente o rock em geral parece estagnado, na África ele vive. As guitarras, selvagens, e a bateria funcionam como uma máquina bem azeitada, são as melhores do ano em particular. O selo alemão Analog Africa lançou a sequência de sua compilação de vários artistas African Scream Contest. O primeiro volume, de 2008, foi minha introdução à musica beninense, e guardo um amor muito forte a ele por isso. Quando eu li as palavras African Scream Contest volume 2, eu não pude evitar de criar expectativas de que ele seria como o primeiro, que haveria um segundo mundo musical beninense inteiro para mim, para ser descoberto, e claro que as coisas não são assim. Passada a leve e inevitável decepção, principalmente em escutadas subsequentes, passei a amar este disco, ainda que não tanto quanto o primeiro, como a coleção maravilhosa e diversa de canções de uma era e lugar que me encantam tanto. E a escolha dos artistas ainda foi muito bem pensada, trazendo além dos figurões como os Volcans de Porto-Novo e a Tuit-Puissant Orchestre Poly-Rythmo, nomes mais obscuros como Elias Akadiri e Picoby Band d’Abomey. E remedia a ausência do volume um de um dos meus maiores ídolos, Stanislas Tohon, que aqui arrasa tudo com sua pedrada Dja, dja dja. Por fim, meu disco preferido de 2018, Yen Ara de Ebo Taylor, para mim, é o que mais expõe a tristeza do domínio anglofônico na mídia global. Não fosse o idioma, canções como Krumandey e Ankoma’m seriam consideradas clássicos universais do funk, do mesmo patamar de Tear the Roof Off the Sucker (Give Up the Funk) e Get Up I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine. Yen Ara atinge a perfeição em melodia e composição, maestria instrumental, tudo pulsando guiado pela juventude e vigor de sua voz de 82 anos de idade! Escutem este disco, meus queridos, vocês irão se surpreender. Divulguem a música africana!

Marcelo D2 – Amar é para os fortes (2018)

Por Francelino Prazeres de Azevedo Filho

O hip hop brasileiro passou por uma fase muito interessante no começo dos anos 2010. Digo “interessante” e não “era de ouro” porque estou falando das minhas opiniões, e pelo que vejo, a crítica especializada não concorda com minha visão, não 100%, ao menos. Naquela época, a moda da vez era um hip hop antropofágico, que sugava as influências dos inúmeros gêneros e tradições musicais brasileiros, sempre trazendo samples obscuros, ganchos que grudavam na cabeça, e um som que borrava o limite entre rap e MPB. Depois, talvez por causa da natural mudança de tendências musicais, talvez por causa do golpe de 2016 que afundou e continua afundando as perspectivas sociais e econômicas brasileiras, o som do hip hop mudou. Ficou mais cru, mais trap, mais agressivo, mais isolacionista e menos melódico. E embora eu reconheça a importância e a necessidade social de tal estilo, particularmente nas letras, não consigo apreciá-lo musicalmente. Para mim, o que era uma “era de ouro” acabou precocemente, sem atingir completamente o gigantesco potencial que eu via.

Ninguém mandou o memorando para Marcelo D2, no entanto. Seu Amar é para os fortes parece situado completamente no estilo de Criolo, Conká, Senzala Hi-Tech e Ogi. É uma espécie de musical hip-hop, lançado em acompanhamento a um curta-metragem de mesmo título, estrelado pelo filho de D2. Como não vi o filme, não posso comentar das qualidades do mesmo, mas no álbum, trechos de diálogos estão presentes em quase todas as faixas, e, devo dizer, pelo que aparece no disco, a história é bem fraca. O diálogo abaixo, da canção Parte 2, é particularmente patético, artificial, e agride meu paladar de tal forma que por si só já seria suficiente para me fazer abaixar a nota:

“– Então, vem cá. Francesa, vai morar em Nova York. Daí tu conhece a brasileirada toda modelo, te apresenta o modernismo e tu resolve vim pra cá pro Rio pra estudar Tarsila do Amaral. Caralho, hein, cara. Tipo, privilégio que virou curiosidade ao invés de virar medo. Visão.

– E você, cara sensível que vai parar lá na galeria pra ficar mais perto da arte, esperto isso. Quero dizer, falta que virou curiosidade ao invés de virar ódio. ”

Se os outros diálogos parecem ter vindo de uma minissérie da Rede Globo, este foi retirado diretamente de uma temporada perdida de Malhação.

Já musicalmente, o álbum é muito bom. Seja por meio de samples ou melodias originais, ele bebe de toda uma variedade de gêneros brasileiros e até mesmo do pop francês retrô, em uma faixa. Depois da tempestade, a faixa em questão, teve seu refrão escrito pelo francês Sasha Rudy, na época com 16 anos, e se destaca pela sutileza e doçura num disco em geral mais áspero. Ainda melhor é Resistência cultural, que após ter sido lançada como single, com participação de Siba e Hélio Bentes, ganha uma versão diferente no álbum. Desta vez com Gilberto Gil nos vocais, e uma sonoridade de sanfona e flauta que parece que veio direto das colaborações de Gil com Dominguinhos nos anos 70. Falando em Siba, foi muito bom ver a magnífica Folha de bananeira, da sua Fuloresta, na voz de Biu Roque, ser sampleada justamente na canção-título, ainda que para mim seja uma das mais esquecíveis do disco em rap e gancho. Febre do rato é instigante, e foi feita sem samples, mostrando o quão bacana fica o som do hip hop com instrumentação assim. Filho de Obá fecha o álbum com seu magnífico refrão em afro-samba cantado por Danilo e Alice Caymmi. Tem uma participação talvez até simbólica de Rincón Sapiência, que para mim é de longe o melhor da geração pós-2016 do hip hop.

O disco é curto, somente 32 minutos, incluindo as conversas moles em todas as faixas. De suas 10 músicas, 4 são sem muita estrutura, do tipo que, em álbuns maiores, sobram e até fazem ligação entre as outras. Neste, entretanto, não há muito a ser ligado, e senti muito a falta de mais canções de porte, que mantivessem o nível de Resistência cultural, Febre do rato e Filho de Obá. A força destas acaba diluída, e sem a constância da pressão musical, não consegui me apaixonar pela experiência. Ainda assim, achei lindo o resgate do estilo do começo dos 10s, e espero que esta obra incentive mais artistas a se enveredar por este caminho. Se não o disco todo, ao menos as músicas mais fortes deixam bem claro como tal caminho pode ser maravilhoso.

In Defense of Britpop: A Riposte to Taylor Parkes

By Fam Li

It was 25 years ago today…

I recently read Taylor Parkes’ (who wrote a great piece on The Fall! – ed) long and very provocative think piece on Blur’s iconic third album Parklife and, more generally, on Britpop’s cultural status (and cultural worth) as a whole on the online music magazine the Quietus. It was actually written in 2014 (that’s about half a decade ago) but was recently dusted off again by the Quietus in order to mark the 25th anniversary of the release of that landmark album. Parkes was a writer for the Melody Maker throughout the Britpop era (in fact he wrote for them for throughout most of the 90s), and was therefore on the journalistic front lines, so to speak, of a musical and cultural movement that seemed, more than any other, to be fuelled and sustained by clever PR and by music press and industry hype. Parkes’ is therefore no second hand testimony, he was lucky (or unlucky) enough to have lived through the whole thing and is able to speak from his own experiences. I experienced that whole era too, although in a much more vicarious way than Taylor Parkes, that is, as a music loving teen back in the mid-90s: as an avid reader of the NME (meaning that I was, alas, unfamiliar with Parkes’ oeuvre until I read the Quietus article) and enthusiastic (although to varying degrees) member of the record buying public. Britpop happened to coincide with that time in my life when I was just starting to become seriously interested in music and was beginning to buy CDs and identify myself with different musical groups and artistes all of which means that I do have a certain fondness for the period, even if I am far from uncritical of its cultural impact or the preponderance of second rate music that characterised it.

Now Parkes’ article gets a lot of things right — and I will come to that bit shortly — but I also think that he gets a lot more wrong. And then there’s the whole question of the tone of the piece, the bitterness and the sense of sour grapes that are inescapable throughout its entire length. It seems as if the author still harbours intense feelings of resentment over the fact that he was obliged, during his time with the Melody Maker, to write about bands and music that he had no real respect or admiration for — and although he has every right to be resentful, that resentment along with an unhealthy, and at times very misleading, dose of hindsight, colours his view of the whole period, and more saliently of the music of that period, to a wholly unreasonable extent. And the main target of all this resentment just happens to be Albarn and his merry band of self-satisfied mockney minstrels. For Parkes Parklife (I’m guessing his surname might something to do with his fixation) is emblematic of everything that was wrong about Britpop, whereas Britpop in its turn is emblematic of everything that went wrong culturally, economically, intellectually, and politically (take your pick) with Britain in the last half decade or so before the start of the new millennium — and beyond.

In particular Britpop sounded the death knell of a certain kind of alternative youth culture, a sort of updated and significantly less elitist version of Bohemianism, that stood in opposition to the demeaning practises and exploitative commercial ethos of the mainstream music industry. More generally though it stood against the dehumanising and assimilating tendencies of late 20th century capital, in the form (post 1970s) of a growing and rampant Neoliberalism, and instead promoted a strong community based DIY ethic. This actually gave young people, in particular, an important degree of social autonomy in which to fashion their own aesthetic, cultural and intellectual values apart (albeit to varying extents) from the mainstream conventions so favoured by their elders. It was a sort of cocooned idealism.

Britpop doesn’t deserve to be remembered with any real fondness or nostalgia, Parkes seems to be saying — not necessarily because it was there, in the space of those three or four years, that the (counter-) cultural rot really began to take hold — but because it was in that period that it could have been, and really should have been, stopped. In other words for Parkes Britpop was the socio-cultural point of no return.

Parklife!

Where does Parklife fit into this process of cultural degeneration? Now although Parkes does begrudgingly concede that the Essex foursome were more than capable of writing the odd decent song or two, and that ‘[b]its of [the album] are really good’, his overall view of the album is strongly negative and he is deeply scathing in terms both of its impact on the music scene of the time and on what was to follow. Seriously though, the dude doesn’t hold back. He describes the album as both ‘heartless and sour’ and ‘infuriatingly bubbly’, and feels that Albarn himself is ‘phenomenally hard to stomach’, calls his lyrics ‘horribly grating’, while individual songs are described as smug and uncaring, and ‘vaguely sinister.’ However Parklife’s abiding sin (aside from any considerations of its artistic worth or lack thereof) lies in the fact that, more than any other single record — or any other cultural artefact really — it was *the* album to usher in this new phase in the subversion and co-option of a youth culture that up until then still had a few vague pretensions to being radical and alternative; indeed Parkes treats Parklife rather as if it was some kind of cultural Trojan Horse. For instance, it’s accused of (or at least suspected of having a rather large hand in) among other things: inaugurating the total gentrification and de-bohemification of London, as well as being complicit in the destruction of its traditional working class culture (Parkes describes the album as having a ‘penchant for smirking caricatures of working class culture’) being entirely cynical in its (often ironic) plundering of the past for musical inspiration and setting off a trend for the same; and of being a calculated attempt by the band to win over mainstream popularity while at the same time holding on to their pre-existing indie cred, and thereby making selling-out a respectable option for other musical groups.

Parkes, of course, doesn’t just stop there, (even if Blur are always his chief targets) he also has some very choice words to say about the unscrupulousness of a mid-90s music press that, spurred on by an ever increasing greed for sales (and the resulting move towards increasing tabloidification) decided at a certain point that it would throw all caution to the wind and go full on in with the Britpop gravy train. It thus ended up goading on and helping to manufacture some of the worst excesses of the genre, revelling in its crassness, its celebration of homogeneity, and just out and out mediocrity — all the while reluctant to do anything, aside from maybe printing the occasional snipe, that might put its new stable (probably more of a barn) of cash-cows at risk. Parkes’ critique also takes in (obviously, how could it not?) Oasis along with a whole cast list of Britpop also-rans, bands whose very names if they’re remembered at all, have gone onto become a series of cautionary punchlines over the years: Sleeper, Shed 7, Cast! At the end of the day, Parkes assures us, the music itself just hasn’t stood the test of time, and he admits to only having hung on to a handful of records from the period in question — none of which he feels a strong urge to ever listen to again. In Parkes’ view then, Britpop’s legacy is an unhappy one on almost all counts, although once again its greatest fault is in the complacency which it seemed to breed in a generation of musicians, journalists, and artists that made them unable or unwilling to perceive the downward spiral in which we were, all of us, headed as a culture, and to even just trace out an attempt at some kind of radical intervention.

Li Contra Parkes

Now, don’t get me wrong: I think that Parkes is fundamentally correct in several of his denunciations of Britpop. Yes, it was an extremely vapid and backwards-looking movement and one which would indeed turn out to herald the final stage in the (almost) complete takeover of youth culture by corporate brands and corporate sponsorship. It *was* thoroughly anti-intellectual and was undoubtedly responsible for the quality of the content and the writing in the (mainstream) music press plummeting somewhere around the mid-to-late 90s. It also gave the world lad-culture with its promotion of sexism, excessive masturbation and the over-consumption of alcohol (the last two are fine in moderate doses by the way, I ain’t no puritan). Amongst numerous other horrible things it also introduced the world to the odious Guy Ritchie and his poisonous fetishization of English working class culture, as well as setting the ball rolling on making jingoism and nationalism respectable again. (And speaking more seriously it also gave the world Blairism which was to signify endless war and the near total-destruction of the left from within). And, yes, the music (being hyped up to the ceiling week in week out the pages of the NME and the Melody Maker) could also be thoroughly mediocre, if not actually straight out piss poor. Bearing all that in mind though I still find Parkes’ criticisms far too sweeping overall, if not extremely unfair and misguided in parts. Let me explain why.

It’s all about the music, man…

The first issue I have with Parkes’ article relates to his dismissive evaluation of the music. Yes there was a fair amount of chaffy old-shite being held up as premium grade golden wheat at the time; on the other hand, however, a good deal of what was released back then actually still holds up now two decades and a half on. Let’s start with Parkes’ big bête noire, Blur. Leaving aside his criticisms of Parklife, Blur’s most influential (if not, in my opinion, their best) album, I find it strange that he doesn’t once mention its successor, the Great Escape, an album that is as close to peak Britpop as it possible to get (the other major contender for that title, Menswe@r’s second album, having only ever been released in Japan) and one which reveals a band which had, at certain points, clearly crossed over the threshold into self-parody (see especially, Mr. Robinsons Quango, the ironically named Stereotypes), a threshold they had still only been hovering in the vicinity of on their previous LP. Indeed, the Great Escape is guilty of most of the sins committed by the band on the previous album — many of which Parkes helpfully singles out in his lengthy screed — and on some counts even surpasses it (as the music press, though generally laudatory of the album, acknowledged at the time). Perhaps Parkes held the album in such deep contempt that he couldn’t even bring himself to nominate it in his article — or might it be, that despite its being as smug, and as condescending, and as full of ‘smirking caricatures’, as its predecessor, if not more so, The Great Escape doesn’t tend to grate quite in the same way that Parklife does? Indeed what saves the album from being the conceptual auto-disaster that it could so easily have been — and that actually helps to take the edge off Albarn’s infuriating smugness and cultural insensitivity, which Parkes does kind of have a point about — is the depth and polish of songwriting talent that the album ends up bringing to light. Actually, Parkes does mention Country House (the lead single off the Great Escape) describing it as ‘almost supernaturally shit’ (an accolade he simultaneously accords to Roll With It, which was pretty awful in fact), and while I do agree that certain aspects of the song are pretty dumb/questionable — the lyrics are as puffed up and conceited as ever, yet another stilted, rudimentary attempt at social commentary devoid of charm or wit; the music video is dreadfully, painfully sexist (with the transparently lame excuse that of course it’s supposed to be a ironic pastiche of Benny Hill or some shit), and features Albarn at his most fantastically punchable — overall it turns out to be quite successful as a piece of pseudo-trashy pop music, in a way that both Girls and Boys and Parklife aspired to be but never actually were (indeed I tend to place the latter pair on a level with your average novelty single); the brashness works out this time because, cocky cunt that he is, Albarn had improved, markedly, as a songwriter.

The larger point which I want to make is this, namely, that we shouldn’t let the very many cultural failings of the Britpop era blind us to the fact that, thinking in terms purely of its musical legacy, it did actually end up leaving behind some very good records — enough of them, at least, to make Parkes’ Britpop takedown feel petty and actually rather specious. Pulp, for instance, managed to release two absolutely blinding albums during those years, His N Hers and Different Class (I’m leaving aside the band’s excellent drugs and bad sex themed comedown album This is Hardcore because it was released during Britpop’s tail-end), both of which are high water marks of 90s music by any fair reckoning and both of which it would be churlish not to include under the Britpop banner, even if the band had been around for at least a decade prior; Pulp, of course, a band as subtle and as thoughtful in their social criticism as Blur were offensive and superficial and as Oasis were… well, they never even tried to give the impression that they’d ever progressed any further than Topsy and Tim in their reading.

Then there were the Manic Street Preachers who happened to release one of their best albums during Britpop, Everything Must Go — a record whose ambitious retro sound would turn out to be a touchstone in Britpopian musical aesthetics — but who were, thematically and lyrically, in a completely different league from most of their mid-90s peers (I mean they started a song off with the words ‘Libraries gave us power’ for fucks sake — you can’t really compare it with ‘I’ll take my car and drive real far/They’re not concerned about the way we are’). These two groups were everything that the overwhelming majority of second- or third-tier (and even most of the first tier) Britpop bands weren’t: that is intelligent, articulate, and (relatively) musically sophisticated — although that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be classed as Britpop (at least with respect to their output of that period).

Lest we forget then Britpop gave us such brilliant albums as Everything Must Go, Different Class, His N Hers, Definitely Maybe, Dog Man Star, The Bends, Elastica, I Should Coco, It’s Great When You’re Straight, Wake Up Boo, C’mon Kids, and if we’re being honest Parklife and its successor. And fuck me if the likes of Echobelly, Gene, Ash, the Charlatans, and even the Bluetones, Ocean Colour Scene, and Shed Seven (who I have to confess I retain something of a soft spot for) didn’t put out some great singles too (Sleeper on the other hand are completely unredeemable) — as I hope my spotify playlist, below will demonstrate. It would be absurd to pretend that as an era in the history of post-war popular music it’s even remotely up there with the 60s or punk or post-punk, but at the same time, in comparison with the 2000s and the disgrace that was indie landfill, Britpop feels like a veritable golden age.

Taking a higher level, much more zeitgeisty, view of the situation, the fact is that, even if Britpop was, in large part, a creation of the music press and the music industry, its popularity remains to a decisive extent, an organic phenomena: part of a virtuous/vicious push-pull cycle in which a cultural industry attempts to carefully manipulate the tastes of a target audience and to capitalise on — or more accurately hijack — what it discovers to be popular, and at the same time to figure out what the next big thing will be and which it can co-opt in the next round. No popular musical movement is completely top down (regardless of what ‘Cultural Marxism’ obsessed conspiracy theorists might think) and while it’s true that hype and wall to wall media coverage can often be instrumental in helping a band’s career take off, history is littered with examples of bands or movements that the music industry and the press wanted to happen but that never did, due either to the inherent shiteyness of the original product, or not even that: due to something else that no one has so far managed to pin down.

There has to be something there that can appeal to people in the first place, even if that is the lowest common denominator, and even that doesn’t always work. And so I find it hard to pin so much of the blame on the music press or the industry let alone on a character like Albarn as Parkes does — how could he have predicted any but the most trivial ramifications that recording Parklife would have on the British cultural scene? That it would, in Parkes’ terms, ruin guitar music over the next couple of decades or so. While we’re playing the blame game here, then, the record buying public deserves some of that opprobrium too, just as it deserves praise when it lavishes attention and success on artists and musicians that you and I are much more favourable towards.

What Happened Next…

And then there’s the other fact that Parkes weirdly (but perhaps understandably, given its awkwardness for his main theses) decides to occlude, and which he could easily have found room for in his very length diatribe, that is, no sooner had Britpop’s corpse been freshly laid upon its bier (it was probably still at the twitching stage) than the serious contestation of its legacy, of what Parkes calls Britpop orthodoxy, began in earnest. So while it is true that Britpop turned out to be a particularly unadventurous time for popular guitar based music– one that not only looked to the past for its inspiration, but to a past that was completely sanitised and, in many ways, falsified — it didn’t take long after its demise for the anti-reactionary reaction to set in: for musicians and journalists to start name dropping everything from Krautrock to Detroit Techno to Slint as big influences and for the couldn’t-be-more-progressive-if-it-had-been-called-prog-rock genre that was post-rock to start to gain some sort of critical momentum and extended coverage in the music press — for instance Tortoise, the post-rock group par excellence had already begun to win numerous plaudits back in 1995, during the very height of Britpop. And it even got to the point that the NME decided that drone obsessives Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen was the most important album of 1998 (even more important than OK Computer, which, as much as I like the record, it absolutely wasn’t) and celebrated Jason Pierce’s whole career, from Spacemen 3 onwards, in a lavish two page centre spread on the eve of the album’s release. For fucks sake they even went and put Godspeed You! Black Emperor on the cover, for what turned out to be that particular music rag’s lowest selling issue to date (although that record probably didn’t hold very long). Even the DIY scene had its ever so fleeting moment in the sun when Teen-C Glasgow funsters Bis were declared the next big thing for about a couple of weeks in 1996 (it’s probably pointless wondering what they’re up to these days, it’s very likely the exact same thing they were doing 23 years ago).

But that was just the way the wind was blowing back then, as we found ourselves accelerating ever more breathlessly towards the turn of the new millennium — and all of which began to prefigure what had once seemed almost impossible, a critical re-evaluation of prog which even took in those perennial music press whipping boys Yes. Even Blur themselves had moved on — the big giveaway was just before the time that their eponymous 1997 album came out when Damon Albarn wouldn’t stop going on about Pavement in all his press interviews, signalling what became a drastic shift away from his previous London-centric Ray Davies pseudo-Cockney obsession and a greater openness towards cross-Atlantic, and in Albarn’s particular case (and he should be lauded for this) worldwide, influences. All of which ended up being eclipsed by what turned out to be Rock’s very own singularity, or rockism’s own version of the end of the Mayan calendar (except unlike 2012 no one was predicting it and it actually ended up not being a non-event), the release of Radiohead’s OK Computer, an album which turned out to be the zenith of British guitar based music.

The message being; you can’t just isolate a period of, say, five years, and then talk about its influence on events a decade or so later and barely mentioning what happened in between. Yes, there was something particularly nauseating about Britpop’s dumb, semi-ironic, semi-serious attachment to the flag along with its spurious nostalgia for a past that was as halcyon as it was (mostly) non-existent, but it’s too simplistic to trace back the current re-awakening of nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiment to Britpop via a straight line. Certainly the current, parlous state of the music scene (at least as it pertains to guitar music) should not be attributed in such a simplistic manner to the artistic and moral deficiencies of Britpop and certainly not to the pre-millennial success of one band, as patronising and as self-satisfied as that band could at times be.

In decontextualising Britpop to the extent that he does, Parkes’ article completely fails to take into account the cyclical nature of the different scenes and movements which composed the British alternative/independent music scene in the years which followed punk: with one set of predominant trends sparking off a reaction was to determine the character and sound of the ensuing (artistic) generation of musicians and popular beat combos. More importantly it fails to take into consideration the longer term trends that cut across and were sustained throughout those individual cycles. For instance, the strong hedonic, anti-intellectual (proto-Nathan Oakleyesque) tendencies which Parkes locates in Britpop, and which he can’t stop castigating it for, were already a prominent feature of Baggy/Acid House (with the former as enamoured of MDMA as the latter was of cocaine and lager), it just never went away — blame it on the availability of different kinds of stimulants, the multifold failures of the British education system, people reading less with each passing generation etc, but don’t (just) blame it on the Britpop.

Which brings us back to today…

Of course the reaction to the (relative) conservatism of the Britpop era wasn’t just limited to the music getting a bit more interesting: the political atmosphere also became much more radical in the years which followed with the growing worldwide influence of the anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation movements — as was so notably manifested in the success of Naomi Klein’s No Logo, and the backlash against the sinister quasi-cultish advertising tactics of multinational brands such GAP and Nike, and culminating in important turn of the millenium G7 protests and the massive, should have been era defining, No Iraq War movement. In the end though it was all to no avail: all those various, forward thinking late 90s, early 00s tendencies eventually led to…well, politically, they led to the fucked-up, hyper-gentrified situation in which we currently find ourselves in — a less hopeful, in many ways, version of the Gilded Age. Music wise they led to a dead end for British guitar music. The fact is that Indie or Rock or whatever you want to call it ran out of steam as a genre, or as an incestuous cluster of genres, round about the 00s — in fact around the time that the Strokes and Libertines were being touted as the saviours of music by the now moribund music press. But that running out of steam and that lack of inspiration and sheer honest-to-god fecklessness which essentially typified British, and actually also American, guitar music in the years following the millenium (and which was soon to lead to the moral musical Waste Land that was landfill indie) was fundamentally a result of the genre’s relatively limited musical set up (with a line-up that usually consisted of a vocalist, a guitarist, a drummer, and a bassist, none of whom were supposed to be particularly adept at their instruments). It was a musical genre which didn’t really have anywhere much left to go on either side of the Atlantic, not least after the clutch of genre-bursting albums, the likes of (the aforementioned) OK Computer, Ladies and Gentlemen… and the Soft Bulletin, that came out in the late 90s, and in the face of a genre like hip hop which creatively speaking was going from strength to strength — nowhere to go, that is, except in a backwards direction (unless you were as freakishly talented and exceptional as a band like Animal Collective, which most new groups weren’t).

Now this is something that often happens to genres of music, most if not all of which seem have an inherent sell-by date, after which they can be carefully and ritualistically preserved as part of a folk tradition, and/or incorporated into other newer genres and transition into something completely different, in the cultural equivalent of a paradigm shift. But even if this all this seems obvious to everyone now, that is really only thanks to hindsight because it sure as fuck didn’t seem obvious back then. No one had the foggiest clue as to how things were going to pan out, and there were no cultural Cassandra’s we were all blithely ignoring as far as I can recall. Reading Parkes’ article, on the other hand, you come away with the opposite feeling, as if everyone, or at least everyone involved in the so called creative industries, could see what the ‘consequences’ of Britpop were and therefore is culpable for what came next.

Give me playlist a listen

In conclusion, then, it’s obvious (or at least it should be) that the almost unimaginably complex interplay of factors — socio-cultural, geo-physical and (above all imo) economic — that have led to our current, intemperate and absolutely dysfunctional, social reality cannot be boiled down to those few specific tendencies which Parkes is desperate to localise within the Britpop era — but as obvious as it is, the content of Parkes’ article shows that it still bears repeating. Parkes is, in fact, guilty of projecting the cynicism of the present back on the past, and as much as I share that cynicism with regards to our contemporary situation, and as much as I agree with a lot of his criticisms of Britpop, I keep coming back to the music, which as I said above, and contrary to Parkes’ rather disdainful attitude, still stands up to scrutiny, even after all these years. I admit, however, that this opinion might be unduly influenced by my own nostalgia, by my own (much happier) memories of the time. To this end, and to compensate for the inadequacy of all my rhetorical efforts above, I’ve put together a Spotify playlist which features a lot of my favourite Britpop tracks and, which I’m convinced, shows the genre/period at its best and thereby offers the best antidote to the ill-tempered anti-Britpop negativity of a Taylor Parkes. Listen for yourselves!

Bobbie Gentry – Fancy (1970)

By Michael Strait

Once again, Bobbie sings other people’s songs – with one remarkable exception.

There are ten songs on this album. Eight of them are covers, one of which (“I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”) was also present on the last album. One of them (“He Made A Woman Out of Me”) was written for Bobbie by the minor pop songwriter Fred Burch.

And one of them is “Fancy”.

Gotta be honest: after “Fancy”, most of the rest of the songs on this album kinda just pass me by in a haze. I said before that “Ode to Billie Joe” is probably Billie’s best song, and that may well be true. But if it is, “Fancy” is nipping right at its heels, and there are certainly times I think it’s the superior song. It’s the only self-penned tune on this album, and the effect of hearing it after having last listened to the light-hearted, airy-smooth Touch ‘Em With Loveis resemblant of a brass-knuckled sucker-punch to the gut. Anybody who considers themselves any sort of country fan, feminist, or class-conscious leftist should have this song somewhere in their library, even if it’s the only Bobbie song they own. It’s incredible, and solidifies Bobbie’s place among the finest storytellers in lyrical history.

Melodically, it’s a return to the bluesy style Bobbie employed so much on her first album, complete with the usual aggressive acoustic riff, funky horns and shimmering strings. There’s a big, strong hook, powerful enough to propel the song into the billboard top 40 ( twice, in fact) despite the uncompromising subject matter. Unlike “Ode To Billie Joe”, there’s no mystery here to keep the public guessing; there’s just deep, deep misery, of the sort that’s been carefully designed to make anyone listening sit up and think for a while about the depth of crushing poverty throughout the richest nation in the world. Here we have the story of a mother who spends her last few dollars, and her last few days in this world, preparing her daughter for a life of prostitution because it’s the only option that doesn’t mean certain death. It’s not shy about it, either, and it doesn’t couch the misery in softer language – witness this verse and marvel at the fact that this song was a successful pop hit in two decades:

Momma dabbed a little bit of perfume
On my neck and she kissed my cheek
Then I saw the tears welling up
In her troubled eyes when she started to speak

She looked at our pitiful shack and then
She looked at me and took a ragged breath
“Your Pa’s runned off, and I’m real sick
And the baby’s gonna starve to death.”

There’s only so much I can actually say about this song, because after a certain point I’d definitely just be reduced to quoting all the lyrics and pointing at them, asking you to just goddamn see for yourself. Suffice it to say that the narrative is incredibly vivid, full of the memorable scene-setting imagery Bobbie has long been so fond of, and that this story contains enough depth, moral complexity, and narrative power for a full movie adaptation if someone got the notion. If you ever needed a reminder of why the working class must always remain a fundamental part of any feminist movement, this is it.

And then there’s the rest of the album.

In a way, this feels more like a debut album than even her actual debut album. I’m not sure what the actual timeline was, but it certainly feels like the rest of this thing was frantically thrown together in the wake of the title track’s unexpected success, just like Ode To Billie Joe. The other songs are almost all covers, and there are some baffling choices. None of the songs are bad, of course – Bobbie’s still yet to let me down there – but a lot of them feel a little out of place following the opener, especially “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head”. Great song and all, but seriously, guys – did it occur to nobody that it’s difficult to appreciate this sort of whimsy with desperate prostitutes and starving babies still occupying one’s headspace? Maybe it was less of a problem in the vinyl days, since it’s on the second side, but I dunno. Listening to stuff like “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again” and “Something in the Way He Moves” (from a musical and a James Taylor album, respectively) after “Fancy” really creates a whiplash effect that never goes away. I’ve certainly got no real desire to describe most of these songs – they’re all just uncomplicatedly good, smooth, string-laden pop tunes, pretty much indistinguishable from the stuff on her last album. No misfires at all, on a song-by-song basis, but the concept renders the whole end product a little screwy.

“He Made A Woman Out Of Me” is the only other one I really feel any urge to actually talk about, and it’s no coincidence that it’s the only other non-cover on the album. The funky organ riff is fantastic, and the way the verses transition into the hook is absolutely divine in exactly the way Bobbie loves. If I didn’t know someone else had written it, I’d have assumed right away that she penned this herself, what with its blues-soul feel and miserable, country-focused lyrics. She sings it with great passion, too, really showing off her soulful chops. It’s not truly much better than most of the generally solid songs on this album, but it’s possibly the only tune here that fits with the tone “Fancy” sets, and as such it’s the one I always end up remembering.

So, there you have it. My lamest review? Maybe. But I feel like I’ve basically summarised this album as well as I can. It opens with one of the best, most affecting, and most powerful songs ever written, and then follows it up with a jukebox. It would be a malicious lie to call it a bad album, or even a mediocre one – but it is, to me at least, a misfire of some description, and I’d have loved to see a full album of self-penned tunes backing up the title track. As it stands, the song feels like an orphan, or an alien living among another species. Get it, for sure, and maybe get “He Made A Woman Out of Me” too, but the rest here is entirely optional.

Bobbie Gentry – Touch ‘Em with Love (1969)

By Michael Strait

She cedes the spotlight mostly to other songwriters on this one. Good thing she’s got great taste.

So, most of my reviews dealing with cover songs tend to compare and contrast ’em with the originals and/or other versions. That’d take me too long here, though, so I’m not gonna bother. Exactly 50% of this album is covers, and of the rest, only two are self-penned. That disappoints me a little, because Bobbie is one of my personal favourite songwriters, but I needn’t have worried too much – she’s not sung a bad song yet, and she’s not about to start now.

For the most part, this is a straightforward exploration of the soul end of Bobbie’s influences. The folk and blues stuff is mostly left by the wayside, though the fingerpicked “Seasons Come, Seasons Go” – one of the aforementioned self-penned ones – isn’t too dissimilar from her earlier lush folk songs. Still, it doesn’t take long for all the smooth soul elements to come in and remind you that Bobbie, on this album at least, really didn’t want to be mistaken for a country singer anymore. The song is lovely, if not particularly memorable; the second of her songs on the album is far more likely to stick with you. “Glory Hallelujah, How They’ll Sing” has one of her characteristically smart verse melodies and some of her most vividly visual lyrics, as well as brief, loud hook that stays memorable mostly on account of cleverly-built contrast with the verses. It always leaves me momentarily a little sad that she didn’t write more tunes on this thing, but truth be told it isn’t the best song on it anyway.

That honor, honestly, probably goes to the most obvious choice. “Son of a Preacher Man” was always one of my favourite songs in the endlessly-syndicated classic pop pantheon, and Bobbie’s take on it is stupendously excellent. That cool, badass riff that opens it sets the mood for the rest of the song, and the rhythm section maintains a strong, self-assured presence the whole way through as she sings those unforgettable melodies with her characteristic complete confidence. There’s no simpering dependence here, nor much weepy nostalgia; there’s just a woman proudly expressing her justly-earned love for a man who deserves it. I’m not a fan of the fadeout at the end, but other than that I’ve no complaints at all – it’s short, sure, but so is the original, so what can you do? The other super short track on the record, the title track, is similarly excellent and opens the album on a suitably arresting note. Bobbie didn’t write it, but I can see why she chose it – the hook comes swooping in out of nowhere in an incredibly memorable fashion in just the sort of clever way I can tell she really appreciated, and the lyrics, while a little nonsensical, are rife with the sort of intrinsically Southern religious imagery she loves. I also like how the guitar and organ take turns, on the first and second verse respectively, to do their little flourishes over the solid base that is the piano. The sonic variety on this album is a real treat.

There’s one more non-cover left on the first side, and it’s excellent. “Greyhound Goin’ Somewhere” manages to perfectly capture the strange mysticality of America’s vastness and the allure of losing one’s troubles in it. It strikes a difficult tone to hit – it’s regretful, especially the mournful, harmonica-assisted conclusion to the chorus, but it’s also full of undeniably yearning and not a little relief. That’s partly due to the excellent pacing – the way the hook is built up to and then segmented, cut apart by little instrumental moments – but also due to Bobbie’s excellent vocals, which manage to sound wistful in two ways at once, as if she simultaneously wants to be better at holding stable relationships together and wants to be going off somewhere and exploring. The first side is completed by “Natural To Be Gone”, which has possibly my favourite verse melody on the album and manages to throw in a softly cantering banjo in a way that doesn’t feel remotely out of place in what is otherwise a fairly straightforward smooth, string-based soul song. Bobbie was just as inventive an interpreter as a writer.

The only non-cover on side two is “I Wouldn’t Be Surprised”, which has a very nice choir and some passionately-banged drums but otherwise is probably one of the less essential tracks on here. It’s still good, of course, but it’s good in a kind of unsurprising way, which makes it a lesser effort as far as Bobbie goes. “Where’s The Playground, Johnny” does the same sort of things, but it does ’em better, with its smooth strings backing up a hook so melodramatic that it should by all rights sound kind of silly. It doesn’t, though – it sounds very pretty indeed, even if it clashes slightly with the worriedly metaphoric lyrics. “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again”, meanwhile, is her shimmeringly pretty take on a song from a musical, and she delivers the simple, slightly kitschy lyrics with such conviction that it’s difficult not to be at least a little moved by them. Finally, we come to the closer, “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy”, which has possibly the prettiest strings and most tasteful rhythm work on the album, not to mention that beautiful moment when the hook sort of holds off on attaining climax for a second, repeating the same string motif a couple of times in anticipation before it blossoms into a full-blown chorus. She really belts in this one, too, showing off the singing skills she’s usually been content to let play second fiddle to her songwriting and lyricism. It’s another display of her outstandingly well-rounded talent, in other words, which is basically the story of this whole album and, really, her entire career.

I mean, don’t get me wrong – I’d still rather be listening to an album of Bobbie originals, so for the most part I tend to play individual highlights from this record (especially “Son of a Preacher Man”) rather than throwing on the whole thing. But whenever I do, I certainly enjoy it, and that’s ‘cos there’s nothing to really not enjoy here. On its own merits, this album is lovely indeed, and it’s only twenty-six minutes long anyway so it’s not like it ever gets tiresome. I’d have more problems with Bobbie spending this section of her career singing other people’s songs if those songs weren’t all so good. I’m not entirely sure what she’s wearing on the cover, but whatever, man. When you’re Bobbie Gentry, you can dress how you like.

SHORTIE’S VIDEO COLUMN: BEACH BOYS – Wild Honey (1967)

By John Short

Bobbie Gentry – The Delta Sweete (1968)

By Michael Strait

I believe this is what the young’uns refer to as a “glo-up”.

Alright, so it’s at this point that I start to sort of understand why so many people insist on calling Bobbie Gentry a country artist. I guess this is a country record, even if it only feels like it arrived there by combining folk, blues and soul in a way that sort of ended up accidentally resembling country music. There’s still lots of souly horn arrangements and folky string arrangements, and the songs are still mostly written like blues or folk songs, but the funny thing about hearing them in this context is you kinda start to realise that country music is basically just what you get when you combine blues and folk anyway. The end result, then, is a highly idiosyncratic record, and it also happens to be an utterly brilliant one.

It’s barely four minutes longer than the last one, but it’s an order of magnitude better, and I already liked that one a lot. Just about all the flaws in Ode to Billie Joe could be traced back to its rushed nature, and that constraint wasn’t present here. So, what you’re left with is a selection of twelve distinct, unique, excellently-written songs, all so tremendously rewarding that I really have no idea which track I’d pick as my favourite. Actually, I don’t really know that I could pick a least favourite track, either, which really is an exquisitely unusual achievement.

If there’s one trait this album shares with its predecessor, it’s that it’s split roughly evenly between folk songs and bluesier stuff. Most of the bluesier stuff here resides on the first half, and that includes the opening track, “Okolona River Bottom Band”, which is something of an immediate mission statement. That reserved, growling guitar riff, melding so perfectly with those blaring horns, almost gives one the impression of ominous danger before Bobbie comes in with a few “la-la-la”s and makes it clear that the song is, in fact, mostly an excellent farce. The vocal melody might be described as mock-serious, and she throws in this glorious recording of some old Southern man cackling like a lunatic at a couple of points to make it extra clear that there’s nothing particularly worrisome going on here. She has a lot of fun with her silly rhymes in the chorus, backing herself up with what are either backing vocalists or multiple tracks of her own voice to create a sense of overriding mirth. Thinking about it, I actually can’t think of many songs that pull that off – I can think of plenty of comedy songs, sure, but songs that successfully give the impression of participating in a hilarious, raucously fun communal event, bringing you right into the fun and allowing you to have a good time along with them? That’s more difficult than you’d think. The song is ridiculously catchy, layered, and – as usual for Bobbie – totally unique. On most albums, it’d be an easy favourite, but here I’m not so sure.

Of the remaining bluesy tracks, two of them are Bobbie originals. “Sermon”, the last track on what would have been the A-side back in the horrid days when vinyl was the only option, is sung remarkably quietly for being so fast-paced, as if to show reverence for the sermon she’s relaying the details of, with horns and distant choirs of backing vocalists heralding the message. I always thought it seemed a little bit like she was quietly mocking the preacher, too – “You may run on for a long time”, she repeats, ostensibly quoting him but also perhaps making fun of his long-windedness – but for the most part it doesn’t appear that she’s making much commentary on the message; she’s presenting it without comment, a slice of her life growing up in Mississippi, not to mention using it as an opportunity to deliver some of her usual beautifully-written lyrics. “Great God Almighty, let me tell you my need/ Yes, my head’s been wet with the midnight deed/ I been down on my bended knee/ Talkin’ to the man from Galilee”. I’m doubtful that the preacher used precisely those words, but I expect Bobbie’s version is an improvement.

The other one, “Reunion”, is one of the most unique creations in Bobbie’s mostly-unique catalogue, and certainly the song you’re most likely to remember the first time you listen to the album. It’s remarkably ambitious for such a profoundly silly song, seeking to sonically recreate both the physical and emotional atmosphere of an extended family gathering, piling Bobbie’s silly lyrics (“Mama make Willie quit pulling at my hair!/ Mama ouch! ouch! mama, just make Willie quit it!”) atop a choir of children singing dinner table gossip as if it were angelic verse and then interjecting the rhythmic spoken-word rhymes of an old Southern dad, or perhaps uncle, giving lackadaisical orders and making easy boasts of the sort that flow easily when there’s plentiful food. It should be an absolute mess, but instead it’s an absolute joy, and it brings a smile to my face every time. It’s not got anything resembling the usual pop song structure, because how could it? It’s very catchy, though, and I’ve had the uncle’s lines stuck in my head for weeks now. “I told you, my mama didn’t raise no fool – I can do anything if I got the right tools!” (If you listen closely, you’ll notice one of the things the choir sings about is the suicide of Billie Joe at the Tallahatchie Bridge. Bobbie was building a whole-ass shared universe before it was cool.)

The remaining bluesy songs are all covers, and every one of them is way better than “Niki Hoeky” off her last record. I actually prefer her version of “Big Boss Man” to Jimmy Reed’s, mostly because I love the quietly contemptuous way she sings it, not to mention the extra context that’s injected by those same lyrics coming from the mouth of a clearly-seething woman rather than a sardonic, depressed man. The energetic guitar riffing helps convey the unhappiness, and I love the sections where all the instruments drop except for the bass, rumbling under her nearly-whispered words of suppressed anger. There’s a similar current running under “Parchman Farm”, which is Gentry’s version of Mose Allison’s cover of Bukka White’s incredible original (linked here for the curious only, as it has little in common with either Mose’s or Bobbie’s versions). Bobbie sings it slowly and deliberately, never raising her voice and choosing to switch the perspective to third person, giving the unmistakable impression of judgement as she sings with sardonic contempt. One is unsure why, exactly, she’s being so implicitly judgemental until you reach the end, when she finally unveils the song’s famous plot twist: “Well he’s gonna be there for the rest of his life/ and all he ever did was shoot his wife”. No surprise, I guess, that a woman might see something markedly less relatable in a song about a domestic murderer proclaiming that he’s never done anything wrong, and I take the light, airy strings that come in after the conclusion of the tale as signifying happiness at justice done fairly and right.

“Tobacco Road”, meanwhile, is a song she probably knew from The Nashville Teens’ 1964 version. My favourite version of the song is probably the original, but they’re all great, and Bobbie’s is no exception. I love the way she alternates between the hard, bluesy riffing and the lush folk arrangements as she sings the brutally matter-of-fact lyrics, as if to contrast the harsh reality of deep Southern poverty with the lushness and beauty of the natural environment that surrounds it. The last of the covers is the only one that was, originally, a true-blue country song, and while I like the original just fine I must confess I’m a much bigger fan of Bobbie’s version. She conveys what sounds like genuine excitement when relaying the tale of life on the bayou, and the various extra instrumental arrangements that flourish up behind her really flesh out the picture. It’s really good fun, and a sadly rare example of totally non-toxic working class Southern pride, with no ties to any confederate nostalgia or even so much as a hint of any rebel imagery.

Even the shortest track on this album feels fully fleshed-out. “Penduli Pendulum” doesn’t break two minutes (despite the protestations of both RYM and Wikipedia, which incorrectly record the track length as nearly three minutes), but it’s got one of the catchiest melodies of the whole bunch, and the way the strings steadily build up to swirl around her voice as she sings on is just gorgeous. It’s not a particularly complex song, but it doesn’t feel like it’s lacking anything at all, and I didn’t even notice it was so short until I looked at the track listing. I’m not entirely sure what the lyrics mean, but they’re very pretty, and I love listening to her sing them. That voice is still gorgeous and unique in its faintly harsh warmth, and it fits the music like a glove.

It’s not the best folk song here, but it’s certainly not the worst – although, again, I’m not sure there even is a worst. They’re all so good! “Mornin’ Glory” is a deeply pleasant three-minute love song, containing no complicated message and no huge, attention-grabbing hook because it just doesn’t need either; it simply exists in a glowing state of loveliness, casting light and heat on all around it, sounding like the musical equivalent of reflections in a placid pool as the sun rises. “Jessye’ Lizabeth” is similarly placid, although not quite so warm; it’s a much more baroque folk song, evoking old England more than the American South, even as the lyrics remain an expression of devotional love (this time to our narrator’s little daughter). But it’s just as lovely to listen to, chiefly because the melody, for all its baroque, glacial slowness, is well-constructed enough to pop back into one’s head whenever one wishes it to, even as it deftly avoids getting stuck there and becoming irritating.

If held at gunpoint and forced to choose, I guess I’d probably pick “Refractions” as my favourite folk song here, though it’d hurt to feel like I was disrespecting the others. It’s also a little baroque and ancient-sounding, but the melody is truly, totally gorgeous, all soft and bright and huge in scope. It melds with the strings perfectly as it climbs and circulates to climax in each verse, sounding as crystalline as the bird she describes in the beautifully abstract lyrics – lyrics which are certainly some of the most gorgeous on the album, even if I’m not sure that they mean anything particularly deep. It’s a gorgeous ray of light masquerading as a song, and it truly baffles me that the woman who made it isn’t more widely celebrated.

Finally, we come to our lovely closer, “Courtyard”, which has the honor of containing my favourite lyrics on an album where almost all the songs have great lyrics. The song itself is slow, light and gorgeous, gliding softly along like mist as she sings longingly and lovingly of the tragic, love-resembling illusions in which she has trapped herself. The final couplet contains vastly more depth than most artists are able to squeeze out of entire songs. “Patterns on a courtyard floor/ Illusions of all I’m living for”, she sings acapella, the music having trailed off and left her sitting there alone, awaiting fulfillment that will never come. It’s a bit of a downer ending, considering the various mixed emotions one can find elsewhere on the album, but it’s beautiful all the same, and certainly deeply pleasant on the ears.

Looking back, I’m amazed at all the stylistic variety, emotional depth, and musical creativity she was able to squeeze into these thirty-three minutes. This is a highly efficient album, without so much as a wasted minute and lacking anything I can immediately pinpoint as a flaw. It’s an album that knows how to have fun without being embarrassing, knows how to be ambitious without being pretentious, and knows how to be heartfelt without being corny. It’s an expertly-made, remarkably perfect piece of art, and it’s a tremendous injustice that it isn’t given more credit as such. It’s unique enough that no genre gatekeepers really feel like claiming it for their canons, except for country music, which has such a frankly overpopulated canon that it can be easy to miss Bobbie in there. I can’t remember how I discovered her, but I’m very glad I did. Now y’all can too. Do yourself a favour and listen to one of the best albums of the late sixties. You deserve it, I promise.

Bobbie Gentry—Ode to Billie Joe (1967)

Michael Strait

I don’t really want to focus on music history here, so I’ll just hit you with the abridged version: Bobbie Gentry recorded the song “Ode to Billie Joe” as an intended B-side, ended up releasing it as a single in its own right, and was stunned at its prompt, immediate success. She proceeded to grab a guitar, a producer, and a bunch of string musicians, and together they set about frantically recording a debut album to capitalize on her success. The end result was barely half an hour long, and about half its runtime was occupied by either “Ode To Billie Joe” or songs that had almost the exact same chord progression as “Ode to Billie Joe”. In other words, it should, by all rights, be kind of a mediocre album at best, and it certainly has absolutely no business being this good.

To be fair, though, we might’ve expected that the woman who wrote “Ode to Billie Joe” would turn out to be an expert at doing a lot with a little. That song is fascinatingly, deeply brilliant, and it’s certainly not encumbered with an overabundance of moving parts. It’s got a few lovely strings to fill some of the space, sure, but they don’t do much more than basic textural work, and that’s all they need to do. The melody, too, is perfectly catchy and not a little haunting, but its real purpose is to direct as much attention as possible to the lyrics. The words are the real meat of this song, and they are, in my humble opinion, among the best ever set to music.

It’s one of those stories that’s more about painting an environment than it is about the actual plot itself, and accordingly the central mystery – the one that’s occupied so much popular discourse about this song – is never resolved. Why did Billie Joe throw himself off the Tallahatchie Bridge? We’ll never know, and that’s okay. What’s important is that you’re left with a fulsome picture of the world in which he lived and died, and it leaves you with the impression that life is rather transient around here anyway. The Mississippi Delta of this song is not quite a dystopia, but it’s an anachronistic relic from an earlier, less prosperous, more brutal era, full of backbreaking farm work broken up only by the weekly church visits and the occasional devastating virus. It’s no wonder the brother ends up moving to Tupelo; it doesn’t sound like there was much for him here. The most indelible mental image the song leaves us is of our poor narrator throwing flowers off the same bridge, no emotion described because no description is necessary. She’s surrounded by death, despair, and abandonment, and there’s little indication that she’s got prospects for anything else. In the end, I’ve always thought this in itself was, in its own way, enough of a resolution to the old mystery. This was the world in which Billie Joe lived, and it was all he had ever known. What more reason did he need to throw himself off that bridge?

“Ode to Billie Joe” is the best song on this disc, very probably the best song of Bobbie’s career, and one of the best songs of the era. It is not, however, the most memorable single moment on the album. That honor goes to “Mississippi Delta”, which is, on my 2007 re-issue, the opening track. I went into this album having been told Bobbie was a country artist, so I expected something like, I dunno, Patsy Cline. Imagine my shock when I throw this baby on and the first thing I hear is that aggressive r&b groove, complete with hard guitar stabs, ominous textural horns and that astounding harsh roar emanating from Bobbie’s mouth, sounding somewhere between an old whiskey-drowned bluesman, a passionate soul singer and a macho rock ‘n’ roll firestarter. She spends half the song’s runtime just repeatedly spelling out the name of her state, and it really has no business sounding as utterly badass as it does. But she makes it sound absolutely natural, and her charisma is instantly enrapturing. On this edition, the title track is the closer, so I spent my first few listens so wowed by the opening and closing tracks that I barely noticed the flaws in between. Sadly, they become more obvious on closer listens, but they’re still quite insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

You can slot all the remaining tracks into one of two camps. First, we have the songs that are basically clones of the title track, at least in terms of the chord progression; all have very similar bluesy melodies and open with the same little guitar motif, and it’s easy to get a little bored by the time you hit the last one. Second, you have the nice, pleasant folk ballads, usually played with intricate fingerpicking and full of lush string arrangements to add some extra sun. Of the former, my favourite is probably “Bugs”, which remains a song just about anyone living in any part of the South can relate to in the summer. It’s a silly joke song, I guess, but so what? It’s funny, and it works. The way the strings and drums do their best to evoke the motions of various insects in the second verse is highly endearing, and the hook is really very catchy. I’m also quite a big fan of “Chickasaw County Child”, which melds some of that lovely fingerpicking with the bluesy melody and throws in what may be the most optimistic lyrics ever written about Southern poverty. “Niki Hoeky”, despite fitting mostly the same template as the others here, is a cover, and while it doesn’t sound much like the (admittedly superior) original, I wouldn’t say it’s without any charms. I like the quiet piano underlying the whole thing, and those slightly exotic drums do sound quite nice. “Lazy Willie” is probably the most inessential of this lot, but I quite like that quaintly memorable Southern saying she throws in the last verse. “Don’t you remember, Lazy Willie, what Momma used to say?/ That all summer long the grasshopper would play/ The ant would work hard storin’ up his winter supply/ When the snow came, the ant lived, the grasshopper died.” I’m not entirely sure I could vouch for the ecological accuracy, but it brings a smile to my face all the same.

The fingerpicked folk ballads, meanwhile, are uniformly lovely on the surface, even if they aren’t all necessarily equally engaging on a deeper level. “I Saw an Angel Die” ties with “Papa, Won’t You Let Me Go to Town With You” for the title of best. The former is a gorgeous, placid sonic portrait of a sun-baked, lightly wind-kissed Southern meadow married to a very prettily metaphoric narrative that seems to suggest a devastating heartbreak, all grounded in Bobbie’s earthen, slightly raspy voice. The latter isn’t as layered, I guess, but it’s still lovely to hear the various instruments introducing themselves and building up as the song progresses, transforming it from a simple girl-and-guitar ballad to a swirling mess of crystalline strings and regal horns that give the father’s trip to town the air of some great royal expedition. “Sunday Best”, meanwhile, is probably the least essential, being just a fairly lovely-but-unremarkable love ballad. As for “Hurry, Tuesday Child”, well, I guess I’m a little mixed on it; I love the ambiguously tragic lyrics (is the child truly leaving to find a better life, or is he leaving this world altogether?), but the song itself kinda plods along without doing much to draw anyone’s attention. It’s nice, but I don’t find myself listening to it very often.

And… huh, that’s it. I always forget how short this album is! It’s all good, though, ‘cos it keeps the flaws from becoming particularly noticeable and allows you to listen in the briefest little windows of time. There’s a lot of promise here, and she’d largely go on to realise that with the albums to come. This isn’t her best record, nor her most interesting, but it’s a solid start to a career and contains a lot of lovely music nonetheless. I’m still not really sure I’m prepared to call it a country record, but I guess I can see why a lot of people do – she’s a white girl from the South playing acoustic guitar songs about poverty and heartbreak, and even if her particular brand of heartbreak is very different to that of most country singers it’s easy to see how one might make the leap. Myself, I’m not really sure where to properly file her, but I know she’s a goddamn great musician, and you should at least have her somewherein that library of yours.