Sufjan Stevens' multimedia work inspired by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, premiered in 2007 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is released as a CD/DVD set.

The BQE

The BQE, Sufjan Stevens' multimedia work celebrating the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, premiered in 2007 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Onstage, it was an audiovisual three-ring circus, with 16-millimeter video screening images of the roadway while costumed female hula hoopers gyrated in the foreground. Now, he has packaged the experience in a boxed set, complete with an essay in the liner notes, the DVD, a comic book, and a View-Master reel. On one hand, this is exactly the sort of quixotically huge undertaking Stevens has a weakness for. And yet, once you strip away the bells and whistles, The BQE is essentially a traditional 40-minute orchestral suite, a lightweight showpiece in which the ghosts of Gershwin, Ravel, Respighi, and other standard-orchestra-repertoire crowd-pleasers surface. In fact, until an electronic interlude crashes in about halfway through, The BQ**E could easily pass for the sort of palette-cleanser that might have opened a major orchestra's subscription concert in the 1950s.
The fact that Stevens would devote his energy to something as unwieldy and time-consuming as an old-fashioned orchestral suite while his fans wait patiently for an Illinois followup is perversely endearing, like learning that J.J. Abrams has put the final season of "Lost" on hold so he can realize his dream of reciting The Iliad. But luckily, The BQE isn't much in need of the polar-bear-on-tricycle-style praise that greeted Elvis Costello when critics learned that he wrote his Il Sogno ballet suite by hand: "Look, it's a pop musician, and he's composing!" The BQE is a bubbly, fun, fast-paced, and deftly written piece, full of compositional fireworks, jazzy interludes, and stylistic detours.
It opens in full faux-pompous mode, trumpets blaring and woodwinds fluttering, before dissolving into a languid Romantic episode, the pillowy string writing and dewy, twinkling piano recalling Rachmaninov at his drowsiest. From there, Stevens flits through a dozen different moods and textures, a rustling-leaves pizzicato section collapsing directly into a kaleidoscopic, double-time electronic version of itself. The variations come and go breathlessly, each folding into the next without much attempt to locate the connective tissue linking them. The effect is superficial, but pleasantly bracing, like flipping quickly through the pages of a book.
The accompanying DVD, which Stevens shot himself alongside cinematographer Reuben Kleiner, is supposed to drive home the connection the work has with this project's famously clogged namesake. However, instead of animating or complementing the bustling music, the visuals bog down the project. The split-screen shots of the highway have a very staid, Ken Burns quality to them, and feel as though they could have been produced completely independently of Stevens' music. If Stevens was setting out to evoke the odd exhilaration of urban chaos-- and he seems to have been, rhapsodizing in the liner notes about the roadway's "steep grades, sharp turns, [and] detours... [creating] a rollercoaster obstacle course for the unsuspecting driver"-- then it's ironic that the video he's produced is completely devoid of kinetic energy. Long, motionless shots of the congestion on the BQE don't give you much of a fresh perspective on traffic; they mostly feel like, well, sitting in actual traffic. When the sun sets and we're invited to gaze upon lit-up city skylines and red suns, it's a relief, mainly because we're no longer stuck in gridlock.
As with Run Rabbit Run, Osso's recent string-quartet reworking of Stevens' second album, Enjoy Your Rabbit, it's tough to know for whom The BQE project is intended. It seems doubtful that the work will find a second life in orchestral programs, and it feels equally unlikely that fans of any of his previous albums will be clamoring to hear this work live. As such, The BQE is probably best classified as an unusually successful vanity project, as well as evidence of Stevens' restless creativity. However, even at the close of the Brooklyn Academy of Music premiere, Stevens came out to sing some songs; one hopes that he gets back to singing and writing some more of those soon enough.


New York-based singer Fatima Al Qadiri creates spectral versions of traditional Islamic songs. On her debut EP for the Tri Angle label, her voice is layered and tweaked to create an intriguing tension between organic sounds and digital processing.

WARN-U EP

If you're interested at all in the intersection of ghostly, leftfield music and beat-oriented pop, then you're probably familiar with Tri Angle. Since launching about a year ago, the boutique label has pretty well dominated this dark, ethereal corner of the indie universe, introducing or helping introduce about a half-dozen of its most intriguing artists (Balam Acab, How to Dress Well, Clams Casino, Holy Other). But if you think you've got Tri Angle pegged at this point, you may be surprised by its latest release, the debut EP from Fatima Al Qadiri, aka Ayshay. A New York-based singer and producer born in Senegal and raised in Kuwait, she makes digitally processed vocal music with an unusual global bent.
Al Qadiri is also a journalist and writes DIS magazine's eye-opening Global. Wav column, which is devoted to highlighting obscure international sounds not usually covered by Western music outlets. Her own songs wouldn't be out of place there. Mixing Julianna Barwick-style vocal layering with traditional Islamic songs, she sings mostly in Arabic and builds spare, haunting tracks from her own voice. An airy falsetto in its natural state, her singing is tweaked and stretched, occasionally pitched downward to sound deep and foreboding, and stacked upon itself to create the sensation of some kind of otherworldly group chant. There are no other instruments, no beats, no gestures to pop songwriting of any kind-- it's music that lives in its own realm.
As unconventional as it sounds, WARN-U is, generally speaking, an affecting listen. Just hearing Al Qadiri recreate a version of this sacred music (which sounds like prayers, or at least the kind of hymns you might hear in a religious setting) is striking in its own right, and the addition of computerized elements creates an unsettling tension. The songs feel ancient and futuristic at the same time, like there's no identifiable place or time to pin them to. If that was Al Qadiri's artistic aim here, then she's achieved it, but in doing so I think has sacrificed some approachability. While at times beautiful and certainly inventive, WARN-U is somewhat one-note, and it can be difficult to differentiate between the three short original tracks. It's also free-form to the degree that it can sometimes be difficult to engage with.
That's where L.A. production duo Nguzunguzu come in, who close things out with a 12-minute "megamix" of the EP's original numbers. Also globally minded but considerably more playful, Nguzunguzu are a great remix choice, and they give Ayshay's material a bright, neon makeover, adding in lots of fluttering drums, handclaps, and trunk-rattling bass. This is where WARN-U is most accessible and arguably most enjoyable, since the addition of structure helps bring Al Qadiri's more avant-garde leanings back toward earth. That a key track here comes from an outside source detracts some from the overall impact, but this is still a boundary-pushing work with strong ideas at its core. Whether or not you fall for it will likely come down to taste, but at the very least, WARN-U doesn't sound like anything else.


Daft Punk’s new album, Random Access Memories, finds them leaving behind the highly influential, riff-heavy EDM they originated to luxuriate in the sounds, styles, and production techniques of the 1970s and early ’80s.

Random Access Memories

In the electronica landscape of the 1990s, Daft Punk first came over as a novelty. Funny band name, funny sound, funny masks, and a funny (and incredibly fun) hit called “Da Funk,” found on their debut album, Homework. They’ve come a long way since, but the playfulness remains, and so does their ability to surprise. Every new step in their career, whether positive (the landmark Discovery, their life-altering pyramid live shows), negative (the inert Human After All, their forgettable score for Tron), or somewhere in between (the film Electroma) has been met initially with a collective sense of puzzlement: “Now what’s this all about?”
Random Access Memories, the fourth proper studio album from Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, continues the trend. But the differences between their first three albums and this one are vast. RAM finds them leaving behind the highly influential, riff-heavy EDM they originated to luxuriate in the sounds, styles, and production techniques of the 1970s and early ’80s. So we get a mix of disco, soft rock, and prog-pop, along with some Broadway-style pop bombast and even a few pinches of their squelching stadium-dance aesthetic. It’s all rendered with an amazing level of detail, with no expense spared. For RAM, Daft Punk recorded in the best studios, they used the best musicians, they added choirs and orchestras when they felt like it, and they almost completely avoided samples, which had been central to most of their biggest songs. Most of all, they wanted to create an album-album, a series of songs that could take the listener on a trip, the way LPs were supposedly experienced in another time.
Daft Punk, in other words, have an argument to make: that something special in music has been lost. You can’t have an argument without a thesis, and they start the album with one called “Give Life Back to Music.” The song’s opening rush brings to mind “old” Daft Punk, but then come percussive guitar strums courtesy of Nile Rodgers followed by orchestral surges. From the jump, it’s clear that the particulars of the sound are important. In a strictly technical sense, as far as capturing instruments on tape and mixing them so they are individually identifiable but still serve the arrangements, RAM is one of the best engineered records in many years. If people still went into stereo shops and bought stereos regularly, like they did during the era Daft Punk draw from, this record, with its meticulously recorded analog sound, would be an album to test out a potential system, right up there with Steely Dan’s Aja and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Daft Punk make clear that one way to “give life back to music” is through the power of high fidelity.
Another way is to work with artists young and old who have inspired them. Rodgers pops up again on “Lose Yourself to Dance” and “Get Lucky,” and on both songs he’s joined by Pharrell on lead vocals. These two songs basically find Daft Punk attempting to make their version of a Chic song, which, in itself, is not a particularly notable goal. But the French duo’s craftsmanship carries the day. Pharrell, despite being the biggest contemporary star on the album, sounds anonymous—his vocals are pretty much just functional. But even that is arguably in line with Daft Punk’s reverence. Disco, after all, was often a producer’s medium, and lead singers weren’t necessarily meant to be the the focus of attention. So it comes back to songwriting and production: How strong is the groove, how memorable are the hooks? “Get Lucky,” a deserved hit, works on both counts. “Lose Yourself to Dance,” on the other hand, is OK, but plodding, perhaps the weakest song on the record and a good example of the potential pitfalls of Daft Punk’s backward-looking approach.
Other songs in the record’s first half—“The Game of Love,” “Within,” and “Instant Crush”—don’t make a huge impression initially but are best understood as part of a broader whole. “Game” and “Within” are downtempo, slightly jazzy robotic soul, delivered in the kind of gorgeous vocoder that Daft Punk have perfected. Musically, “Instant Crush” sounds a lot like a great song by Daft Punk’s pals Phoenix, and the processed lead vocal from the Strokes’ Julian Casablancas holds a simple tune that’s catchier than anything he or his main band have managed in a while. All three tracks function well in the context of the record, throwing the tour-de-force “Giorgio by Moroder” into sharp relief.
“Giorgio” is a stunning piece of pop-prog that seems partly drawn from the groundbreaking producer’s experiments in long-form, epic disco, like his side-long version of “Knights in White Satin”. Moroder’s only contribution to the song is an interview that offers a thumbnail history of his life as a musician, one that recounts how how he heard the sequenced Moog as the future of music (see “I Feel Love”). The construction of “Giorgio by Moroder” is masterful, moving from easygoing beats to a for-the-ages, chill-inducing synth line, to orchestral crashes, to a brilliantly goofy guitar solo. It’s a fitting tribute to Moroder’s spirit and legacy.
RAM’s best songs come in its second half, another clue that it’s meant to be heard in full. It builds as it goes. “Touch”, the record’s literal centerpiece, is where things start to get interesting. It’s telling that the songs featuring the two oldest and deepest influences on the record—Moroder and Paul Williams—are the most over-the-top. (Williams’ role in the 1974 cult film Phantom of the Paradise became an early obsession for Daft Punk.) These pocket symphonies allows the duo to take their concerns to the furthest reaches of ambition—and good taste. “Touch” packs in a Cluster-fied spacey intro, some showtune balladry, a 4/4 disco section complete with swing music trills, and a sky-scraping choir, all in service of a basic lyrical idea: love is the answer and you’ve got to hold on. It’s strange, disorienting, and emotionally powerful, with a silliness that doesn’t undercut the deep feelings in the least. It encapsulates what makes Daft Punk such an enduring proposition: their relationship to cool. Their vulnerability comes from embracing cheese while also understanding the humor and playfulness in it, holding all these ideas in mind at once.
This quality is also heard in “Fragments of Time”, featuring lead vocals by legendary house DJ Todd Edwards. The laid-back melody embodies another often disparaged musical moment: ’70s singer-songwriter excess that East Coast critics liked to write off as the sound of El Lay—the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Michael McDonald. Conveying the openness and innocence that marked pop radio as the ’70s ended, “Fragments of Time” sounds something like a sequel to Discovery’s “Digital Love.” Contrasting “Digital Love” and “Fragments of Time” also raises an interesting paradox: though everything about RAM, from the session musicians to the guests to the means of production, is meant to sound more “human,” the album at points sounds more sterile, almost too perfect. To my ears, this quality isn’t necessarily to its detriment, as much of its appeal ultimately comes from its surface beauty, the sheer gorgeousness of the overall sound. But I suspect this feeling is at the root of why, judging from early reviews, some listeners were underwhelmed.
The continual churn of the internet, experience tells us, favors quick connections, conveniences, ephemeral pleasures. But there are areas of culture popping up that seek to slow down, focus on details, and wallow in the kinds of media that it still takes money to create. This is the space that Daft Punk seek to occupy, which in and of itself can be seen as problematic. For those who embrace the more egalitarian approach to music production created by access to cheap tools and cheap distribution, Daft Punk’s mind-bogglingly lush record scans as elitist, possibly even dismissive of the creativity that is happening on a smaller scale.
To really understand where they’re coming from here, you have to go back to the height of the album era, which was really just a blip in pop music history. Three things made it different: 1) it was the time just before MTV; 2) it was the time just before the CD; 3) it was the time just before the Walkman. All three hit around the dawn of the ’80s and had a profound influence on how recorded music was experienced. MTV, in addition to foregrounding the visual presentation of artists, returned music to a singles-focused realm. The CD did its part too, making skipping ahead so easy and allowing for the listener to jump around at will. (It also made artwork less important and introduced the idea of records as “data.”) And the Walkman’s convenience opened up new spaces for listening while decreasing sound quality, a trade-off that has driven the technology behind popular music consumption ever since.
So RAM is best appreciated as a counter to these trends. It’s not that “all music should be this” but that “some music could be this.” By the time you make it to the album’s astonishing final stretch, it’s hard not to think that Daft Punk have succeeded at what they set out to do. The arrangements on “Beyond” and “Motherboard” are breathtaking, and Panda Bear, after many so-so collaborations, aces his vocal turn on “Doin’ It Right,” a terrifically uplifting bit of electro-pop.
And then it ends with “Contact”: It’s the most old-school Daft Punk song here, and it’s also the only one based on a sample, pulling its main riff from a 1981 song by the Australian band the Sherbs. Daft Punk and collaborator DJ Falcon first used “Contact” in a DJ mix in 2002, and now it finds its way on an album about time and memory in 2013. You get a feeling of time collapsing with it, seeing where Daft Punk have been and where they could go. “Contact” will likely close some future live multimedia extravaganza, and people will go insane, and they will return to this album with new ears. You never know, but my guess is that people will be listening to Random Access Memories a decade hence, just like we’re still listening to Discovery now. You’ll forget the YouTube interviews with the collaborators, you’ll forget the day they announced the suits, you’ll forget the day the “Get Lucky” snippet leaked, you’ll forget every rumor, you’ll forget the SNL commercials. But the record will remain, something that channels the past but sounds like little else right now, an album about rediscovery that's situated in the constantly-shifting present.


The former teen-pop star’s rueful new album explores who you become when the life around you falls apart and you have to build a new one from the ruins of the last.

Silver Landings

At the start of the last decade, Mandy Moore began working on her seventh album with her then-husband Ryan Adams. It never materialized. Moore said that she and Adams wrote songs together that Adams never scheduled the studio time to record. He allegedly prevented her from trying to hire other producers to help complete the album, and would tell her she wasn’t a real musician because she couldn’t play an instrument. She didn’t finish the record, and her music career stalled out; she was writing, she was working, yet nothing was happening. The years got swallowed up. Moore and Adams divorced in 2016, and that year she joined the cast of the time-jumping romantic drama This is Us. As the show’s success grew astronomically, Moore’s music seemed to shrink to an equally distant point in the rearview mirror.
Where do our past selves go? How can we possibly start all over again, when so much time has passed and the world around us has warped out of recognition? These are the questions that stir like dust through the air of Moore’s seventh album and first in almost 11 years, Silver Landings. She abandoned the material she wrote with Adams and instead co-wrote every song on the record with Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith, whom she married in 2018. She also brought back producer Mike Viola, who helmed her previous album, 2009’s Amanda Leigh. Surrounding herself with this adopted musical family gives the album a feeling of domestic warmth and security. But Moore’s lyrics speak from a shakier place; she can’t experience the security of the present moment without also seeing it crash into the insecurity of the next.
That’s where the album’s lead single, “When I Wasn’t Watching,” finds her. “Where was I when this was going down?” Moore sighs. “Maybe sleeping in/Maybe out of town.” Potential lives she could’ve lived flicker across her mind: “How do I start to retrace the steps I haven’t even taken yet?” Moore captures this stranded, disembodied feeling with remarkable economy and clarity, and the music sounds as brimming with shadow-selves as she is. “My favorite version of me disappeared/Through longer days and shorter years”—If she’s not singing or acting, Moore seems to ask, if instead she remains anchored forever to the current second, who, or what, is left over?
If there’s a shared theme among the songs on Silver Landings, it’s who you become when the life around you falls apart and you have to build a new one from the ruins of the last. She never focuses on the damage directly, but instead on the first, tentative steps one takes afterwards, when at any minute it feels like the ground might crumble away beneath you. “Easy Target,” co-written with former Death Cab for Cutie member Chris Walla, could be a sequel to “When I Wasn’t Watching” even though it precedes it in the track list, Moore trying to reenter the world with all of her vulnerability intact. “Through all of the noise,” she sings, “going out on a limb again,” the instruments glittering around her as they would in a Fleetwood Mac song.
The whole album kind of sounds like Fleetwood Mac, or at least descended from the same 1970s Los Angeles studios that incubated similarly crisp records by Jackson Browne and The Eagles, glassy marbles of sound with storm clouds of color swirling inside. Guitars ripple, organs pour into the ear. The kick drum is a soft implosion. The recording is so clear you can hear acoustic guitar strings creak like door hinges as fingers shift around on them in “Forgiveness,” the closest the record comes to expressing bitterness. “I wanted to be good enough for you,” she sings, “until it wasn’t good enough for me.” The song moves patiently beneath her as her resentment slowly thickens over four minutes.
But just as the past has a way of clarifying the degree to which someone hurt you, it can make your feelings toward other parts of your life more tangled and unfocused. On “Fifteen,” Moore attempts to survey the early teen-pop career she gradually left behind. When she debuted in 1999 with the single “Candy,” Moore entered the teen-pop cosmos alongside Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, and Christina Aguilera. Her life changed very rapidly. “Missed prom/Missed graduation/No college in the fall,” she sings—as if she both longs for and can’t imagine having the normal life she didn’t get to live—“On the road with a boy band singing for the people in the mall.” The deadpan quality of these details would come off as cynical and embarrassed about this phase in her life if she didn’t also seem to feel affection for her own naivete: “No regrets, with a few exceptions/Every wrong turn was the right direction.” If anything “Fifteen” embodies the true purpose of Moore’s new music: to extend her hand backwards through time to love and forgive herself.

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It's been six years since the Brazilian singer's debut. Now she returns with an album that both utilizes and breaks free of samba and bossa nova classicism with deep, downtempo beats.

Fio da Memória

In 2010, São Paulo’s Luísa Maita released her debut album Lero-Lero and entered into the family business. Her mother, Myriam Taubkin, was a concert producer while her father, Amado Maita, released what’s now considered a holy grail album back in 1972. Lero-Lero continued in her father’s tradition with an album full of hushed acoustic sambas, which she later opened up to DJ reinterpretation from Fatboy Slim-approved producer Tejo to DJ/rupture. A follow-up was not soon forthcoming, not that Maita vanished from the spotlight completely. She covered Caetano Veloso and Elis Regina for a few tributes, lent vocals to fellow “samba sujo” singer Rodrigo Campos’s debut album, and two of her songs from *Lero-Lero *were featured on the soundtrack to Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Her voice could also be heard both during the closing ceremonies of the London Olympics and on promos for the recent Rio Olympics.
Coming six years after Maita’s debut, Fio da Memória proves that the wait wasn’t in vain. Rather than delve deeper into samba and bossa nova classicism and let others update it with remixes, Maita and cohorts modernize the deep history of the music themselves. The result is a striking album full of spare but heavily percussive downtempo tracks that foreground the smokiness, subtlety, and empowerment in her voice. Maita’s Portuguese barely rises about a purr on opener “Na Asa,” but its message is clear. “If you want to be reborn/Your power is in your wings,” she sings against a backdrop of a martial snare, finger snaps, and a deep, spacey bass drum.
For the most part, the drum programming, track-filtering, and sampler duties fall to producers Tejo and Zé Nigro. But while electronics propel most of the tracks, both are tasteful to never let it overwhelm the band itself, providing another rhythmic tick to the uptempo rumble of “Porão” and adding psychedelic trickles to the title track. Tejo gives a ’90s trip-hop thump to “Volta,” while a distant samba drum line gets tweaked and teased by Nigro into many layers for “Folia.”
But Maita and her band are more than capable of conjuring a smoldering atmosphere on their own with live instrumentation, too. “Olé” seethes with stitches of guitar, bass, and cowbell, then flares to full fire as Maita whispers about finding liberation from an old love and freedom to love again: “I will stand up for myself…and I will find what is mine.”
Maita’s freedom from both her love of the past and the samba tradition is delectable. The underlying drum pattern on “Fio da Memória” is a samba, but Maita and her collaborators blur it in digital delay, synth fuzz, and processed drum hits, transforming that telltale pulse into something unfamiliar. “I wanted to revisit the Brazilian rhythms and other sounds that I have heard growing up from a contemporary, electronic and urban perspective,” she said in the lead-up to the album. Her mesmerizing voice playfully toys with such sentimentality: “Your story was stolen/By someone who loved you too deeply and also wept.” Rather than be heartbroken, she sounds gleeful to break from tradition.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 2001 resurrection of Nas, a canonical comeback album that came out swinging and never backed down.

Stillmatic

In the summer of 2000, at music mogul Steve Stoute’s birthday party in New York, Nas and JAY-Z ended up in an unexpectedly tense conversation about the state of hip-hop. The pair had never exactly been friends. After growing up in housing projects five miles and a borough apart, the rappers met in the early 1990s on a tour that included Jay’s mentor, Jaz, and Main Source, the group that had introduced Nas to the public with his incendiary guest verse on 1991’s “Live at the Barbeque.” They were not the main attractions; Nas would pop out to rap about snuffing Jesus and Jay would play hypeman for Jaz. The tour went off without a notable hitch, save for the incident in Washington, D.C. when members of the crowd, upset at a sound system failure, chased the performers back to their tour bus. “We were figuring we gonna have to knuckle down,” Main Source’s Large Professor would tell XXL in 2002, until Jay pulled a TEC-9 out of his gym bag and told the more famous artists not to worry.
With his astonishing 1994 debut, Illmatic, Nas was anointed the savior of a certain strain of formalist, autobiographical rap. Two years later, Jay released his own debut, Reasonable Doubt, on a label he co-founded with Biggs Burke and Dame Dash. Nas was supposed to appear on Reasonable Doubt’s “Bring It On,” but, according to Dash, kept flaking on scheduled recording sessions. His voice still made the album, though, sampled in the hook of “Dead Presidents II.” Nas’ second album, It Was Written, came out a week after Reasonable Doubt. On its first song, “The Message,” he sneers at rappers driving around New York in Lexuses with TV sets in the headrest; the line came to him when he saw Jay behind the wheel of one.
For several years, the feud—if you could even call it that—stayed at a simmer. But around the turn of the century, little barbs started jutting out of songs and freestyles. At first it sounded like bickering over the throne left vacant after the death of The Notorious B.I.G. Then things grew more personal, each rapper claiming he’d paved the way for the other’s style, career, persona; Jay began teasing a relationship he’d had with the mother of Nas’ daughter. There were no names yet, but the lines got more pointed.
Anyway—the conversation at the Stoute party. According to Nas, who recounted the conversation in the fall 2001 issue of Felon magazine (on the cover: “PEE WEE KIRKLAND SPEAKS OUT ON: GROUND ZERO”), Jay started by throwing his own people under the bus. He said that his protégé, Memphis Bleek, was a big fan of Nas. He said that Beanie Sigel would never sell more than 600,000 records. He said that unlike 2Pac and DMX, he and Nas were “lyricists”—that Pac and X only had “starving” fans buying their albums. “I looked at him like he was crazy,” Nas told the interviewer; he had just recorded with DMX, and had made plans to fly to Las Vegas and smooth over the tension with Pac before his death in 1996. Even more audacious was Jay’s alleged claim that he’d finally surpassed Big as an artist. (Sometime after this interview, on record, Jay would hedge—slightly: “And if I ain’t better than Big, I’m the closest one.”) “Then,” Nas said, “this slithering snake goes and does that Summer Jam bullshit.”
On June 28, 2001, during Hot 97’s annual festival at the Nassau Coliseum—where, five years earlier, Nas had famously stopped his concert after learning of Pac’s death—Jay rapped, first over Kanye West’s flip of the Doors’ “Five to One” and then, when the cheers grew deafening, acapella, an early version of a song called “Takeover.” Initially he went after Prodigy, whose childhood dance recital photos were plastered on a video screen. (Earlier in 2001, when Jay had convinced Funkmaster Flex to let his new signees freestyle for an hour on Hot 97’s airwaves, he made sure they were given the Mobb Deep rapper’s “Keep It Thoro” beat before tearing into Nas et al.’s “Oochie Wally.”) But at the end of the performance, he took aim at a different target. “Ask Nas,” Jay shouted over the din. “He don’t want it with Hov!”
A few weeks later, Nas responded with a freestyle over the beat from the “Paid in Full” remix. This is where he came up with the title Stillmatic. In a verse denser than most of the new ones from 1999’s tepidly received I Am…, Nas accuses Jay of biting his style back when the less established MC rapped “like the Fu-Schnickens”; he derides Jay’s “fake coke rhymes” and calls him, quite plainly, a liar. “Un was your first court case,” Nas notes, referring to the stabbing of record executive Lance “Un” Rivera, for which Jay eventually received three years probation. “You had no priors.”

It didn’t stick. The Blueprint dropped on September 11, 2001 (it “couldn’t even be stopped by bin Laden,” Jay would later brag), complete with the full version of “Takeover.” The verse that Jay stopped short of performing at Summer Jam, the one about Nas, was revealed as one of the most scathing disses in rap history. After some perfunctory cracks about “Oochie Wally” and those Karl Kani ads he, now, takes his turn calling Nas a fraud who patterned an identity on his. “You ain’t live it,” Jay raps,
You witnessed it from your folks’ pad
Scribbled in your notepad and created your life
I showed you your first Tec, on tour with Large Professor
Then I heard your album ’bout your Tec on the dresser
Jay even addresses the disembodied Nas on “Dead Presidents II,” taunting him for not receiving any royalties on the song. Perhaps more damning than any specific allegation of fabricated biography or financial maneuvering was the sense that Nas had not only failed to live up to the hype Illmatic inspired, but had become something of a joke. He had fallen, as Jay puts it, “from top ten to not mentioned at all.”
The history of rap beefs is a history of rappers who did not have to take the bait. (Nas would have known this well, growing up in Queensbridge and seeing local star MC Shan lured into a battle by the upstart KRS-One, who claimed to take offense to a point of historical accounting but was in fact carrying out a personal grudge against Mr. Magic and the Juice Crew; KRS leveraged the spat into a position as one of the most iconic rappers of his generation.) And yet, beyond simply engaging, Nas seemed to accept Jay’s premise about the state of his career and reputation. Stillmatic is framed conspicuously as a comeback album, and twice on its first two songs, Nas evokes the image of his body coming out of a grave—not as a Christ figure, as he might have shaded the scene in the ’90s, but as a man who’d been buried alive.
Someone looking at a balance sheet would be confused. Nas had followed Illmatic—which was rushed onto shelves to combat bootleggers and sold poorly despite its instant canonization by critics—with It Was Written, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and was certified double platinum two months later. In 1999, he released two albums: April’s I Am… (also No. 1, platinum by May) and November’s Nastradamus (a slip to No. 7 that still earned its plaque within a month). But he also alienated swaths of his audience, starting with the purists who balked at the Trackmasters’ pop sensibilities, which guided half of It Was Written, or at the mafioso persona Nas adopted for much of the other half.
He had planned to make his third album a sweeping double-disc called I Am… The Autobiography, tracing his life from beginning to hypothetical end. But bootlegging, which had only accelerated in New York, was also moving onto internet file-sharing sites, and the bulk of the album was widely available long before the label could put together cover art or a marketing calendar. Frustrated, Nas kept a few of the leaked records and rushed to replace the others, rapping agitatedly over busy faux-Timbaland (or, occasionally, C-grade actual Timbaland) or downright creepily. While both albums have redeeming qualities—and Nas would release weaker albums in the future—this was, for the time, an unquestionable nadir.
Through these years, when Nas went to the studio, he recorded in marathon sessions, writing long verses and labyrinthine narrative raps. This approach yielded innumerable impressive songs, but that proliferation, along with a self-sustaining reputation as someone whose best work was damned to languish on DAT tapes, ensured that new material would be leaked by studio and label employees, sample-clearance specialists, and assorted hangers-on whenever possible, each knowing any scrap would be eaten up by mixtape DJs or online collectors, often for a significant price. So when it came time to record Stillmatic, the album on which his reputation would now hinge, Nas retreated to the Bahamas.
Alongside his A&R and a longtime friend, Lord, Nas wrote and recorded there for three weeks, ruminating on his present situation and mining stories from his and Lord’s lives back in Queens. At several points throughout Stillmatic, Nas turns to examine his adult life, specifically the way money and fame have corroded it. But this introspection gets blotted out, again and again, by grudges and complexes—and by details smaller, warmer, from longer ago. Memories spring to the surface as if by random access: cigarette burns on the sofa in his childhood home, plastic bags from the CTown Supermarket, the faces of the older women you could and couldn’t curse in front of—the surnames of those in each category. It is not exactly nostalgic, though you wouldn’t call it haunted, either. It’s as if everything is happening at once; as he raps over a warped Stacy Lattisaw record on the intro, “This is my ending and my new beginning,” a Mobius strip that cuts through unattended stairwells and limousines with hourly rates recoupable to Columbia Records. Maybe the word is burdened.
There was presumably no greater preoccupation during the Stillmatic sessions than “Takeover.” The bin Laden line from Blueprint 2 is barely an exaggeration; that song, and The Blueprint as a whole, made an immediate impact, by nudging Jay, who was already a superstar within hip-hop, into the clubs and canons guarded by corporate executives and rock critics. The “one-hot-album-every-ten-year average” he cites became conventional wisdom about Nas’ career (despite its obvious absurdity—It Was Written is as good as anything Jay had recorded to that point). What’s worse: Jay delivered the song with a mix of menace and bemusement, reducing Nas, when convenient, to a lapdog nipping at his heels.
Rather than reflect this coolheadedness back at Jay, Nas decided to rip out his throat. “Ether” was recorded over Ron Browz’s chintzy beat, and in the lineage of many great diss songs, it slow-plays its best material: Though it begins with a sample of Pac saying “Fuck Jay-Z”—and while it strings “I will not lose,” the spine of Jay’s “U Don’t Know,” through its own chorus—its first two verses contain relatively few personal details, save for the evocation of Jay’s “Hawaiian Sophie” cameo. Nas chooses instead to tout his own influence, and to place himself in one of those graves.
When he digs out, though, Nas is positively brutal. Just a few bars into “Ether”’s extended third verse, he’s wondering if Jay had been abused as a child—this, he argues, is the only thing that would explain the way Jay had been writing about women. “Scared to smile?” he prods. “They called you ugly?” He scoffs at Jay’s claims of having been a drug kingpin, recalling instead an eager aspiring artist who would phone Nas’ home unsolicited, showing up to dinner
Wearing Jaz’s chains—no Tecs, no cash, no cars
No jail bars, Jigga—no pies, no case
Just Hawaiian shirts
Nas rehashes Jay’s claim to have eclipsed Big and mocks his and Dame’s Big-and-Puffy cosplay; he alleges that Jay did not, in fact, stab Un Rivera, and was being “made” to take the fall; he paints him as a fawning protégé in perpetual search of a mentor, from Jaz to Big Daddy Kane, Irv Gotti to Big. Nas actually coins the term “stan,” as in obsessive fan, in this verse, a reference to the song by Eminem—who he says “murdered” Jay in their collaboration on The Blueprint, a ridiculous claim that has nevertheless been internalized by generations of rap fans.
In a final act of pettiness, Nas dropped “Ether,” along with the album’s actual second single, “Got Ur Self A…,” on December 4, Jay’s 32nd birthday. The reaction was immediate and it was totalizing. Within the week, Jay had issued a response with “Supa Ugly,” which desperately explicates his relationship with the mother of Nas’ child, and for which Jay’s own mother forced him to apologize. But there was no coming back; “Ether” was the knockout blow. Despite the gossip value of “Supa Ugly,” when Hot 97 pitted the two tracks against one another in a listener poll, Nas trounced Jay. The latter knew it. “Jay’s on the phone with me, convincing me that this has to happen in life: We have to go through ups and downs,” a Roc-A-Fella A&R would later recall Jay saying to him on the phone. “We have take losses in order to get greater wins.”
Like “stan,” “ether” entered the lexicon as slang for the highest form of evisceration. And yet, despite the stickiness of Eminem’s supposed “Renegade” win and the sense of Nas’ 1997-2001 as a period spent in the wilderness, the victory was not really about historical recordkeeping. It was a triumph of timing, craft, and tone. If anything, the beef underlined how Jay and Nas had always reflected one another and moved uneasily into the other’s professional territory—Nas the wunderkind, whose attempts to cross over were seen as phony, and Jay, the commercial behemoth who felt that he’d mortgaged his credibility to get there.
The knottiest verses on Stillmatic—its introduction, “2nd Childhood,” even “Ether”—recall the cobweb raps of Illmatic and It Was Written. This added density almost always comes in the form of flooding detail; the songs become technical showcases. The sparer tracks are indebted in part to Pac, whose freewheeling improvisation Nas seemed to channel in bursts on I Am… and would continue to tinker with for years. But where the negative space in Pac verses suggested a first-take looseness, it has the opposite effect on Nas—the forced economy makes his writing seem more structured, more premeditated. This is clear on the Phil Collins-sampling “One Mic,” both when Nas explodes (the “get busy/load up the semis” burst in the second verse) and when he drops into a hush (“Diamonds are blinding/I never make the same mistakes” in the third). On “Smokin,’” the air between words underlines the threats in an otherwise casual delivery, and on “Rewind,” where Nas tells a crime-movie vignette in reverse, the lack of clutter makes each step in the murder plot chillingly inevitable.
There is no uniformity to the production on Stillmatic—it lurches from “Ether”’s artificiality to Premier’s analog warmth, the playful ’80s revivalism on “Destroy & Rebuild” to “One Mic”’s melodrama. When Megahertz flips the Alabama 3’s “Woke Up This Morning” for “Got Ur Self A…,” it has the superficial novelty quality of a mixtape track from the period—that is, unless you remember Jay having rapped, a year earlier, that the theme song to The Sopranos plays in his head on a loop. If there is any unifying force, it’s the overcast sky from the album cover, which seems to hang over almost everything.
The oddest and most satisfying beat on Stillmatic is Large Professor’s sorrowful Ernest Gold flip on “You’re da Man,” a song that treats Nas’ celebrity as a new circle of hell. He writes about the jealousy he clocked from his earliest brushes with fame, the innumerable men he saw mimic him while praying for his downfall. Despite his early adoption of melodies into his hooks, Nas is seldom given credit as a particularly musical rapper; here his vocal intonations add tremendous depth to the text, as when he quips, “Look at me now: ten years deep,” a  straightforward boast that warps into a lament. In the second verse of the song’s original version, Nas literalizes his angst in a scene that recalls centuries of literature about devilish secret societies:
At church, on my hand was a preacher’s blood
I swallowed dirt from a graveyard, in need of love
I vomit blunt residue—I want revenue, dreaming
And pump lead at you devils trying to take my freedom
It drove me crazy: the day I drank my own urine, my own semen
With a nine to my brain
That scene’s exclusion from the retail release made the demo a totem for collectors; more than that, it burnished the legend of Nas as someone too volatile for the record industry’s tastes. But most interestingly, it reveals how brutalized he had come to feel by that industry, by forces beyond his control or understanding. As emotionally raw as the song is, the details and events appear at a distance, as if Nas is insulating himself. The direct contrast is with “Destroy & Rebuild,” where Nas airs grievances with former friends and collaborators from Queens. The fracturing of these relationships would presumably be painful, and while hurt feelings seem to animate that song, there is also an apparent glee, perhaps at the opportunity to tackle solvable problems—to clean up, as he puts it, “my own backyard.”
Nas follows “Destroy & Rebuild” with “The Flyest,” a charmingly overproduced AZ duet that functions as a victory lap but is, frustratingly, betrayed by the filler that comes next. Stillmatic’s original pressing included “Braveheart Party,” a song so clumsy and cloying that it makes “Oochie Wally” sound like “Verbal Intercourse.” It was removed, at Mary J. Blige’s request, from subsequent CD and vinyl batches and does not appear on digital streaming platforms. (Blige cited “personal reasons” in her plea to Columbia.) Unlike most post-facto edits, which usually—especially after the advent of DSPs—bring with them a vaguely authoritarian air, this one had an uncomplicatedly positive effect on the album.
The blemish that remains is “Rule,” the Trackmasters’ reinterpretation of Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” that Nas and Columbia released less than 30 days after September 11. It’s not a totally pollyannaish song—Nas raps about the alienation he feels as a Black American, about African mineral rights, about military spending—but the schmaltz is unavoidable. (When he raps, unconvincingly, that “we must stop the killing,” it’s unclear who and which.) Yet something curious is tacked onto its end. After the beat has stopped, Nas delivers a short monologue over a 19th-century military reveille that undercuts what came before it:
“Men, women, and children killed by the police… niggas ain’t gon’ forget that, man. You know what I mean? So what this war show me is, like, whatever you want out of life, whatever you feel is rightfully yours—go out and take it, even if that means blood and death. That’s what I was raised up on, that’s what this country’s about. This is what my country is. And my country’s a motherfucker.”
The following “My Country” casts Nas and Millennium Thug as a Rikers Island convict and an American soldier in a desert, respectively, who send letters to one another about their experiences. The latter’s imagistic writing (“You could see the sea and the stars look closer to me”; “Every time I hear the wind I think a slug went in”) is contrasted with Nas, who turns inward—to memories of his father holding him above his head as a toddler, cursing the place they both live. The rappers’ voices only overlap once, when they refer to their respective situations as billion-dollar businesses.
Rather than pursue a strictly structural critique or retreat to safer ground, Nas ends this post-9/11 coda, and Stillmatic as a whole, by extending the argument from “My Country” into something more elemental, even spiritual. “What Goes Around” is about poison: ecstasy and cocaine, prescription drugs and vaccines, white Jesus and Coca-Cola, the Queens public schools Nas attended as a child. It’s a song where, when someone dies, Nas invites you to imagine trudging to a florist and filling out a condolence card—but also to see the rain that accompanies death, to feel the metaphysical fracturing that can’t be explained or legislated away. “What is destined shall be,” he raps to end the album proper. “George Bush killer till George Bush kills me.”
Stillmatic shirks the expectations placed on Nas as a teenager and the baggage he carried with him into his 30s. But there’s little joy in this, and the catharsis is only intermittent. So he turns to score-settling, clawing back what was taken from not only him, but the smiling women across the hall, the revolutionaries he cites at the end of “My Country” who were killed by the state, the friends who went away and never came back. By its end, he’s no less burdened—but his burdens are finally his own.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Joni Mitchell's eighth album, an iridescent meditation on solitude, a masterpiece in her catalog and across all of music.

Hejira

Joni Mitchell was running away. From what or where to have never been as vital in Mitchell’s songs as her in-betweens—between relationships and cities, between heartbreak and repair, between chords and tenses. From her early song “Urge for Going” through her travelogue classic Blue and beyond, Mitchell typified the woman wanderer, rarely represented in music. Hejira, her sprawling eighth album, embodies this quintessence. The road rolls out of her like a surrealist painting on the cover, combining bold realism and abstraction. Mitchell interprets the Arabic title meaning “departure” as “escape with honor.” She was returning to herself. “I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs,” Mitchell once said, “but I feel the songs on Hejira could only have come from me.”
To begin with, however, in the spring of 1976, Mitchell was running from a doomed engagement, the chaos of touring, an increasingly inhospitable music business, cocaine, and home. It started, more or less, on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue.
A clip from Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film chronicling that drug-and-nostalgia-soaked tour shows Mitchell outpacing her generation. It’s November, 1975, and she sits in Gordon Lightfoot’s house with her acoustic guitar and her black beret and a new song that would open Hejira a year later: “Coyote.” She wrote it on and about the tour—exposing sex-drugs-rock myths in lyrics about her peers’ “temporary lovers and their pills and powders to get them through this passion play”—but more accurately, she was composing “Coyote” in real time, improvising with her surroundings. To her right, backing her up and following her lead, was Dylan.
Mitchell’s longstanding admiration of Dylan led her to Rolling Thunder, and because she admired Dylan, she did not look back. She was busy being born. She had just released her misunderstood jazz-pop masterpiece The Hissing of Summer Lawns. It may be true that a younger Mitchell’s lyrics were liberated by Dylan’s 1965 single “Positively 4th Street.” It may be true that Dylan fell asleep in 1974 when she played him Court and Spark. But by 1975 the tables had turned. Dylan was revived in the wake of his Joni-inspired comeback, Blood on the Tracks. (“The most important thing is to write in your blood,” Mitchell had once said.) And during this acoustic performance at Lightfoot’s, with the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn on a third guitar, the look in Dylan’s eyes confirms what all knew, that at this moment Mitchell is the towering genius.
She had called herself a “singing playwright” since Blue, and she always narrated the dialogue, characters, and setting with her crescendoing soprano and the unconventional tunings of what she called her “chords of inquiry”—“They have a question mark in them”—as much as her lyrics. But “Coyote” adds new dimensions to the title. In a low speak-sing register, this fable presents “coyote” as the womanizing cowboy cornering Mitchell, “A prisoner of the white lines on the freeway,” and total mayhem. In one scene he’s “got a woman at home/He’s got another woman down the hall/He seems to want me anyway.” Two scenes later, “Coyote’s in the coffee shop/He’s staring a hole in his scrambled eggs/He picks up my scent on my fingers/While he’s watching the waitresses’ legs.” The titular “Coyote” is the playwright Sam Shepard, with whom Mitchell happened to have a brief affair. In her wittily wide-eyed first line, she captures the tour’s insanity while outsmarting this guy who she likens to a predatory animal: “No regrets coyote!”
At the end of the ’70s, Mitchell told Rolling Stone it was never her goal to be the queen of her generation, or the best. Her goal was to remain interested in music. Her steady gravitation toward jazz was proof, from Blue’s approximations of its textures to the experimental yet accessible Hissing of Summer Lawns. She considered the electric jazz fusion of Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way to be the previous decade’s definitive record and absorbed its astral atmospheres. She was an avant-gardist among rock’n’roll people in an era when improvised music was creating rock stars of its own. Still, Mitchell inhabited that slippery space unique to those ahead of the times.
Rolling Thunder didn’t only fuel the luminous and literary “Coyote.” It also broke her down physically and left her addicted to cocaine. (She allegedly told the tour to pay her in coke and wrote ever-longer poems high late into the night: “Everybody took all of their vices to the nth degree and came out of it born again or into AA,” she said in 1988.) A month after, attempting to start her own tour for Hissing, her wrecked state and endless battles with her drummer John Guerin—the self-described “jazz snob” to whom she was engaged—resulted in its abrupt cancellation.
So the circus gave way to a spirit journey. Mitchell found herself sitting at Neil Young’s beach house wondering how to recuperate from such self-annihilation, longing to travel. Soon two acquaintances—one, an Australian former lover; the other, a lover-to-be—showed up together at her door in Los Angeles. The boys were going to drive cross country; their destination, for the Aussie ex with a 20-day visa and a grim custody battle, was Maine. “We were going to kidnap his daughter from the grandmother,” Mitchell said. “You could have made a whole movie about that trip.” (Paging Todd Haynes.)
Thirty-two years old with no license, Mitchell drove this band of outsiders east before looping back solo, down the coast of Florida and then along the Gulf of Mexico, “staying at old ’50s motels and eating at health food stores.” She adopted fake names like “Charlene Latimer.” She was often disguised in a red wig. She wrote most of Hejira on the guitar she kept in her white Mercedes. “I was getting away from romance, I was getting away from craziness,” Mitchell said, “and I was searching for something to make sense of everything.”
Hejira exalts the art of being a woman alone. It is restless music of road and sky, of interior and exterior weather suspended, epic and elemental. Her narratives unfurl with driving forward motion, telling stories of black crows and coyotes, of cafes and motel rooms; a bluesman and a pilot; psychics, hitchhikers, mothers, a guru. She contemplates eternity in a cemetery. She sees Michelangelo in the clouds. She hears jazz in the trees. Blue’s optimistic “traveling, traveling, traveling” gives way to an insatiable “travel fever,” each cartographic song extending the road further from Savannah to Staten Island to Canadian prairies, from Beale to Bleecker Streets. Her solitude distills the details into ascetic elegance.
The stark arrangements on Hejira, free of traditional structures, with only a few players on each song, are iridescent like glitter on icicles or sand. Mitchell stretches the unresolved tone of her “chords of inquiry” into a nine-song epiphany. The fretless bass, spare percussion, and unusual harmonics depict her wintry lucidity as well as the extremes of her existence, which she had accepted in service of her creativity. The protracted song lengths were allegedly a product of her drug addiction, while their clarity was inseparable from her process of getting clean.
She had started playing with the jazz fusionists of L.A. Express on Court and Spark—musicians who wouldn’t “put up a dark picket fence through my music,” as she once put it—and during a pit stop on her road trip, guitarist Robben Ford played her an advance copy of the debut album by Jaco Pastorius, an electric bass player who, like Mitchell, was really more of a painter. The 24-year-old had a tendency for introducing himself as “the greatest bass player in the world.” Mitchell (and most of the best bassists in his wake) wouldn’t have disagreed. She called the eccentric Floridian the bass player of her dreams. Pastorius used a knife to pry the frets off his instrument and transform it, playing more fluidly, flexibly, or as Mitchell called it, “figuratively” than anyone. Having only recently joined the intrepid Weather Report, Pastorius overdubbed parts atop four cracked-open Hejira songs, rhythms that liberated the music.
Hejira’s tenor is one of personal reconstitution, but Mitchell populates the lyrics with characters she met along the way, some literal, some symbolic, each representing a fundamental component of her character. “Furry Sings the Blues” describes her actual visit with the bluesman Furry Lewis near Memphis’ crumbling Beale Street, one birthplace of the blues, and could be an allegory for the corruption of a music business that left its pioneers behind, another parking lot paved over paradise. (That’s Neil Young on harmonica.) “A Strange Boy” recounts her disappointing tryst with her travel companion and his confounding immaturity, standing in for the overall inadequacy of men that Mitchell had contended with so often. It’s attuned to mystery, representing this guy she couldn’t crack in amazing dialogue, like, “He asked me to be patient/Well I failed/‘Grow up!’ I cried/And as the smoke was clearing, he said/‘Give me one good reason why.’” On the discordant “Black Crow,” Mitchell likens herself to the bird overhead, brooding, searching, diving. But the most powerful of these itinerant encounters occurs solely in her imagination.
On “Amelia,” she becomes the sky. Her ode to Amelia Earhart is soaring and celestial. “Like me,” Mitchell sings of the disappeared aviator, “she had a dream to fly.” This austere six-minute ballad takes the form of a conversation “from one solo pilot to another,” Mitchell has said, “reflecting on the cost of being a woman and having something you must do.” Ambition must often go it alone, and Mitchell accordingly subtracts bass and drums entirely. What sounds like sweeping pedal steel is really Larry Carlton’s electric lead guitar and vibraphone. The song’s harmonic character is an arresting question mark, both unsettled and at ease, just like solo travel, knowing there might be something, someone missing yet savoring the space created by absence. Mitchell spoke of Hejira’s “sweet loneliness,” to which “Amelia”’s major chords and resilience attest. “Amelia, it was just a false alarm,” goes Mitchell’s refrain ending each verse, ending every romance, too. As she sings of “driving across the burning desert,” likening six vapor trails to “the hexagram of the heavens [...] the strings of my guitar,” and how Earhart was “swallowed by the sky,” the whole forlorn song seems to go that way. Stars glint in its upper edges.
Clouds and flight, metaphors for freedom and what tempers it, had long been two of Mitchell’s central obsessions. She called descendants of the Canadian prairies, like herself, “sky-oriented people,” and writing on a plane in 1967, she had looked down on clouds to contemplate life, arriving at her standard, the timeless “Both Sides, Now.” But nine years on, in “Amelia,” she equates her living in “clouds at icy altitudes” with her long-standing depression that left her admitting she’s “never really loved.” When she pulls into “the Cactus Tree Motel” to sleep on the “strange pillows of my wanderlust,” the inn’s name is an allusion to her 1968 song about a woman “so busy being free.” Her life’s motifs knock the door in Georgia, too, on the winking torch song “Blue Motel Room,” where rain turns the ground to “cellophane,” a word Mitchell famously used to describe her defenseless Blue era; “Will you still love me?” she yearns coolly, echoing a formative influence.
Of all the land Mitchell traveled, though, the space and otherworldly plantlife of the arid Sonoran Desert seem to have made the greatest impact, as evidenced on “Amelia.” The desert is an isolated landscape pitched to infinity, a place to confront yourself and your insignificance in the scheme of things. On her song named for a desert creature, “Coyote,” she voices her desire “to run away” and “wrestle with my ego.”
Her ego-erasing quest comes to a head on “Hejira.” The title track is a sprawling monument to her decade of turning personal catastrophe into philosophy, laying bare her cardinal themes. “Possessive coupling.” “The breadth of extremities.” “Comfort in melancholy.” Unlike Hejira’s other songs, it contains few proper nouns: it specifically confronts the existential expanses of muted despair instead, illumination eclipsed with pain in the music's depths. She’s “traveling in some vehicle.” She’s “sitting in some cafe.” She’s “a defector from the petty wars that shell shock love away.” If heartbreak redeems itself by creating knowledge, then “Hejira” locates the precise coordinates where that shift occurs. Nowhere in her catalog does she create a richer or more rigorous self-portrait.
I know no one’s going to show me everything
We all come and go unknown
Each so deep and superficial
Between the forceps and the stone
On “Hejira,” Mitchell interrogates her 32 years. She had made profound sacrifices for the sake of her art, which perhaps accounts for the music’s intensity: When you feel you’ve sacrificed everything for your work, you bring everything to it. She looked for answers in every corner of the country her car could reach. She poured in every reserve and inexhaustible query. What are the uses of solitude? How close to nerves and bone can you get? Is art worth the sacrifice? Could she ever fully be seen? Her music stretches into a dissolving horizon suggesting the questions are unanswerable. Its unresolved charge suggests that life will be a cycle of finding meaning in the questions. In the spartan space, Mitchell invites us to complete the picture.
Staring at headstones on “Hejira,” “those tributes to finality,” pondering death, she considered her life. “I looked at myself here,” she sings, “Chicken scratching for my immortality.” Even Joni Mitchell must sometimes feel meaningless, at the top of the mountain, wondering what everything is worth. She always said she embraced granular details in her autobiographical art songs because it made a better story, and people should “know who they’re worshiping.” Here she offers a metaphysical magnification of her most atomic truths.
We’re only particles of change
Orbiting around the sun
But how can I have that point of view
When I’m always bound and tied to someone
Two other of Hejira’s songs illustrate as much. “Song for Sharon” is Mitchell’s reckoning with her position as single and childfree in her 30s, subverting the status quo in subject and in form. She’d addressed this reality before, like on For the Roses’ “Woman of Heart and Mind.” But in this nine-minute letter to her long-lost friend back home, Sharon Bell—who took a conventional path, “a husband and a farm”—she went further, surveying the advice she’d received from other women about how to give her life meaning: “have children,” “find yourself a charity.” With unbothered resolve and an even-handed tone—not innate for Mitchell—she situates herself between these two pathways of womanhood, seeking the common ground between herself and Sharon, or maybe between herself and all women, like her mother and grandmother who suppressed their dreams. “Song for Sharon” blows up the myth of the pop renegade with no direction home. Staring the past in the eye, Mitchell admits (in a call back to Blue’s “All I Want”), “All I really want to do right now is find another lover,” the last word drifting like smoke.
The most significant of its 10 verses was inspired by the actress Phyllis Major, who died by suicide in March of 1976. “A woman I knew just drowned herself,” Mitchell sings about the wife of Jackson Browne, who she herself had also dated, and whom she despised. (Her 1994 song about domestic violence, “Not to Blame,” was written in the wake of accusations against Browne, too.) “It seems we all live so close to that line,” Mitchell sings, “And so far from satisfaction.” “Song for Sharon” becomes a multifaceted song of solidarity with a diversity of women seeking dignity and respect. Its length illustrates the endlessness of such a task.
Hejira built a new sound to match the feminist paradigm it presented for being a woman in the world, with autonomy, adventure, and pleasure all as virtues. In the mid-’70s, the trope of the solo male traveler seeking enlightenment in meandering solitude was well-defined by tales like Walden and On the Road, even Siddhartha. Women travelers were unknown. Mitchell’s position “made most people nervous,” she sings on the beautiful, gently loping album closer, “Refuge of the Roads,” which describes her meeting with Tibetan Buddhist spiritual teacher Chögyam Trungpa. But her role brought others to life. In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir had posited, in The Second Sex, that “the free woman is just being born,” and when she arrived so would her poetry. Hejira is evidence, a shapeshifting aesthetic to voice a still-emerging mode of being female.
“Here’s the thing,” Mitchell told Rolling Stone in 1979. “You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They’re going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So of the two options, I’d rather be crucified for changing.”
Time had another idea. For years, the prevailing Mitchell narrative positioned Blue as her creative peak, Court and Spark as her commercial apex, and everything else a fascinating slow fall. This is, of course, incorrect. Creatively, if not commercially, Mitchell’s entry to jazz—the second half of what biographer Michelle Mercer calls “her Blue period” from 1971 to 1976—was more akin to Dylan going electric and cresting on an upward stride. She had adapted a new language for her trio of albums leading to Hejira like Dylan’s triptych leading to Blonde on Blonde.
Hejira’s influence remains as boundless as the music. Along with inspiring the Rolling Stones, Hejira is among the Mitchell albums that a young Björk held in the highest esteem. In recent years, Danielle Haim, Weyes Blood, and St. Vincent have anointed it as their favorite. In 2019, pop experimentalist Jenny Hval wrote a song about the act of listening to “Amelia.” Hejira created a precedent for the pantheon of art about women alone in motion that now includes Agnès Varda’s Vagabond and Patti Smith’s M Train.
The month of Hejira’s release, in November of 1976, Mitchell played “Coyote” as part of the Band’s Last Waltz. She herself didn’t tour for three years after, living “in exile from a mainstream audience,” as Rolling Stone put it when she resurfaced with her Charles Mingus collaboration in 1979. She either understood her staggering achievement or lost what little remained (had it existed) of her faith in the “star-maker machinery” of highly commercial music. She knew “no one’s going to show me everything,” as she sings on the title track, so she fulfilled her dreams herself. She wished for a river to skate away on. Hejira became one.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan


The ambitious debut from 21 Savage features many of the best producers around, but the young rapper doesn't have the finesse to break out beyond his horror-film style.

Issa Album

21 Savage skulks through verses like a villain in a slasher flick. On the cover of his Slaughter King mixtape he sported a hockey mask like Jason. His mixtape titles all evoke horror gore. His verses are built around heart-racing, hair-bristling anticipation. He preys on victims and terrorizes them, using intimidation and sadism, then jolts through quick shots of graphic violence narrated with stoned apathy. His songs are striking in their bluntness, breathless and macabre.
Many rap marksmen ground their shootout confessions in the context of social inequality, making the distinction between hood survivalism and outright barbarism. 21 doesn’t care. He doesn’t dissociate murder from morality. He’s the self-professed Bad Guy praying to his Glock and his carbon. Alongside Metro Boomin, he refined his menace into a sting with Savage Mode, succinct in sound and ruthless vision, a 30-minute joyride inside the mind of Bishop from Juice.
Capitalizing on the momentum, 21 Savage has returned with his debut, again accompanied by Metro, this time with assistance from Southside, Zaytoven, DJ Mustard, Jake One, Pi’erre Bourne (of “Magnolia” fame), and more. Issa Album, named for an interview segment gone viral, attempts to balance newfound fame with deep-rooted realness. He hasn’t softened, but he’s fixated more on riches than body counts. When he isn’t numbing his pain with the money, he’s struggling to put words to his emotions. 21 spends more time dealing with the living (his crew, his boo, and the girlfriends of rivals, specifically), and the feelings they impart. “I made it off the block, bitch I beat the statistics,” he rapped on Savage Mode, and Issa revels in the freedoms afforded by new money. It’s more ambitious, venturing down previously unexplored paths. But 21 simply doesn’t have the required finesse to cover more ground with nuance.
With each passing release, 21’s deadpan muttering gets less effective. The imagery, which has always been somewhat lacking, is even more flat on Issa, the writing more clumsy. “Bank Account,” “Dead People,” and “Money Convo” all make the same banal comment about an increased cash flow, simply acknowledging the excess and enjoying counting the cash; he could’ve gotten the same result recording a money machine processing bills. Whenever he extends himself he comes up short (as on “Numb,” which aims to be a triumphant rags-to-riches revelation but somehow never musters a lick of enthusiasm). It isn’t difficult to draw a line from songs like “FaceTime” and “Special” back to Savage Mode’s “Feel It,” but his emotionless inflections do significantly less for attempted bando ballads this time around. On the latter, as he continuously reiterates how in his feelings he is and how special she is in the plainest possible terms, it feels empty. “The internet won’t help you understand me,” he raps on “Famous,” seemingly insulating himself from criticism. But the quip is absurd coming from someone so easy to read.
Great production can hide many sins and on Issa, the hottest beatmakers in rap come to 21’s aid. Zaytoven fills a pair of Metro boomers with his signature piano embellishments, but Issa is highlighted by the En Vogue-warping “Thug Life” and the flute frenzy on “Baby Girl.” Unlikely bunkmates Jake One and Southside team up for gripping oddball productions; “Dead People” sounds like compressed and inverted Super Mario Bros. background music. 21 produced “Bank Account” himself, and its clean minimalism is one of the surprises. The others come in the form of more evocative writing and an unexpected guest. On “Nothing New,” he carefully surveys the streets around him. “Police gunned his brother down, this shit too hard to handle/Loading up his chopper, he gon’ show ‘em black lives matter,” he raps in a rare showing of empathy. “Whole Lot” gets juiced by uncredited ad-libs from Young Thug, which sprinkle the margins with his charm. “Close My Eyes” balances killer coldness with survivor’s remorse. 21’s admission, “I see dead bodies when I close my eyes,” can be read as a violent fantasy or the haunting price of taking life. He is so compelling when he digs deeper into his psyche this way, providing more than superficiality, but there aren’t enough of these moments to sustain Issa Album, which is as basic as its title.


Wiz Khalifa's sixth album has been promoted as his most "personal" project, but the introspection here mostly entails reiterating his come-up tale, punctuating it with an ellipsis and "but I’m rich now" tacked on for good measure.

Khalifa

For most of Wiz Khalifa’s career, he’s been lumped into the category of "stoner rap," but the Pittsburgh native is an aggressively functional smoker, a pot enthusiast with a Steel City work ethic. His anthems have won him a dichotomous fan base: one-half living off his gigantic heartfelt singles that have nil to do with pot-smoking and the other the loyal, chest thumping Taylor Gang kids with aspirations of someday affording his KK (that’s "Khalifa Kush," Mr. West). It’s worked out well for Khalifa; he’s managed to compartmentalize an audience that doesn’t need to know the other half exists as long they’re being fed a steady stream of relevant tunes.
His sixth studio album, Khalifa, would suggest he’s splitting the difference—creating an album that is more personal (hence its partially eponymous title). After all, Wiz’s relationship with pot is a very personal thing (to him) and so is his need for success. He’s also a father, which presents another opportunity to dig deeper. But "digging deep" isn't really in Wiz's repertoire, and apart from some faintly nostalgic bars about his come-up here and there, listeners panning for introspection will mostly come up empty.
Wiz is on a whole other plane now, thanks to perhaps the biggest hit of his career ("See You Again"), a song that wasn’t even on his album. So instead of living through the struggle like some of his previous works suggest, this project reflects on escaping it: The track "Cowboy" verbalizes those earliest days of cutting corners in PA, set to Jim Jonsin and his production duo FNZ’s soothing beat. He alters and repurposes that come-up tale throughout most of the album, punctuating it with an ellipsis and "but I’m rich now" tacked on for good measure. Like he says on the Metro Boomin-produced opener "BTS": "humble beginnings, rich ass endings," but he keeps regurgitating that sentiment through the duration of 13 songs.
That doesn’t mean the album is without bangers. The Rico Love-assisted "Celebrate" is a mellow ode to the good life of sex and blowing checks. "City View" dabbles with an '80s-skewed beat compliments of a production from Metro Boomin and Lex Luger. "iSay" is another one, because Juicy J always delivers, even over rumbling keys. The only track with hit potential, though, is "Bake Sale" with Travis Scott, which sounds more like a Travis Scott record than a Wiz Khalifa one. And of course the pot anthems are present. "Call Waiting" offers us Wiz Khalifa the singer, where he coos about marijuana like it’s his most faithful companion, and "Lit" where he and Ty Dolla $ign volley back and forth over who rolls and smokes the most.
But this is all to the detriment of promising a more private work, since that’s basically just "Work Hard, Play Hard" with a different SKU. The only real glimpse into the life of Cameron Thomaz is on "Zoney," where he goes into greater detail about his life: "Coming up I always thought I’d be the runner up / Gave my all but it felt like it wasn’t enough." He closes the track with a sweet dialogue between him and his son, Sebastian, where it sounds like baby Bash is calling Pittsburgh "Pixburgh" like a true native. Maybe Khalifa isn’t meant to be all that personal; after all, he didn’t name the album Cameron. It delves as far as it can without hitting government-name territory, and for that the true fans will embrace it. But how many times can you retell the same story? Good thing stoners have a short memory.


This invigorating compilation of African dance music from the 1980s and ’90s is a nostalgic snapshot of the Ugandan DJ’s youth—and a celebration of the selector’s ability to connect disparate sounds.

Various Artists: Kampire Presents: A Dancefloor in Ndola

Kampire Presents: A Dancefloor in Ndola

Ndola, Zambia’s third largest city, is best known internationally for copper mining and the imposing Levy Mwanawasa stadium. On the evidence of A Dancefloor in Ndola, a new compilation from East African DJ Kampire, the city should also be celebrated for its joyful party vibes and cosmopolitan dancefloors, whose music is so riotously funky it threatens to shake the Levy Mwanawasa to its foundations.
Kampire, born in Kenya to Ugandan parents, lived in Ndola from the ages of two to 18. A Dancefloor in Ndola is inspired by the songs she absorbed during this period—in particular, via her father’s record collection—including a range of music from Eastern and Southern Africa, from soukous to township bubblegum, drawn largely from the 1980s and early ’90s. There is a heavy emphasis on women singers, including Congolese heroes Pembey Sheiro and Feza Shamamba and South Africa’s V-Mash and Di Groovy Girls.
The album isn’t mixed but it’s admirably constructed. Kampire, like any DJ worth their salt, is skilled at teasing out connections between disparate sounds. A Dancefloor in Ndola shows the art of the DJ as selector, joining the dots between musical trends in a way that flows effortlessly onto the dancefloor.
Several years and thousands of miles lie between Princess Aya Sarah’s “O Wina Tienge” and the African House Party Project ft. Splash, Patricia Majalisa, and Dalom Kids’ “P-Coq,” the first and third songs on this compilation. But Kampire’s clever selection highlights the similarities between the florid, funky soukous of the “O Wina Tienge” and the rolling pop house of “P-Coq,” with sturdy kick-drum thump, call-and-response vocals, and late-’80s/early-’90s sonic palette running through both songs’ sinuous grooves. The way that “P-Coq” then gives way to V-Mash’s gloriously headstrong “Naughty Boy,” whose clubby production and vocal strut suggest a South African Madonna at her most Brat, makes for a jubilant extension of musical throughlines.
This combination—bass-drum-heavy beats, time-stamped electronic instrumentation, and intricate vocal arrangements—dominates A Dancefloor in Ndola. The parallels with wider club culture are self-evident. Princesse Mansia M’bila’s “Ngoma Mansia” and Samba Mapangala and Orchestra Virunga’s “Mashariki” are absolutely pounding, repetitive and hypnotic in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has experienced Tanzanian singeli (or, indeed, emerged from a club into broad daylight). But there are enough exceptions to the rule for the compilation to breathe. The syncopated saxophone skip of Lady Isa’s “Djambo” provides blissful air midway through, while Founders Band’s “Kimbera” tops off the record on a less regimented note. Its fuzzy and slightly imperfect sound turns out to be the perfect way to end A Dancefloor in Ndola’s theoretical night out.
Kampire also masters the DJ’s art of ferreting out obscure records and turning them into your new favorite songs. Perhaps the African House Party Project’s “P-Coq” was well known locally when it was released in 1991, but its appearance here elevates the song to the upper ranks of early-’90s house anthems, thanks to its yearning vocals and production that fuses local musical ideas with house’s voracious appetite for new sounds. Di Groovy Girls’ “Ririmi Rotsombela,” an effervescent piece of township bubblegum for which Kampire provides her own “Dance Edit,” is so catchy, from its irresistible synth riff downward, that it feels like it should have been world-conquering.
Most listeners to this compilation will never visit Ndola, but the evocative power of A Dancefloor in Ndola makes you feel like you almost have—like you too might have sweated out a night at the center of Zambia’s Copperbelt Province to the continent’s greatest electronic pop bangers. This is dance music at its transportive, revelatory best, a real reminder of what an astute, inventive DJ can do.


The old Jack White suddenly steps out from behind the curtain with 42 minutes of amp-busting blues punk. Even the last couple of White Stripes albums weren’t this stacked.

No Name

Somewhere between his increasingly fussy solo albums, and certainly by the time he started policing audiences’ cell phones, it became clear that Jack White was not the uninhibited nonconformist he played so convincingly with the White Stripes. Since that duo disbanded in 2011, White has systematically sucked almost all the fun from his image, revealing that this avatar of effortless cool was actually bound by a complicated code of unwritten rules he was more than happy to lecture music publications about. It’s been a heel turn akin to watching the coolest senior in your high school return as the district’s biggest stickler of a substitute teacher.
What a difference one record can make. Of all the considerable feats pulled by White’s raucous, ripping, unrelenting sixth solo album, No Name, perhaps the most remarkable is how cleanly it wipes the slate after a decade-plus of traditionalist scolding, divisive experiments, and creative misfires. No Name reconnects White with the primal impulses that made the Stripes so undeniable. It’s a comeback that instantly announces itself as a contender for White’s best solo record: 42 minutes of amp-busting blues punk that reveals the old Jack White was behind the curtain all along, hungry and undiminished, waiting for the right moment to make his reentrance.
Thanks to savvy guerilla marketing, No Name arrives with its lore prewritten. It was surprise-released July 19 at White’s Third Man Records shops, where uncredited, white-sleeved pressings were slipped into the bags of unsuspecting customers. This wasn’t like the time White hid 7"s inside of reupholstered furniture, though. He wanted the world to hear and discover this record, and Third Man’s social accounts encouraged fans to “rip it” and share. The project’s raw immediacy initially suggested it might be throwaway, a palette cleanser before White resumed his usual studio tinkering, but its triple-octane riffage and seething, sticky hooks pointed to something more lasting and substantial. Even the last couple of White Stripes albums weren’t this stacked.
The all killer, no filler ethos is a far cry from Fear of the Dawn, the absolutely gonzo solo record White released in 2022. Where that record invited listeners to marvel at its virtuosity and gawk at its sadistically counterintuitive creative choices, No Name leans into his most intuitive, meat-and-potato impulses. Opener “Old Scratch Blues” thrashes with the gravity of Led Zeppelin’s most titanic riffs, while “That’s How I’m Feeling” plays like a belated stab at one last great, aughts-style rock revival single. “Bombing Out” may be the most convincing two and half minutes of scuzzy hardcore you’ll hear from a 49-year-old this year.
White’s churlish demeanor belies the radical empathy of his worldview. On “It’s Rough on Rats (If You’re Asking),” he asks for consideration of the have-nots (“As bad as we got it/It sure must be rough on rats”). On “Archbishop Harold Holmes,” he sermonizes over itchy, AC/DC-caliber guitar licks that “hate is trying to take someone else’s love for yourself/But I’m here to tell you that love is trying to help someone else.” With its pit-starting thrash, “Bless Myself” similarly leans into White’s screaming-pastor shtick, preaching the virtues of divorcing spirituality from organized religion: “‘God on command/God on demand’/If God’s too busy I’ll bless myself!” Of course, the lyrics never matter as much as the authority with which he sneers, spits, and barks. It’s amazing how dialing up the conviction can turn “uh oh, Jack White is rapping” into “fuck yeah, Jack White is rapping.”
In a certain light, a back-to-basics project like this could seem like a retreat, an easy win for an artist who hasn’t scored in a while. Yet there’s real risk in releasing an album that so brazenly invites comparison to White’s best work, especially amid the hardening conventional wisdom about the irreplaceability of Meg White. With No Name, White resets the narrative: If he fell off, it was on his own terms. Now he’s back and in total mastery of a domain no other act claimed in his absence. Maybe he really can turn it on like a light switch.


After years of anticipation, the idiosyncratic Detroit rapper returns with an unpredictable new album full of vocal quirks and unlikely punchlines.

Ganger

Sometimes the ease with which Veeze raps makes it seem like he’s not even trying. When he’s beside more emotive emcees—like on the three-man weave “Making a Mess” with Pooh Shiesty and Big30 or the glorious posse cut “Meg Thee Stallion”—his hazy, syrupy murmurs sound as though he doesn’t care whether the words make it out his mouth. But beyond this unbothered facade is an expansive skillset and idiosyncratic imagination. Early tracks like 2019’s “Rusty” and 2020’s “Law N Order” became instant pillars of the Michigan rap scene, with fragmented, unpredictable bars—“I mixed his juice, now his stomach hurtin’ like he ate Taco Bell”—that distinguished Veeze from more conversational storytellers like Babyface Ray and Peezy. Since that initial explosion, he’s released music infrequently, admitting that rap and fame just weren’t priorities: “I was trying to fall off.”
Luckily the 29-year-old Detroit rapper is at the peak of his powers on Ganger, the long-awaited follow-up to his 2019 debut mixtape, Navy Wavy, wielding vocal oddities and chuckle-inducing, stream-of-consciousness bars. Veeze passes through varied production like he’s lazily window shopping on Fifth Avenue. He oscillates between laid-back joints fit for an evening smoke session (the penultimate “Tony Hawk” and dreamy “Safe 2”) and boisterous, percussive beats that could soundtrack a late-night car chase (“OverseasBaller”). There’s even a track that sounds like the Breaking Bad theme song, then kicks into a souped-up bossa nova rhythm (“Weekend”).
For the average rapper, this is treacherous territory. But Veeze is a Swiss Army Knife, able to adapt his scratchy, unrushed delivery to any environment. On the murky, GLA-produced “No Sir Ski,” he sounds like he’s underwater as he slurs his way through NBA player references. By the next track, he’s firmly on dry land, rapping with uncharacteristic clarity over an exuberant Bone Thugs-N-Harmony flip. Sometimes his vocal manipulation leads him off the deep end, like at the end of the opener “Not a Drill,” when he evokes a baby throwing a temper tantrum, or on the standout “Boat Interlude,” where he and Lil Yachty sound like they’re impersonating Doctor Doom. The deviations inject personality into moments where Veeze could have played it safe.
Meanwhile, Veeze’s writing on Ganger feels like a direct line to his twisted thoughts. He bounces from one idea to the next, weaving through endless pop culture references, forcing you to pay attention to each line. His punchlines range from hilarious (“That drank all in my belly like Winnie the Pooh”) to uncomfortable (“Cup dark, had to ask him how much cotton he pick”), as if he’s rattling off joke pitches in the Wayans Bros. writer’s room.
Veeze will claim to want to be the greatest rapper alive, then spell his own name wrong in the next line. He will tease that he’s too big for Rolling Stone, then grumble about the pressures of fame. “I need the quickest way to get up to a meal ticket,” he raps in the third verse of a song titled “Unreleased Leak,” hiding quiet desperation in the midst of flexes and boasts. There’s a refreshing vulnerability here from a rapper primarily known for his blasé approach. For brief moments, Veeze also lets the listener in on his true motivations, the underlying drive churning beneath his too-cool surface.


The songs that comprise SVIIB, School of Seven Bells' latest and possibly final LP, were written shortly before member Benjamin Curtis died in 2013 from sudden-onset lymphoma and completed by band co-founder and Curtis' partner Alejandra Deheza after his death. While it's remarkable that SVIIB exists at all, let alone in such fine form, what’s even more remarkable is how resilient, even joyful it is. These are generous songs, the product of deep caring.

SVIIB

“Ablaze,” from School of Seven Bells’ fourth and likely final LP, is composed of the same elements SVIIB have threaded together for years: heroic riffs, a colossus of a percussion track and Alejandra Deheza’s weightless sighs. The emotional clarity, however, is new; the song is an ode to redemptive love, delivered with full earnestness and complete surrender. “You saw the stars in me,” Deheza sings, and her often-glassy voice and SVIIB’s usually-huge mixes turn into something more plaintive, almost a cappella: “You told me how you saw the stars/You told me that till I believed.” It’s among the most life-affirming five minutes of pop music in recent memory. It is quite possibly perfect.
“Ablaze” is also the first song on SVIIB, making the album’s first words “how could I have known?” The subtext is unavoidable and wrenching. Deheza’s former bandmate and creative-and-more partner Benjamin Curtis died in December of 2013 from T-cell Lymphoblastic Lymphoma, and understandably, SVIIB took a long break; the only song they released was a cover of Joey Ramone’s “I Got Knocked Down (But I’ll Get Up),” recorded from Curtis’ hospital bed. The songs that comprise SVIIB, though, had existed for a while; specifically since 2012, recorded during a couple idyllic sessions. “We were finally in this place of just perfect peace, just being best friends,” Deheza said in an interview last year. So she wrote the lyrics to SVIIB as a largely biographical memorial of their relationship, romantic and platonic, through breakups and hardships and emotional pits. Even the title, its faux-Latinized shorthand (and it being the group’s only self-titled release), now reads like the heading to a last chapter, a deliberate final statement.
School of Seven Bells have aways made tweaks and refinements from their essential sound, and SVIIB doesn’t depart from it. But where their earlier material sometimes seemed detached, or more concerned with mystic metaphors than emotional clarity, SVIIB is viscerally felt. Every track on SVIIB is one Curtis had worked on before his death, and the conceit—and the fact that Deheza followed it through to the album’s completion—lends eerie resonance to lyrics like “open your eyes, love, you’ve got me crying.”
SVIIB is undoubtedly a hard listen at times for those who have followed the group, particularly when its context breaks into the songs. “Confusion" is bleak and tremulous—the exhaustion in Deheza’s vocals is not acting—and in the right mood, completely gutting. But while it’s remarkable that SVIIB exists at all, let alone in such fine form, what’s even more remarkable is how resilient, even joyful it is. These are generous songs, the product of deep caring. “A Thousand Times More” surges and reassures, the musical equivalent to a personal cheering squad; even the lover’s tiff of “On My Heart” is devoid of sour notes, collapsing into a swoon after its bridge and staying there.
Nor is the album stuck in the heady, bodiless realm. “Signals” is deadly serious and deadly dramatic, God, guns, glitches, snakes, bass choirs and congregations all making lyrical appearances, but all before a sledge of a riff in the chorus that hits as hard and sure as sudden attraction—a huge hook, right to the nerves. “Open Your Eyes,” though it retains some of the group’s typically idiosyncratic songwriting and meandering phrasing, is the most straightforward pop ballad SVIIB have recorded—Deheza’s speak-singing resembles a number of current radio hits, and change a few chords and the piano and percussion would evoke closing credits. But the song would not work any other way. SVIIB’s career, from beginning to likely end—has been a process of paring down their sound, jettisoning all extraneous material until all that’s left is emotional truth. And SVIIB is not only the group’s most technically accomplished work, their perfected swan song—it feels true. You couldn’t ask for a better memorial than that.


Q-Tip's long-delayed experimental album, cut at the beginning of the decade with contributions from jazz musicians, is finally given a proper release.

Kamaal the Abstract

Kamaal the Abstract is not a great record by any means. But it is an interesting one, a unique effort by an artist struggling to mesh two disparate musical systems, gambling that inherent internal friction could spark some excitement. Unfortunately, the road to 6.3 is paved with experimental intentions. Kamaal the Abstract first leaked at the beginning of the decade, the follow-up to Tip's solo debut Amplified. While the status of the latter record has only grown in the ensuing years, thanks largely to Dilla's rise as a cult production hero, Kamaal's nature as an experimental cul-de-sac feels more cemented with time. But the ink never dries in the history books; if anything, the 2000s may have finally given Kamaal and Kamaal an opportunity for creative redemption.
The collision of jazz and hip-hop, of course, isn't a new concept, especially for an artist who worked with Ron Carter on Tribe's second LP. But with Tribe, never mind Digable Planets, Guru, or US3, incorporating jazz often felt like more of a stylistic affect than concrete engagement, just a couple of looped bars and a brief instrumental solo from a big name on a track outro. Since bebop revolutionized jazz in the 1940s, attempts to integrate the genre with pop forms have been risky. Tip's pops used to say hip-hop reminded him of bebop for a reason; at their best, jazz and rap both feature interconnected conversations and content being generated over a short time in their parallel worlds. But rap music's complexity is tied up in language, the melodic and harmonic aspects stripped down so as to focus the listener on the verbal. Post-bebop jazz usually hinges on harmonic complexity.
Kamaal the Abstract, to its great credit, is unafraid of (messily) combining these values. Tip seems to have focused primarily on jazz's harmonic intricacies, evident on opener "Feelin'" or "A Million Times", which are unafraid to eschew pop song structure to get at the meat of what makes post-swing jazz harmonically interesting. But sometimes this nuanced backdrop sounds an off-note for the subject matter; while a bunch of ideas were going on in any Tribe-era Q-Tip verse, Tip's redundant boilerplate womanizing over Steely Dan-style chord changes on "Heels" just doesn't fit. Even worse, Tip's singing throughout the record -- a shallow signifier for this more "soulful" approach, perhaps? -- feels unnecessarily cautious. Very Andre 3k.
But jazz gets shortchanged, too. For the most part, the solos feel safe and not particularly notable. Guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel's presence followed the release of an exciting, adventurous solo LP The Next Step, so it's confusing to hear his cameo reduced to rhythm guitar on the extended, platitudinous jam "Do You Dig U?". Even the incredible Kenny Garrett, who does get an extended solo feature on the stop-start funk “Abstractionisms,” seems to be holding back. It feels like the soloists were so conscious of the album's pop music concessions, they felt they had to dumb it down, afraid to cut loose, as if they were recording for “The Late Show” or a random studio session. Despite Tip's willingness to combine the stylistic approaches of jazz and hip-hop, many songs feel imbalanced this way, with potentially exciting material undercut by underwhelming performances or half-finished ideas. It is worth recognizing that the Miles and Mizells of the world were extraordinarily rare. Few artists could perfectly balance of jazz's intricate complexity as a live performance with lightning-in-a-bottle pop perfection as a piece of recorded art.
Which is why "Even If It Is So" is such an accomplishment. With a simple repeated piano vamp over acoustic guitar, the song features the rapper riffing compassionately about single motherhood alongside a memorable horn hook. The music perfectly reflects the song's theme of subdued respect, the incredible beauty of strength in the most harrowing situations. It also leaves you wanting more, the kind of song you'd love to hear extended and embellished, perhaps in a live setting. Which is the key to this record's possibility; each track is a loose framework of unfulfilled promise. There's been a lot of talk about the growing importance of the live show to artists in the RapidShare era. While Kamaal isn't the brave, experimental success it wants to be, it doesn't exactly feel like the cul-de-sac it once did. It suggests a promising future, where the world of live shows offers Q-Tip and these soloists a chance to stretch out, while recalling their roots in entertainment, which isn't so evident here.