monday, september 14th

New York, hair tutorials, middle-aged rappers & more

Rise and shine!

Good morning, folks! It’s Monday again, which means it’s time for a brand new Monday Morning Mixtape :)

Kate Jamison, everyone. An absolute star coming through with the cover art for this week’s mixtape. We’ll be featuring more of her 35mm photography throughout this season!

Last Week This Morning

In this weekly section I’ll walk through the previous week’s mixtape: a track-by-track and sound-by-sound guide to what you heard, what you might have missed, and all the extracurriculars to go along with it. Today, we’ll look back on last Monday, September 7th.

Sleepwalk

So, I moved to New York. Finally.

I gave it a shot in mid-March and it happened to be one of the worst weeks to move to the Big Apple in the city’s history. I was here for five days before fleeing back to suburban comforts. Six months later, I’m back in the New York groove, a week settled into my new spot in Bed-Stuy. It feels good.

As such, it felt apt to open last week’s MMM with “New Career in a New Town,” an underrated cut from David Bowie’s 1977 record, Low. Low was the first album of Bowie’s “Berlin trilogy,” an era in which he left Los Angeles, kicked coke, and moved to Berlin to crank out three of his most innovative records with Iggy Pop, Brian Eno, and others. There’s an odd conceit that lies beneath the choice to move to the most politically contentious city in the Western world during the height of the Cold War for artistic clarity. But I get it: there’s also an odd conceit in moving to a city that was, as recently as five months ago, the world’s epicenter for the on-going pandemic and declared “dead forever” (very ridiculous) only to pay rent when it’s not in full bloom and you’re not required to be there. Sometimes the restart button just needs to be punched.

Low, and “New Career in a New Town” specifically, captures the emotional experience of being in the right place at the wrong time. The song tracks from the inhibition that accompanies feeling unwelcome in the physical imposition of a steely metropolis to the wonderment in discovering its lifeblood beyond the surface. (And that harmonica…what the fuck is it doing there?! I can’t get enough of it.)

All sleepwalk songs will be housed on the Spotify playlist below.

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• “Good Morning” by Black Thought, featuring Pusha T, Swizz Beatz, and Killer Mike, kicked us off last Monday. (For those of you unaware, as I was upon first listen, Black Thought is the lead MC and co-founder of the Roots.) Again, it felt too on-point not to lead with the song that spoke directly to the MMM. // The song is wonderfully boastful, but at its heart is about wokeness (“Good morning!”), which puts Killer Mike in his wheelhouse for the final verse. By contrast, Pusha T’s verse confuses me a bit as he’s not a “conscious” rapper in the true sense of the term and the appearance feels like it pulls from the vision a bit.

  On any given day, the space that I occupy in the world is somewhere between a Killer Mike and a Pusha T, between an activist and a street hero, a man of the people and a man of the streets — that’s my origin story. I feel like both of their energies represent my own creative bipolarity.

  - Black Thought, with his thoughts on “Good Morning”

  // Unconsciously, I’ve gravitated toward the work of middle-aged rappers this year. RTJ4 has been in heavy rotation and Alfredo from Freddie Gibbs & the Alchemist has also gotten a fair amount of spins. All the rappers on “Good Morning” are in their 40s (Black Thought, 48; Pusha T, 43; Killer Mike, 45; Swizz Beatz, 42) and Gibbs is on the threshold himself at 38. Despite not being in the trenches for newest trends or chart-topping success, it’s fascinating to hear guys maintaining their edge and making solid records just because they still can.

• You must understand, ABBA is part of my DNA. I don’t claim to be a super fan in the way that a super fan inhales the output and aurora of an artist by maintaining a second-hand knowledge of every factoid, worshipping the deep cuts, and loving the lesser records like a parent loves their undercooked child. (Sidebar: this is obvious, but ABBA’s stan army must be named the Super Troupers.) But I low-key love ABBA in the way that every song of theirs I like just means so much to me. It’s likely you’ve had a similar experience, but ABBA came to me via my mother and aunts, part of the soundtrack to their childhoods, and it didn’t hurt that the jukebox musical Mamma Mia, based on ABBA’s biggest hits, debuted in 1999, right around the time I began retaining memories. The original cast recording soundtrack is one of the defining sounds of the start of my existence as I knew it. // And it’s not like I’ve ever seen the Swedes as a guilty pleasure. Over the years, I’ve had a deepening appreciation for the excellent integration of songwriting and performance that the group has. Well before it was cool to be a poptimist, ABBA was proof that great songs didn’t need to be confessional or acoustic or self-conscious, they could just be fun. // Music finds us in weird ways. I don’t have TikTok and I’m on Instagram with relative infrequency, so the fact that I discovered ABBA’s “If It Wasn’t For the Nights” on a TikTok video, titled “70s big bouncy hair tutorial💫,” that made its way onto my Instagram Explore page in which the most Aryan-looking woman cuts her own hair while mouthing the song feels at best completely random and at worst like the algorithm is inexplicably aware of my own hair-vanity (this is IRL exclusive, I never look up hair tutorials; shocking, I know) as well as the best way to reel me in (i.e. brutally under-heard ABBA cuts). (Thank you for reading my run-on.) I’ve watched the video at least twice a day for the past week, so it might have worked. Seriously though, how was this song never released as a single?

• The mixtape’s penultimate song was “Full of Fire” by Al Green. As a foil to the overt four-to-the-floor disco of ABBA, I’ve always found Green’s songs to be secretly danceable. While Green was renowned for his fastidious approach to vocals, often recording dozens of takes to perfect something as small as a turn of phrase, it’s the consistency of the drum sound across his recordings that always pulls me in. I’ve long wondered how the distinctive sound (obtuse, heavy, and flat to the point where it sounds more like a tom than a snare) was obtained from a technical standpoint and how much intention went into creating and maintaining it. Green’s music is rarely rhythmically complex, but that ensures a steady core that makes you want to move. To put it another way, it’s got that kind of thrust that led Justin Timberlake to describe it as “some serious babymaking music.” // I would be remiss not to mention an alternative reading of this track that considers Green’s role as a religious figure and his turn toward gospel music throughout the 80s. As it is, “fire” imagery is littered throughout the Bible as a symbol of transformation (both destructive and renewing) and passion. As I listened to this song, it was hard not to hear it as an ode to born-again Christianity, in which the character realizes a burning passion for spiritual connection and a singularity of desire. The idea echoes writing in Luke 24:32 in which two disciples, having just unknowingly encountered Jesus in the aftermath of his Resurrection, ask one another, “‘Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?’” They, too, are born-again in a renewed and deepened knowledge of the gospel. It’s this moment of realization that Green captures on “Full of Fire,” albeit with less perplexity and more joy than his counterparts from 2,000 years earlier.

• For the second week in a row we talk Frank Ocean, this time as it relates to “Nature Feels” from his 2011 debut mixtape, nostalgia,ULTRA. It was my first time giving a Frank project a full-hearted listen and I came away feeling pretty mixed. Conceptually, the mixtape feels like it’s dealing with the repercussions of sin as it effects individuals and the human race as a whole, particularly when it comes to love disguised as sex and sex disguised as love. I love this, as its ambitious as hell especially for someone so young, and Frank comes off as talented,ULTRA. (Additionally, the cassette sounds that make it sound like Frank is playing you his mixtape is something I am a terrible sucker for.) But when it comes to execution, the project has seminal moments which fall flat. The three “reinterpretations,” which are meant to be the mixtape’s tentpoles in which Frank distinguishes his artistic voice on ready-made classics (Coldplay’s “Strawberry Swing,” Eagles’ “Hotel California, and MGMT’s “Electric Feel”), too often lean on the form and nature of the originals for content. When the tracks transcend these limits, such as on the majority of “Nature Feels,” they’re taken down a peg by lines like this:

  Feeling like Adam when he first found out this existed
  Wow!
  Me and my Eve trying out our first positions

  You just can’t put things like that out in the world and hope to get away with it. Moments like these, almost unbearably corny, crop up like weeds across the proverbial garden and reveal the half-baked nature of the project in which a bit more consideration, editing, etc. could’ve done the ideas a lot more justice. Frank’s sincerity shines through, just not always for the better.

• Post-script: The voices that are heard in between songs are those of Phoebe Bridgers and her drummer/writing partner Marhsall Vore. Phoebe performed live at Red Rocks last week as part of a concert series in which Megan Thee Stallion, Nathaniel Rateliff and the Nighsweats, and Lil Baby, among others, performed over three nights. You can view her full set, performed to an entirely internet-viewing audience, below.

Do you have thoughts, comments, or questions on last week’s mixtape? Listen again and leave a comment below! I’ve provided the link to the mixtape on SoundCloud as well as the playlist on Spotify for ease of listening.

A Tweet I Loved

I am the only one who finds this nearly as funny as it is. Shout out to Light In The Attic, which is a great independent reissue label and a very funny Twitter follow.

Light In The Attic @lightintheattic

Wet Ass Bandits

Long-reads

You’re spared of a long read this week. Please don’t mask your disappointments.

Shouts

Happy Birthday to Old Man Gerity!! My dad turns 55 today, so what better way to celebrate than by sharing one of the approximately five songs that he likes (not that he’d be able to name it). Yes, this will sound EXACTLY how you expect it to sound.

A Final Word on the Mixtape

On Friday the music world lost a legend in Toots Hibbert, leader and founder of the Jamaican reggae band Toots & the Maytals. This week’s mixtape is dedicated to him: all songs from the Toots discography. I’ll write more about his legacy and impact on next week’s mixtape. In the meantime, I hope everyone has a productive week. You can find the monday, september 14th mixtape below via SoundCloud! You can visit the MMM substack page here. Stay safe and hit me up with any questions!

With love,

TG