Hello, one and all, and welcome back to the Monday Morning Mixtape! The whole Monday part of the bargain has not been an easy one to uphold 😉
There are lots of exciting things to share: a brand new mixtape, a review of last week’s mixtape, and my own survey of 2021 in review in which I air my grievances and praises. Hope everyone has a great week! I’ll be back on February 7th.
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monday, january 24th mixtape
My favorite’s of 2021!
The Sixties loomed large over the last mixtape, bookending it with “You Only Live Twice” and ending with “Bonnie And Clyde.” Both were Mad Men-inspired, with the former operating as the closing song to the fifth season and the latter played in passing an episode or two after. As a pair, they feel so quintessentially of their time with their shared thematic allure of sex and violence and notably maximalist psychedelic production. They’re particularly intriguing for their novel use of “exotic” sounds. In “You Only Live Twice” it’s the south Asian-inspired melody played throughout on an electric guitar made to sound like tinny flute and in “Bonnie And Clyde” it’s the psychotic giggle which echoes with prescriptive consistency throughout the track. It makes me wonder if this isn’t an early example of sampling or if they just had someone make that noise for four minutes. George Harrison’s “Wah-Wah,” the last of the trio, shares a similarly maximal production style, perhaps even surpassing the previous two. They’re all perfect as a result of their garishness: the often goofy attempts at splendid sound collages speak to their time more than any couplet.
The milieu of “Wilpan’s Walk” feels like an actual iteration of the dream-it-yourself, all-for-one-and-one-for-all, communal bullshit that we’re told the Sixties was about (or wanted to be). Strata East, the formidable independent jazz record label, was founded by trumpeter Charles Tolliver and pianist Stanley Cowell (both of whom appear on the track) in 1971. While not overtly political, Tolliver and Cowell’s label was founded in the Black power principles of racial pride and financial and creative empowerment, lending to its revolutionary approach: allowing the ownership of the music to fall to its composer or bandleader. With a process that is still far from the norm today (see: “Taylor’s Version”) Strata East was a font of progressive Black jazz throughout the 70s that was founded in artistic self-determination and a collective spirit, releasing records from the likes of Pharoah Sanders, Clifford Jordan, and Gil Scott-Heron.
And then there was Earl. (Not to dwell too long on loose associations, but Strata East’s quiet revolution of allowing artists to control the means of production feels like a lineal predecessor to Odd Future running amuck across the internet in the late aughts to control their means of representation. Both loose collectives of artists fulfilling the fantasies of those just slightly before them [in OF’s case, a decentralized internet], albeit at different volumes.) “2010” dropped in December 2021 and was hypnotizing with Black Noi$e’s bubbling electronic backing and Earl’s lone verse. There’s a real deceiving economy to Earl unfolding simple metaphors to poetically reveal lines of success gradually overwhelming past pain. And perhaps more obviously, it’s a master class in free association, one that offers new imagery with every listen: I just heard mention of a storybook-like winking crescent moon in my last listen.
Nancy Sinatra - “You Only Live Twice” (1967)
George Harrison - “Wah-Wah” (1970)
Music Inc. - “Wilpan’s Walk” (1972)
Earl Sweatshirt - “2010” (2021)
Serge Gainsbourg & Brigitte Bardot - “Bonnie And Clyde” (1968)
After releasing the 2020 survey last year I was (validly) chided for my own absence from the poll’s respondents list. Though I shared my favorite songs and albums of the year, it wasn’t within the same strictures as I had subjected readers to. So this year I figured I would take the poll and join you all in thinking about the year that’s past.
Hard to say anything other than Olivia Rodrigo, right? At the end of 2020 it’s hard to imagine anyone predicting the meteoric rise she’d have to being ubiquitously known. 2021 was her world and we were just living in it.
It was also the year of street jerk chicken, national parks, getting fat & happy, west coast living, records on records, getting much better at my job, and more travel than I could’ve thought possible
Jerry Remy
I know this is lame, but I have no idea. Please accept my overcompensations below and big credit to anyone who had enough hate in their heart to fill this out
20 favorite of the favorites from this year:
Almost Hear You Sigh - the Rolling Stones; Ride the Tide - Donnie and Joe Emerson; Family Don’t Matter - Young Thug; Hive - Earl Sweatshirt (feat. Vince Staples and Casey Veggies); Boys in the Better Land - Fontaines D.C.; Celestial Chant - McCoy Tyner; Put It On - Big L; Peg - Steely Dan; Summer Breeze, Pts. 1+2 - the Isley Brothers; Snafu - Yusef Lateef; Crime Pays - Freddie Gibbs & Madlib; Doomsday - MF DOOM; Lakers - Freddie Gibbs & Madlib (feat. Ab-Soul and Polyester the Saint); Workinonit - J Dilla; Rapp Snitch Knishes - MF DOOM (feat. Mr. Fantastik); Like A Ship - Pastor T.L. Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir; Walk Tall - Hiroshi Suzuki; Blues & Pants - James Brown; Eye Know - De La Soul; Lifestyle - Rich Gang
Aja - Steely Dan; Trident - McCoy Tyner; Donuts - J Dilla; Let’s Get It On - Marvin Gaye; Country Funk, 1969-1975 - Various Artists; The Real McCoy - McCoy Tyner; Piñata - Freddie Gibbs & Madlib; Can’t Buy A Thrill - Steely Dan
As described below, I had a weird relationship with the music released in 2021, so there weren’t many songs that came out this year which I latched myself to. Below are the ones that stood out to me:
Be Sweet - Japanese Breakfast; Big Boss Rabbit - Freddie Gibbs; Please - Jessie Ware; Made Like That - Sierra Farrell; SWEET / I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE - Tyler the Creator (to pick one of the many enjoyed on his record)
There were really only two 2021 albums that I returned to again and again this year. They were Tyler the Creator’s “CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST” and “Promises” by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra.
At arm’s length, though I’m really not sure who’s arm.
On one hand, I felt like I pulled myself out of the sphere a bit. Historically a dedicated listener of the New York Times’ Popcast (shout out Jon Caramanica, prayers up that he one day subscribes to the MMM) which helped keep me in the critical loop, I maybe tuned into five episodes throughout all of 2021 and two of them were done in memoriam. In 2020 I was good about maintaining a running list of high-profile and well-received albums that always offered me something to turn to across the musicscape. I was dedicated in the first couple months of 2021, but it slipped after then.
On the other hand, it felt like many of the heavyweight stalwarts who gave it a shot this year delivered substandard efforts. Bieber, Kanye (he was still Kanye at that point), and Drake all had chart-topping albums that didn’t match up to previous feats. Though slightly less drastic, something similar can be said about the beloveds Lorde and Kacey, whose records received lukewarm reception compared to their respective predecessors and failed to top the charts despite outsized anticipation for both releases. Taylor Swift had three different albums (“Evermore,” “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” and “Red (Taylor’s Version)”) that were number one in the year (which is crazy!), but none of them technically featured newly conceived material for 2021. At the end of the year it felt like Adele delivered on what others had not. And as noted Olivia Rodrigo was the deserved queen bee. But by and large, the output felt disappointing.
This might be slightly cheating (it was a three-part documentary, each part decidedly movie-length), but “The Beatles: Get Back” captured a realm of my heart that no other movie I saw this year even knew existed (and that includes two other great music docs, “Summer of Soul” and “The Velvet Underground”). What sets “Get Back” apart from essentially all other music films outside of its magnificent scope is its unfiltered intimacy: it truly feels like you’re in the space with the band along with cameramen, girlfriends, engineers, and roadies enduring the doldrums, fights, and cigarette breaks along with the moments of enduring musical brilliance. (Future music biopics should take the unsexiness of the pop songwriting creative process to heart; “Bohemian Rhapsody” being an example of one that tried and failed miserably to sum up weeks-long processes into a string of eureka moments.) The dynamics of the most important band in the history of have never been laid so bare to the general public, showing there’s still more of the mythos to understand and deconstruct a half century later. They’re also just such charming fuckers.
“Dune” would probably be a distant number two if I had to pick a feature film.
No Time to Die; unrewarding villain, and the stakes were too low to justify committing to Bond’s demise
Licorice Pizza; (problematic age gap aside) one of the best shot films of the year wasted on a meandering plot and a serious lack of character development for someone with as much potential as Alana (the character, not the actress). Someone noted the stellar soundtrack in their response which I wholeheartedly agree with
The Many Saints of Newark; by a landslide. Proof that disappointment is not always the result of betrayed expectations. From the release of it’s self-serious trailer (what the hell was that version of “Gotta Serve Somebody”??) this seemed doomed to be little more than a glorified Easter egg hunt. It was worse than that, but it was hard to be surprised
Though I didn’t attend many concerts in the past year, nearly every one I did attend had it’s own unique resonance, making it hard to narrow to one moment:
After the last minute cancellation of Bonnaroo, Christine and I high tailed it out of Nashville and caught Waxahatchee at a snug venue in Columbus, a moment that felt like the culmination of a summer on the road. Everything about that night was beautiful, not least of which was the music itself.
With this weekend’s news of the cancellation of their reunion tour, seeing the Fugees perform their first concert in 15 years (and their last for the foreseeable future) on a Manhattan rooftop feels like I’ve attended the one concert that will give me “I-was-at-that-show” credibility. By the miracle of generosity I was able to get tickets from a friend’s ex (huge shout out to SB). By the grace of friendship, Peter (my unwitting companion) was patient enough to stay until the trio appeared on stage two and a half hours after their scheduled time. When the Fugees finally did come out, it was electric.
I haven’t missed the Newport Folk Festival since I was 18, so returning in 2021 after the festival’s cancellation in 2020 felt like communion with family.
The way you know you’ve made someone a great mixtape is if you train their ears to expect your sequencing of songs as compared to what one would expect in a song’s normal context (on an album, for example). It means they kept coming back.
Though I had been familiar with him previously, Young Thug was one of my bigger discoveries of the year. This was thanks entirely to an excellent introductory mixtape of his songs which Christine gave me at the very beginning of the year. The mixtape would go on to soundtrack most of my time living in Bed-Stuy, listening to it as I sweated profusely in my room eating jerk chicken and sipping Sprite on hot summer nights. It was such an exciting, intimate way to receive and engage with the music (in case the whole point of the Mixtape was lost on you). Though Thug’s music was a realm which I’d never really spent time in, my ears slowly but surely got more comfortable with his bizarre vocal approach. I’ll never be able to hear “Hot” without expecting “Old English” to follow, and I’ll never understand why “Family Don’t Matter” wasn’t the album closer.
